Knowing what we can do: actions, intentions, and the construction of phenomenal experience
Synthese 181 (3):375-394 (2011)
| Abstract | How do questions concerning consciousness and phenomenal experience relate to, or interface with, questions concerning plans, knowledge and intentions? At least in the case of visual experience the relation, we shall argue, is tight. Visual perceptual experience, we shall argue, is fixed by an agent’s direct unmediated knowledge concerning her poise (or apparent poise) over a currently enabled action space. An action space, in this specific sense, is to be understood not as a fine-grained matrix of possibilities for bodily movement, but as a matrix of possibilities for pursuing and accomplishing one’s intentional actions, goals and projects. If this is correct, the links between planning, intention and perceptual experience are tight, while (contrary to some recent accounts invoking the notion of ‘sensorimotor expectations’) the links between embodied activity and perceptual experience, though real, are indirect. What matters is not bodily activity itself, but our practical knowledge (which need not be verbalized or in any way explicit) of our own possibilities for action. Such knowledge, selected, shaped and filtered by the grid of plans, goals, and intentions, plays, we argue, a constitutive role in explaining the content and character of visual perceptual experience. | |||||||||
| Keywords | No keywords specified (fix it) | |||||||||
| Categories | ||||||||||
| Options |
|
|||||||||
Download options| PhilPapers Archive |
Upload a copy of this paper Check publisher's policy on self-archival Papers currently archived: 5,631 |
| External links |
 |
| Through your library | Configure |
Similar books and articlesJohn Louis Schwenkler (2009). Space and Self-Awareness. Dissertation, University of California, Berkeley
Johannes Roessler (2009). Perceptual Experience and Perceptual Knowledge. Mind 118 (472):1013-1041.
Andy Clark (2001). Visual Experience and Motor Action: Are the Bonds Too Tight? Philosophical Review 110 (4):495-519.
Thomas Crowther (2010). The Agential Profile of Perceptual Experience. Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 110 (2pt2):219-242.
John R. Searle (1979). The Intentionality of Intention and Action. Inquiry 22 (1-4):253 – 280.
Andy Clark (2006). Vision as Dance? Three Challenges for Sensorimotor Contingency Theory. Psyche 12 (1).
Paul Noordhof (2003). Something Like Ability. Australian Journal of Philosophy 81 (1):21-40.
Analytics
Monthly downloads |
Added to index2010-02-10Total downloads78 ( #10,113 of 548,972 )Recent downloads (6 months)3 ( #25,799 of 548,972 )How can I increase my downloads? |
My notes
Discussion
