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Intersubjectivity in perception

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Abstract

The embodied, embedded, enactive, and extended approaches to cognition explicate many important details for a phenomenology of perception, and are consistent with some of the traditional phenomenological analyses. Theorists working in these areas, however, often fail to provide an account of how intersubjectivity might relate to perception. This paper suggests some ways in which intersubjectivity is important for an adequate account of perception.

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Notes

  1. Straus (1966, p. 138).

  2. Gibson (1979).

  3. Paillard (2000).

  4. Chiel and Beer (1997).

  5. Zajac (1993).

  6. Clark (1997).

  7. Chiel and Beer (1997, p. 554).

  8. Gallagher (2005a).

  9. Buytendijk (1974); Sandman (1986); Sheets-Johnstone (1999a).

  10. See Gallagher (in press), for a fuller account of the philosophical roots of the situated cognition idea.

  11. Dewey (1884, p. 280).

  12. Dewey (1938, p. 67).

  13. Wheeler (2005) gives a good account of Heidegger in this context.

  14. Heidegger (1968, p. 95).

  15. Ibid., pp. 86–90.

  16. Merleau-Ponty (1962, p. 369).

  17. Ibid., p. 369.

  18. Ibid., p. 370.

  19. See Gallagher and Marcel (1999).

  20. Clark and Chalmers (1998). Also see Clark (in press).

  21. Clark (1998); Wheeler (2005); Wheeler and Clark (1999).

  22. See Adams and Aizawa (2001).

  23. Dreyfus and Dreyfus (1985, 1986).

  24. Dewey (1896).

  25. Varela et al. (1991); Thompson and Varela (2001).

  26. Noë (2004).

  27. Ibid., p. 1.

  28. Ibid., p. 73.

  29. This is certainly the case across a number of disciplines that in the past have been highly influenced by cognitivist-computationalist approaches. See, e.g., Brooks (1991); Gallese (2000); Clancey (1991). The phenomenology of Husserl, Heidegger, and Merleau-Ponty has informed most of the philosophical accounts. See, e.g., Clark (1997); Dreyfus (1992); Gallagher (2005a); Gallagher and Varela (2003); Noë (2004); Sheets-Johnstone (1999b); Todes (2001); Varela et al. (1991); Wheeler (2005).

  30. Todes (2001); Noë (2004).

  31. Clark and Chalmers (1998).

  32. Ibid., p. 7 (my emphasis).

  33. Ibid., p. 8.

  34. Clark (1997, in press).

  35. Todes (2001). Todes’ book is actually his 1963 Harvard dissertation originally titled “The Human Body as Material Subject of the World.” In 1990 it was published for the first time, under its original title, as part of the Garland Press series of Harvard dissertations, which included the dissertations of Davidson, Goodman, Putnam, and Quine. In 2001 it was republished as Body and world, with a Foreword and Introduction by Hubert Dreyfus, and a second Introduction by Piotr Hoffman.

  36. Ibid., p. 2.

  37. Ibid., p. 3.

  38. Trevarthen and Hubley (1978). [Editor’s note: See also Beata Stawarska’s article, “Feeling good vibrations in dialogical relations,” in this issue.]

  39. E.g., Husserl (1966).

  40. Sartre (1956, p. 229).

  41. Husserl (1973a, p. 289). Cf. also Husserl (1968, p. 394; 1973b, p. 497).

  42. Sartre (1956, p. 255).

  43. Gurwitsch (1931/1978, pp. 35–36).

  44. Let me note here that Dreyfus himself has been influenced by Todes and Gurwitsch on these issues. Indeed, the same question about intersubjectivity that I am raising here can be raised in regard to Dreyfus’s account of expertise, an account which downplays the role of others. Harry Collins, for example, makes this critique. See Collins (1996, 2004). Also see Gallagher (2007); and Selinger (2003).

  45. Todes (2001, p. 2).

  46. See, e.g., Wheeler (2005). Wheeler makes good use of Heidegger’s concept of Mitsein to suggest that “a human being is world embedded only to the extent that she has been socialized into the set of practices and customs that define her culture …. Any talk of an individual’s subjective world can refer only to a secondary phenomenon, one that is dependent on a more fundamental, inherently social condition of cultural coembeddedness” (p. 149).

  47. See Gallagher (2005b).

  48. Noë (2004).

  49. Ibid., p. 60.

  50. Ibid., p. 63.

  51. Ibid., p. 23.

  52. Wheeler (2005, p. 197).

  53. For that reason we sometimes experience what I would call “Proustian effects” of intersubjectivity which may be deeply recessive in our perception of certain aspects of the world. It doesn’t happen all the time, but when I see the hammer (or some set of tools) the memory of my father may come explicitly to mind (because he and I built some things together many years ago). When it does not come explicitly to mind, however, that doesn’t mean that it is not there, with a certain emotional valence, working below the threshold, informing the perceptual significance of that hammer.

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  1. Department of Philosophy, University of Central Florida, Orlando, FL, 32816, USA

    Shaun Gallagher

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Gallagher, S. Intersubjectivity in perception. Cont Philos Rev 41, 163–178 (2008). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11007-008-9075-8

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