Online research in philosophy

Hommel et al. propose that high-level perception and action planning share a common representational domain, which facilitates the control of intentional actions. On the surface, this point of view appears quite different from an alternative account that suggests that “action” and “perception” are functionally and neurologically dissociable processes. But it is difficult to reconcile these apparently different perspectives, because Hommel et al. do not clearly specify what they mean by “perception” and “action planning.” With respect to the visual control of action, a distinction must be made between conscious visual perception and unconscious visuomotor processing. Hommel et al. must also distinguish between the what and how aspects of action planning, that is, planning what to do versus planning how to do it.

A phenomenology of action is outlined, analyzing the structure of volition, kinesthesis, and perception in the experience of action, and, finally, the experience of embodiment in action. The intentionality of action is contrasted with that of thought and perception in regard to the role of the body, and the relations between an action, the experience of acting, and the context of the action are specified.

Alva Noë’s _Action in Perception _offers a provocative and vigorous defense of the thesis that vision is enactive: visual experience depends on dispositional motor responses. On this view, vision and action are inextricably bound. In this review, I argue against enactive perception. I raise objections to seven lines of evidence that appear in Noë’s book, and I indicate some reasons for thinking that vision can operate independently of motor responses. I conclude that the relationship between vision and action is causal, not constitutive. I then address three other contentious hypotheses in the book. Noë argues that visual states are not pictorial; he argues that all perception is conceptual; and he argues that the external world makes a constitutive contribution to experience. I am unpersuaded by these arguments, and I offer reasons to resist Noë’s conclusions.

Although we agree with Hommel et al. that perception and action refer to one another, we disagree that they do so via a code. Gibson (1966; 1979) attempted to frame perception-action as a field phenomenon rather than as a particle phenomenon. From such a perspective, perception and action are adjoint, mutually interacting through an information field, and codes are unnecessary.

In the last few years there has been an explosion of philosophical interest in perception; after decades of neglect, it is now one of the most fertile areas for new work. Perceptual Experience presents new work by fifteen of the world's leading philosophers. All papers are written specially for this volume, and they cover a broad range of topics dealing with sensation and representation, consciousness and awareness, and the connections between perception and knowledge and between perception and action. This will be the book on the philosophy of perception, a fascinating resource for philosophers and psychologists.

Natural language processing involves a tight coupling between action (the production of language) and perception (the comprehension of language). We argue that similar theoretical principles apply to language processing as to action/perception in general. Language production is not driven solely by the speaker's intentions; language comprehension is not only input-driven; production and perception use common representations. We will relate recent findings from our language production lab to the Theory of Event Coding (TEC)'s principle of feature binding.

Within cognitive science, language is often set apart (as it is in the present volume) from perception, action, learning, memory, concepts, and reasoning. Yet language is intertwined with all of them. Language perception is a kind of perception; language production is a kind of action. Vocabulary and grammar are learned and stored in long-term memory. As novel utterances are perceived or produced, they are built up in working memory. Concepts are most often studied in the context of word meanings; reasoning is most often studied in the context of inferring one sentence from another.

Wittgenstein in the Tractatus focussed on a picture theory of language. He was clear that this meant that language mirrored reality, mirrored the world. The picture theory was an account in essence of the relation between a word and what it referred to in the external environment, or between a sentence, a proposition or sachverhalt and the event or situation to which it referred. The Tractatus was completed in 1919 and published in 1922. Within the space of 11 years after its publication Wittgenstein had abandoned the picture theory and, in the Blue Book and the Brown Book, sketched out a quite different account of language as a congeries of language games, and different languages as different sets of language games; words were given their meanings by use, by explanation, by training and essentially by social interaction. This changed account took its definitive form in the Philosophical Investigations, posthumously published in 1953. Wittgenstein did not wholly abandon the Tractatus and would have liked the Tractatus and his later writings to be published together, though this was never done before his early death (Hacker 1996). There is a problem how he could have presented two such different accounts of language with equal conviction. Can they be reconciled? The examination in much greater depth of both may solve the problem. Since the Tractatus and the Philosophical Investigations, there have been massive advances in different but equally relevant fields: in linguistics, in neurology, in philosophical discussion, in evolutionary theory, in psychology, in child development. Most recently and relevantly, there has been the discovery of mirror neurons (Rizzolatti & Arbib 1998), neurons which are excited by the perception of action and which seem to constitute the precursors of motor programs to reproduce the perceived action, that is, a plausible basis for imitation and communication. There has also been great progress in the study of the active brain in the production of speech, using fMRI, PET, ERP, MEG and there are new ideas on the motor basis of speech production and speech perception, on the relation of speech and gesture, on visual and auditory perception. The paper will suggest that in the light of all these developments Wittgenstein's two accounts of language can be reconciled within a larger framework, and the philosophy and science of language can profitably be linked with each other.

In this short essay I respond to the criticism of Action in Perception (2004) advanced by Ryan Hickerson and Fred Keijzer. In particular, I provide a brief precis of the main argument of Action in Perception. I seek to clarify the claims made in the book about the relation between perception and action, the importance of sensorimotor knowledge. I discuss the problem of "sensorimotor chauvinism," that of the "ping-pong playing robot," and the problem of perceptual presence.

We present work demonstrating that the nature of an object for our visual system depends on the actions we are programming and on the presence of action relations between stimuli. For example, patients who show visual extinction are more likely to become aware of two objects if the objects fall in appropriate visual locations for a common action. This effect of the action relations between objects is modulated both by the familiarity of the positioning of the objects for action, and by the mere possibility of action (the ‘affordance’) between the objects. In addition, the programming of an action to a part of an object alters the representation of that object, making the ‘part’ into the object selected by the visual system. These results point to object coding being a rather flexible process, affected not only by the perceptual properties of stimuli but also by the relations between these properties and action. We discuss the implications for theories of perception as well as considering why action information, in particular, may be important for perception.