Abstract
This paper defends a dynamic model of the way in which perception is integrated with action, a model I refer to as ‘the navigational account’. According to this account, employing vision and other forms of distance perception, a creature acquires information about its surroundings via the senses, information that enables it to select and navigate routes through its environment, so as to attain objects that satisfy its needs. This form of perceptually guided activity should be distinguished from other kinds of semi-automatic responses to visual stimuli that do not necessarily involve conscious experiences. It essentially involves inner states, which involve both the awareness of phenomenal qualities, and also a representational component. The navigational account is compared here with the enactive approach to perception, which opposes the view that perceptual experiences are inner states. This paper argues that a full account of perception raises a number of different questions. One central explanatory project concerns questions about the kinds of processes that currently enable a creature to identify and respond appropriately to distant objects: the answer, it is argued, lies in acknowledging the role of conscious inner representations in guiding navigational behaviour through complex environments. The fact that perception and action are interdependent does not conflict with the claim that inner representational states comprise an essential stage in visual processing.
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Notes
The label ‘critical realism’ has been applied to a number of different theories. I use it here to refer to the account of perception developed by the group of American philosophers that included Roy Wood Sellars, Arthur Lovejoy and George Santayana, and was further refined in the later philosophy of Wilfrid Sellars: see in particular Sellars (1975, 1978, 1982). The general form of the account goes back at least as far as Reid.
It is important to notice that this mastery of sensorimotor contingencies takes a dispositional form, as the Kantian tradition emphasises: see, for example Bennett (1974), chapter 2. Activity is not necessary for visual experience, as is sometimes misleadingly implied. For I can have a visual experience without undertaking any action at all, as in hallucination, and also in forms of rapid recognition, for example when grasping of the gist of a scene: see for example Mack (2002).
Valberg has spelled out reasons for accepting this claim (1992, pp. 9–18). A similar argument is defended in Robinson (1994, chapter VI). For a contrasting view, see Martin (2004). Scepticism about the comparison with hallucinations is sometimes expressed, but the occurrence of complex visual hallucinations (the Charles Bonnet syndrome) is an established medical fact: see especially Manford and Andermann (1998).
One aspect of the theory that I shall say nothing about concerns the question of whether an understanding of the sensorimotor contingency profile of a given sense modality can help us the resolve the so-called “hard problem” of consciousness – an issue that Kevin O’Regan, in particular, has concentrated upon: see for example O’Regan and Noë (2001).
In line with this critical approach, Noë devotes much of Section 1.5 of his (2004) to attacking the appeal to inner representations in an account of perception.
And, as I have argued in my (2004), perhaps they only show a lack of storage, not that occurrent experience lacks the richness it appears to have.
The fact that the identified distal object plays a dual causal role, as both the cause of the subject’s experience, and also as the focus of subsequent navigational activity, suggests a way of identifying the contents of experience. Important as this issue is, I shall not pursue it here.
See, for example, some of the many alternatives well summarised by Andy Clark (1997).
I discuss the implications of change blindness experiments in more detail elsewhere (Coates 2004).
I discuss these phenomenological issues in considerable detail in Coates (2007), chapter 9.
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Acknowledgments
I have discussed earlier versions of this paper with a number of colleagues, and am grateful for many useful criticisms. I am particularly indebted to Andy Clark for his comments on a version of this paper read at the University of Sussex in 2001, and also to Steve Torrance and John Rose for many helpful suggestions.
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Coates, P. Experience, action and representations: Critical realism and the enactive theory of vision. Phenom Cogn Sci 6, 445–462 (2007). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11097-007-9063-1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11097-007-9063-1