Abstract
In this paper I claim that perceptual discriminatory skills rely on a suitable type of environment as an enabling condition for their exercise. This is because of the constitutive connection between environment and perceptual discriminatory skills, inasmuch as such connection is construed from an ecological approach. The exercise of a discriminatory skill yields knowledge of affordances of objects, properties, or events in the surrounding environment. This is practical knowledge in the first-person perspective. An organism learns to perceive an object by becoming sensitized to its affordances. I call this position ecological disjunctivism. A corollary of this position is that a case of perception and its corresponding case of hallucination—which is similar to the former only in some respects—are different in nature. I show then how the distinguishability problem is addressed by ecological disjunctivism.
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In the same vein, La Favela and Chemero (2016) put forward an ecological account of visual illusions in support of a direct theory of perception. However, they do not seem to agree that disjunctivism and ecological psychology can form a good match. They suggest that disjunctivists “often engage in debates that discuss perception in traditional terms” (2016, p. 71) and that ecological psychologist does not need to appeal to “disjunctive contents to explain” hallucinations (2016, p. 77). But the ecological psychologist appeals to disjunctive principles to explain hallucinations (2016, pp. 71–72) and this precise point can be embedded in a disjunctive account of experience. Besides, as I will argue in Sect. 4, the ecological view of perception can benefit from a partnership with disjunctivism. Another interesting work that follows the same trajectory as this study is Beaton’s (2016) proposal to read the sensorimotor theory of perception as a form of direct realism. There are relevant similarities between his results and those I advance in this paper, although we draw on different resources and take different paths. The present work may be seen as complementary in some respects to Beaton’s work. He also claims that his position is both disjunctivist and direct realist (2016, p. 265). However, while he stresses the direct realist aspect of his position, I stress the disjunctivist aspect. We both sustain not only that an episode of perception and its corresponding episode of hallucination are different in nature but also that, given the proper circumstances, one can know whether one is perceiving or not. However, we have different approaches to introspection. He, relying on Shoemaker’s work on introspection, maintains that one can have propositional knowledge of whether one is perceiving, while I, relying on ecological resources, maintain that one can have second-order practical knowledge of one’s perceptual episodes. Another component of our works that is complementary is the attention I give to how the ecological approach to perception helps to clarify the notion of skill that underpins disjunctivism—at least the version I advocate—while Beaton gives more attention to how direct realism helps to clarify the philosophical consequences of the sensorimotor theory of perception.
According to Burge, the science of perception explains episodes of perception and episodes of illusion or hallucination based on a common factor. The same “quasi-deterministic laws between registration of proximal stimulation an the perceptual states” (2011, p. 44) explain how someone comes to have a perceptual or a hallucinatory state. The differences between theses states are due to distal inputs, “the causal chains that lead from the environment to the same registration of proximal stimulation.” (2011, p. 44) As, according to science, the same mechanism explains the occurrence of an episode of perception and an episode of hallucination, disjunctivism must be wrong since it rejects this fundamental and explanatory common factor. However, as I will show later, episodes of perception and of hallucination are not to be explained by the same principles or laws according to ecological psychology. Thus, Burge is wrong in rejecting disjunctivism only because of his restricted diet of sciences.
Gibson’s notion of information as a relation of specification must not be confused with Shannon’s concept of information (Gibson 2015, p. 232, 1968, p. 245). Whether the relation of specification depends necessarily on natural laws has long been debated. This claim seems to be defended by Gibson, as well as Turvey, Shaw, Reed and Mace (Turvey et al. 1981). Chemero, however, claims that strong regularities underpinned by conventions are enough (2009, pp. 116–120). See Heras-Escribano & Pinedo (2016) for criticism of this position. More recently, Bruineberg, Chemero and Rietveld distinguish between lawful information and general ecological information. The latter is “any regularity in the ecological niche between aspects of the environment, x and y, such that the occurrence of aspect x makes the occurrence of aspect y likely” (Bruineberg et al. 2018, p. 7). In this paper I will utilize the definition of lawful information.
If this is the kind of light available to sight, then it is not surprising that it has been argued that distance is not given to us directly by vision but must be inferred. No ray of light contains information about how far it has traveled. See Smith’s reconstruction of the Berkeley discussion about this point (Smith 2000, pp. 488–490).
These differences are necessary for the ambient light to contain information. In some situations, as when the environment is filled with dense fog, the ambient light is not structured, as at any point the rays coming from different directions have the same intensity. In this environment, no changes in a surrounding surface would have any impact on the ambient light. For Gibson, as nothing can be discriminated in this scenario with the help of the ambient light, this situation is a case in which sensation is not sufficient for perception (Gibson 2015, pp. 46–47).
Invariants that specify lasting entities are also referred to as structural invariants. However, there are also invariants for events—invariants that specify a style of change. These invariants are also referred to as transformational invariants. For a detailed discussion of these types of invariants, see Michaels and Carello (1981, pp. 25–30).
It’s worthwhile to mention that the ecological approach to perception is suitable to handle sensory substitution. This is because the aim of perceptual systems is to detect energy patterns. Informational structures, not sensations themselves, are meaningful. Thus, an optic pattern that is normally picked up by the visual system may also be picked up by the haptic system provided that it is first converted into a haptic pattern. For further discussion on this point, see Favela et al. (2018).
Gibson reported that it can be very disorienting for an airplane pilot to fly through clouds if there is no way to see the ground. Even when there is some visibility, if the ground is out of sight, the pilot’s acuity in perceiving size constancy is impaired (Gibson 2015, pp. xviii, 153).
This proposal should not be confused with the behaviorist idea that perception is reduced to a kind of performative behavior. An organism can perceive the size of a tomato before moving to a position in which the back of the tomato is put in view. Gibson’s point is that the function of the perceptual systems—the pickup of invariants in the environment—is subordinate to the function of the performative and orienting systems (Gibson 2015, p. 234); that is, to the organism’s control of its actions for achieving its needs and plans. However, at the same time, is true that some kinds of behavior serve perception. Adjustments of the eye, head, and body, movements, and probings are all encompassed by an exploratory system that is subordinate to perception (Gibson 1968, p. 57; Gibson 2015, p. 234).
A history of interactions with an object or property is essential for the acquisition of a perceptual or discriminatory skill. By those interactions an organism “can have found out that this or that action was actually afforded in the past, and this can be the basis on which its current perception of its environment can have become sensitive to these environmental properties” (Myin 2016, p. 99). Gibson also claims that “the pickup of information reinforces the exploratory adjustments of the organs that make it possible” (1968, p. 271).
John Hinton was probably the first philosopher to explicitly propose this kind of analysis for looks claims (Hinton 1967) and to suggest that we are not obliged to accept that there is a common element, a shared inner experience, to perceptual and illusory experiences (1967, p. 223). As to whether naïve realists, who had also endorsed before Hinton that there are two types of experience in the appropriate sense, should count as disjunctivists or not is an open issue (Snowdon 2008. p. 40).
This case is usually referred to as metaphysical disjunctivism; disjunctivism about the nature of experience. Others prefer to explain the difference between the successful and non-successful usage of perceptual verbs in relation to the epistemic warrant that experience can provide, which is usually referred to as epistemic disjunctivism. For an introduction to varieties of disjunctivism, see Haddock and Macpherson (2008).
It may be objected that some performances are so difficult that even someone highly skilled in completing the performance will not succeed every time she tries to exercise that skill. This is the case, for instance, of chicken sexing. Even the most skilled in this task will, at best, classify 1000 chicks per hour with 98% accuracy (Biederman and Shiffrar 1987, p. 640). This seems to challenge the assumption that all exercises of a skill must be successful. It would be odd to say that these people only exercise the skill 98% of the time but fail to exercise it in the other 2% of the time. In cases such as this one, we require, as Millar points out, the notion of a success-rate ability (2016, p. 70). A chicken sexer who has the ability to classify 1000 chicks per hour with 98% accuracy will succeed in classifying with 98% accuracy every, or even nearly every, time she exercises her success-rate ability during the course of a 1000-chick sequence. Again, abilities or skills are individuated in such a way to preserve the connection between exercise and success.
It’s perfectly doable to conceive, as McDowell does (1996, 2011), perceptual skills as involving conceptual resources from the beginning and then to sustain that the exercise of these conceptual-perceptual skills provides propositional knowledge. This is not the path I’m following, at least if it is assumed that concepts are context-independent entities that satisfy Evans’ generality constraint (EVANS 1982, p. 104) and structure propositional thought. As is strongly suggested by ecological psychology, non-conceptual perceptual skills can be acquired much before we are able to acquire conceptual-perceptual skills, and this is something that we share with animals. The ecological approach, as Turvey et al. emphasize, “is concerned with the perceiving that goes with acting” (TURVEY et al. 1981, p. 240) or with how perception serves to guide and control action, whereas the traditional approach to perception is concerned with the fixation of perceptual beliefs. Gibson is focused on low-level phenomena. Besides, as Dreyfus suggests, we should try to explain how the “upper stories of the edifice of knowledge” (2006, p. 48)—such as perceptual beliefs—rest upon the non-linguistic coping going on on the ground floor. This requires first a good understanding of what is going on on the ground floor.
In the view presented here, objects are not purely given to us in perception, they are intelligibly apprehended and structured in the space of possibilities for action. Perception, as we have been pointing, is not passive but active, it involves the employment of agent’s discriminatory skills. Thus, Sellars’ charge that a pure given cannot be an episode of knowledge (Sellars 1991, pp. 127–134) does not apply to the view presented here.
Beaton, relying on the sensorimotor theory of perception, advanced a very similar approach to how perceptions are distinguished from hallucinations and illusions. According to him, we should look at the similarities and differences between “actions an agent would take (if appropriately tested) when imagining (or hallucinating or having an illusion of or dreaming about) a given object (or property, etc.) and when actually perceiving such an object.” (2016, p. 271) This is very close to Gibson’s point outlined above about the different effects of adjusting the sense organs when perceiving and when imagining, dreaming or hallucinating.
In a classical study with newborn kittens, Held and Hein (1963) gathered evidence on the importance of motor feedback for acquiring spatial notions. In their experiment, a group of kittens were allowed to move around a cylinder with vertical strips. A second group of kittens were exposed to the same stimuli, not by their own movements, but by a device that moved them around the cylinder. By mechanical linkages to the gondola attached to the active kittens, this device was able to mimic the movements of these kittens (1963, p. 873). Thus, both groups were exposed to the same visual stimulus flux. However, only kittens from the first group learned to navigate and move in the setting, while the kittens from the second group remained incapable to orientate in space.
These considerations might not be sufficient to deal with the case of a virtual reality that is controlled by one’s movements. I am grateful to one of the anonymous reviewers for having pointed this out. This is a topic that raises many issues and would require much more space than I have to address them. However, I will make two comments about this case. First, many existing systems of virtual reality produce experiences that are distinguishable from our normal perceptions. This is because these systems are not so responsive to movements as our perceptual system is. Second, in the limiting case where a virtual reality system would produce over time a virtual reality that resembles our non-virtual reality, including the relations between movements and changes in experience, I would be inclined to claim that an agent equipped with the proper skills can perceive in this virtual reality, and that this reality is real after all. I would have then to commit to a view of reality that comes in degree, having our non-virtual reality as the limiting case, but this is a discussion for another paper. For a response to this objection from a sensorimotor approach, see Noë (2004, pp. 224–225).
This raises the issue of what constitutes a first-person skill. Following Lynne Rudder Baker, we can say that a first-person skill or ability must exhibit the marks of consciousness and intentionality or self-consciousness. As to the first disjunct, which interests us here, the skill must be one by which the organism interacts “consciously and intentionally with the environment” (Baker 2013, p. 172). As we have been arguing, consciousness and intentionality are not instantiated only by awareness of sensations. Perceptual discriminatory skills exhibit equally the marks of consciousness and intentionality by making us aware of environmental invariants.
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Acknowledgements
I would like to thank the two anonymous reviewers for their valuable suggestions and critical feedback on this manuscript.
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This work was supported by CNPq/Brazil (National Council for Scientific and Technological Development), Project No. 305288/2015-6, and by CAPES/Brazil (Coordination for the Improvement of Higher Education Personnel), Project No. 88881.119656/2016-01.
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de Carvalho, E.M. An ecological approach to disjunctivism. Synthese 198 (Suppl 1), 285–306 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-019-02253-2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-019-02253-2