With the
emergence of cognitive science as a discipline fully devoted to studying
various aspects of mind and cognition, philosophical analysis has also changed
its course and is concentrating more on the psycho-physiological aspect of
mind. Perceptual Experience, as an effort in this direction, explores
one of the most fertile and challenging areas in current research, perception. The
book presents new work by fifteen of the world’s leading philosophers. All
papers cover a broad range of topics like perceptual directness as
transparency, perceptual distortions like illusion and hallucination, the
representational nature of perceptual experience, the content of perceptual
experience, the representational content and its relation with the phenomenal
content of the perceptual experience, relation between perceptual experience
and perceptual success and the question about subjects of perceptual
experience.

After a
concise introduction which briefly discusses how each of the issues discussed
in the paper are related to each other, the background is set for the reader
and she knows ‘what to expect from the book’ while reading. The very first
paper is by John Campbell. He talks about the color experience. Reviewing Locke’s
fundamental argument about error in ordinary concepts of color, he brings out
the force of Locke’s view but also proposes a vindication of our commonsense
conception of color as an aspect of objects on which direct intervention is
selectively possible.

Most
intentionalists agree that the contents of perception are propositions. There
are two main views about what these propositions might be — some say that they
should be construed along Russellian lines- as structured entities involving
objects and their properties. Others have argued that the contents of
perception are Fregean propositions, which are composed of modes of
presentation of objects and properties rather than objects and properties
themselves. David Chalmers’s paper, "Perception and the Fall from Eden", discusses these two kinds of propositions in detail, then offers an account of
what experience represents, which aims to stay true to the phenomenology that
we have direct access to objects and their properties. He contends that our
perceptual experience is regulated by the ideal of an ‘Edenic world’, a world
of perfect colors and shapes where objects and properties are revealed to us
directly, then he tries to show how world is not Ednic with a version of
veridicality.

Tim Crane
brings out the philosophical discussion about perception, in his paper "Is
There a Perceptual Relation."  He first shows how recent discussions of
perceptual experience have mis-located the central point of dispute. It is
followed by a discussion of how transparency thesis is an over-statement and
how the question of qualia is not the central question.

Fred
Dretske talks about unconscious perceptual content in "Perception without
Awareness’. He holds that there is much that we perceptually represent but of
which we are not perceptually aware of and which is therefore not manifest in
our phenomenological experience. In his paper, he presents and critically
assesses a number of experimental studies that purportedly demonstrate the
prevalence of such unconscious perception. If we do not give an account of such
unconscious experience, we cannot say that phenomenological character of our
perceptual experience supervenes on its representational content.

Anil
Gupta’s paper, "Experience and Knowledge" discusses the content of
perceptual experience and how it contributes to knowledge. He has articulated
the role of experience in the rational belief. As compared to rationalism, he thinks
empiricism does better justice to the contents of knowledge.

In her
paper, Susan Hurley advances a view that she refers as ‘the shared circuits
hypothesis’, which describes a unified framework for the mechanisms that enable
control, imitation and simulation. She is of the view that perception and
action are dynamically co-constituted and suggests that cognitively significant
resources, such as distinction between self and other and between the imagined
and the real and information for action understanding and planning, can be seen
as emerging from the information space that action and perception share.

As an
answer to the question, what is the object of perception, logical empiricists
like Russell and Ayer appealed to illusions and hallucinations to argue that
the proper objects of perceptual experience are sense data, rather than objects
in the world or states of affairs. According to their view, perception is a
relation between objects in the world and the perceiver, a relation mediated by
subjective entities. More recently, frank Jackson and Robinson have offered the
adverbialist theory of perception. This theory agrees with the sense data
theory that perception should be construed as a relation between perceiver and
world, but denies that this relation includes sense data. For the adverbialist,
perceiving something is a matter of sensing in a certain manner rather than
sensing in a peculiar immaterial object. For instance, seeing something red is
best described as seeing red-ly. This adverbialist theory agrees well with the
common sense view that vertical perceptual experiences present us with objects
in the world. The direct realist concurs with this, but does not think that the
perceptual relation can be understood as the result of a modification of
experience. Mark Johnston’s paper is a defense of a direct realist position and
discusses the functions of sensory awareness by developing an analogy between
perception and digestion.

Geoffrey
Lee shows how certain very plausible assumptions about experience can lead to
surprising conclusions about how certain experiences are physically realized. In
"Phenomenal Impressions’, Eric Lormand argues that only phenomenal
experiences engender impressions either of transparency or images or its
converse. All phenomenal experiences embody either an "image impression"
of subjective objects with objective properties (an illusion, in our case), or
the "transparency impression" of objective objects with subjective
properties (also an illusion, in our case).  He uses inner perception to
explain why the (illusory) impressions exist. It means we introspect only
environmental properties or special phenomenal objects with normal
environmental properties like those of color and shapes etc.

In
general, the disjunctivists try to do justice to the common sense intuition
that veridical perceptual experience puts us in direct contact with the
objective world while at the same time taking seriously the argument from
hallucination. In order to accomplish this goal the disjunctivist argues that
veridical perceptual experiences are of a different kind than hallucinations
and illusions. M. G. F Martin’s paper, "On Being Alienated" is a
defense of disjunctivist position.

Another
significant issue in perception is about the perceptual presence and
phenomenology – how content of perceptual experience need to be conceptualized
in order to account for perceptual presence. We perceive some contents directly,
for instance, ‘this is a red apple’. We perceive others indirectly, as ‘the
team is winning’. But it is difficult to determine the extension of such
distinctions. When I see a table, and it looks to have a back, is that
something that is represented by the experience itself, or it is instead
something that I conclude on the basis of experience, or which is prompted by
experience? Noe discusses how cogent is such a distinction. He maintains that
our perceptual systems in fact represent much less than we think they do, and
that our mind fills in to complete a perceptual scene supplying detail where
the perceptual system does not. Since ordinary phenomenological testing will
not allow us to reliably distinguish what is filled in from what is not, it
cannot decidedly settle question about what is part of perceptual experience.
Careful attention to the nature of perceptual experience reveals that
experiences are not like snapshots; even in paradigm cases of veridical
perception, what we experience visually outstrips what we actually see at any
given moment.

Jesse
Prinz argues that perception involves matching incoming percepts to those
already stored in memory. In such a way that the incoming percepts may inherit
their semantic content form their stored counterparts. Since the range of
contents available to the stored percepts is unlimited, so too is the
in-principle range of contents of direct perception: we can directly not only
redness and tigerness and carburetorness, but also primeness and injustice and
truth.

We may
assume possible cases where two subjects seem to share representational contents,
but where these are associated with very different phenomenological properties,
like the cases of spectrum inversion, or with the absence of any phenomenology
at all, like the cases of zombies. Syndey shoemaker argued that such cases are
compatible with spectrum inversion because the representational content of
perceptual experience represents ‘appearance properties’, which are the
nameless properties that are correlated with colors in the experience of a
particular sort of subject but could in principle be associated with different
colors in experience of different sort of subject. In his paper Shoemaker
defends this view against a number of recent criticisms that have been leveled
against it. Susanna Siegel also argues that a relatively rich range of properties
are represented perceptually, and suggests a principled way of distinguishing
what is directly perceived from what is not: by considering which difference
make a phenomenonological difference. If we want to know whether being a pine
tree is a property represented in visual experience, we need to ask whether
there is the right sort of phenomenological difference between the visual
experiences one has before and after one develops a capacity to recognize pine
tree as such. Michael Tye explores these issues in detail, spelling out what is
meant by ‘richness’ and ‘fineness of grain’ in light of a number of recent
results from empirical psychology in order to defend a subtle version of the
view that experiences have non-conceptual content.

All those
working even remotely on perception should not skip this book. It gives a very
focused and yet detailed account of the major issues in the area. It discusses
some of the important empirical studies done on perception and their
theoretical implications as well. The book is recommended as one of the text
books for those who are taking courses in related areas.

© 2006 Richa Yadav

Richa
Yadav recently completed her PhD in philosophy of mind from IIT, Kanpur, India. Her dissertation is on individuation of mental states, with especial
reference to the individualist and the non-individualist debate. Her research
interest lies in philosophical issues in cognitive science, philosophy of
language, epistemology, ethics, translation studies and metaphors. She is also
a creative writer.  

Categories: Philosophical