Abstract
This paper answers a philosophical challenge that emerges when we problematize the seemingly trivial "fact" that, on the one hand, through our senses we are presented with a realm that is not of our own making; while, on the other hand, various perceivers are acquainted with diverse presentations of this realm, depending on their perspective and cognitive machinery. The challenge is dubbed here the problem of presentations. The paper draws on the idea of situation-dependent properties proposed by Susanna Schellenberg. However, the paper takes the notion of situation more seriously and introduces a number of basic notions borrowed from situated cognition—a cluster of ideas that have recently emerged in the philosophy of mind. These make it possible to introduce the perceiver in such a way as not to endanger the objective character of situation-dependent properties. Thought of this way, situation-dependent properties are in turn described as the building blocks of presentations.
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Notes
My use of the term “presentation” should also be seen against the background of the notion of “sensory presentation” as proposed by Kalderon (2015). I thank the anonymous reviewer for drawing my attention to this book.
Technically this could be articulated in terms of the derivative \(\frac{dP1}{{dS}}\) = 0. This applies to many other notions which I am going to present later on in this paper, but I decided to skip this formalism. Insofar as we can grasp these notions intuitively, in natural language, there is no need to introduce formalism for its own sake.
This is not a reduction of the subject to its purely physical base, hence a form of reductive materialism, for the very notion of “purely physical base” already smuggles in the Cartesian internal–external dichotomy. Meanwhile, some parties within the situated cognition movement, certainly Varela et al (1991), are explicitly against any such reductionism. The point is, instead, that the cognizing, perceiving subject must not be thought of as decoupled from its situational environment—it arises in it.
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Acknowledgements
I would like to thank Andrea Altobrando and the anonymous reviewers of this paper for their encouragement and exceptionally useful comments. This work was supported by the Polish National Science Centre (Narodowe Centrum Nauki) [Research Grant No. 2019/33/B/HS1/01764].
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Werner, K. The problem of presentations: how it is that one object is perceptually given in multiple ways. Synthese 200, 181 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-022-03486-4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-022-03486-4