Online research in philosophy

Working from a naïve-realist perspective, I examine first-person knowledge of one's perceptual experience. I outline a naive-realist theory of how subjects acquire knowledge of the nature of their experiences, and I argue that naive realism is compatible with moderate, substantial forms of first-person privileged access. A more general moral of my paper is that treating “success” states like seeing as genuine mental states does not break up the dynamics that many philosophers expect from the phenomenon of knowledge of the mind.

The sensorimotor theory (Noe¨, 2004, in press) discusses a special instance of lack of perceptual experience despite no sensory impairment. The phenomenon dubbed “experiential blindness” is cited as evidence for a constitutive relation between sensorimotor skills and perceptual experience. Recently it has been objected (Adams & Aizawa, 2008; Aizawa, 2007) that the cases described by Noe¨ as experiential blindness are cases of pure sensory deficit. This paper argues that while the objections bring out limitations of Noe¨’s sensorimotor theory they do not do enough to challenge a robust perception–action interdependence claim. There are genuine cases of experiential blindness and these are better explained by the hypothesis of the interdependence of perception and action rather than by a passive vision approach. The cases provide support for a strong thesis of embodied cognition where ongoing sensorimotor dynamics non-trivially constrain perceptual content.

Alva Noë is a modern-day empiricist. His book Action in Perception is chockablock with contemporary cognitive science; its preface and notes (not to mention general erudition) point to on-going collaboration with Evan Thompson, Kevin O’Regan, and Susan Hurley. Their research investigates the sensorimotor bases of consciousness, and Action in Perception is offered as its philosophical backdrop. As such, the book presents a series of ideas and interpretations that constitute what Noë calls the “enactive approach” to perception, many of which are explicitly phenomenological in orientation. So those on the lookout for imaginative philosophy of mind will find Noë's work particularly compelling. (Noë would prefer "already feeling about for imaginative philosophy of mind," because on his account paradigmatic perceptual activity is tactile rather than visual.) In this review I will not address the empirical details concerning Noë and his compatriots, but will instead focus on the way Noë’s enactive approach should be situated vis-à-vis traditional phenomenology. Action in Perception is part of the grand project of a robustly scientific knowledge of human perceptual experience, but it is clearly also a philosophical theory, so I will address it philosophically. I address it as I take it to be: one of the best works in the philosophy of perception to appear in a very long time.

Alva Noë’s version of the enactive conception in _Action in Perception_ is an important contribution to the study of visual perception. First, I argue, however, that it is unclear (at best) whether, as the enactivists claim, work on change blindness supports the denial of the existence of detailed visual representations. Second, I elaborate on what Noë calls the ‘puzzle of perceptual presence’. Thirdly, I question the enactivist account of perceptual constancy. Finally, I draw attention to the tensions between enactivism and two trends in cognitive neuroscience: the two-visual systems model of human vision and the theory of internal forward models of action.

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.

I describe a naive realist conception of perceptual knowledge, which faces a challenge from the idea that normal perceivers and brains-in-vats have equally justified perceptual beliefs. I defend the naive realist position from Nicholas Silins's recent version of this challenge. I argue that Silins's main objection fails, and that the naive realist understanding of perceptual knowledge can be reconciled with the idea that brains-in-vats have justified perceptual beliefs.

Disjunctivism about sensory experience is frequently put forward in defence of a particular conception of perception and perceptual experience known as naïve realism. In this paper I present an argument against naïve realism that proceeds through a rejection of disjunctivism. If the naïve realist must also be a disjunctivist about the phenomenal nature of experience, then naïve realism should be abandoned.

The focus of this paper will be on the problem of perceptual presence and on a solution to this problem pioneered by Kant [1781; 1783] and refined by Sellars [Sellars, 1978] and Strawson [Strawson, 1971]. The problem of perceptual presence is that of explaining how our perceptual experience of the world gives us a robust sense of the presence of objects in perception over and above those sensory aspects of the object given in perception. Objects possess other properties which are, one might say, phenomenologically present even though they are admittedly sensorily absent. The general form of the solution to this problem that Kant developed seems to me to be a neglected resource in contemporary work on perceptual consciousness. Kant solves the problem of perceptual presence by appealing to that which he called the productive use of the imagination. This faculty of mind supplies schematic representations of the object of perception that explains a phenomenological sense of perceptual presence even of those features that are not, in a sense to be further clarified,.

In the present paper, I shall argue that disjunctively construed naïve realism about the nature of perceptual experiences succumbs to the empirically inspired causal argument. The causal argument highlights as a first step that local action necessitates the presence of a type-identical common kind of mental state shared by all perceptual experiences. In a second step, it sets out that the property of being a veridical perception cannot be a mental property. It results that the mental nature of perceptions must be exhausted by the occurrence of inner sensory experiences that narrowly supervene on the perceiver. That is, empirical objects fail directly to determine the perceptual consciousness of the perceiver. The upshot is that not only naïve realism, but also certain further forms of direct realism have to be abandoned.

In his book Action in Perception , Alva Noë poses what he refers to as the “problem of perceptual presence” and develops his enactive view as solution to the problem. Noë describes the problem of perceptual presence as the problem of how to conceive of the presence of that which, “strictly speaking,” we do not perceive. I argue that the “problem of perceptual presence” is ambiguous between two problems that need to be addressed by invoking very different resources. On the one hand, there is the problem of how to conceive of the presence of objects as wholes, front side and back, and their constant properties. On the other hand, there is the problem of how to account for the presence of unattended detail. I focus on the first problem, which Noë approaches by invoking Husserlian ideas. I argue that Noë’s enactive view encounters difficulties, which can be dealt with by complementing it with Edmund Husserl’s idea of fulfillment and generally restoring the view to its original Husserlian context. Contrary to Noë’s purport, this involves regarding the view not as a theory of perception and perceptual content but as part of a descriptive–clarificatory project of conceptual analysis. The Husserlian phenomenologist analyzes, e.g., the concept of shape or color by investigating the fulfillment conditions pertinent to shape or color. In general, my critique of Noë’s enactive view serves to caution philosophers against unprincipled uses of Husserlian ideas.