The Objects of Perception

(1) And so perception realizes one of the two logically possible structures open to experience: namely, an experience of the specific type ‘experience of——’ (extensionally). Here we have the means for understanding two salient facts about perception. The first is, the falsity of a ‘faculty’ account of the phenomenon, the theory that perceptual accessibility relates in a merely additive fashion to the other constituents of consciousness, rather as (say) the faculty of sight does to the other inhabitants of the mind. It makes sense of this fact, since even though perceptual accessibility is not analytically derivable from consciousness, it is nonetheless both entailed by it and the concept of perception constituted through a purely formal operation upon a concept analytically essential to consciousness itself. Thus, it is both necessary and logically prefigured, and cannot be a mere addition to the other constituents of consciousness as sight is.

The second significant property of perception that is illuminated by this understanding of perception is this. It becomes readily comprehensible why perception is of necessity the unique ultimate experiential epistemological link between mind and physical phenomenal reality. The reason lies in the fact that if the concept of perception is merely that of extensional experience of a distinct reality, no conceptual space is available for alternative

ultimate experiential avenues leading reliably out onto outer reality. The physical case simply exemplifies a universal rule.

(2) On this account of the nature of perception, the way is clear for consciousness to open out concretely in intelligible manner onto the World in which it finds itself, given to awareness in its ultimate ontological form. And in doing so, the phenomenon of perception fills a logical matrixwhich has been prepared for it in advance by a concept constitutive of consciousness. Then what is the general type of the objects that are thus given to perception? They are things (broadly understood). That is to say, concrete things: material objects, events, qualities, relations, and suchlike. And they are not facts about those things. The perceptual objects are concrete realities, not truths about concrete realities—and by

‘concrete realities’ I mean, merely the realities themselves. Thus, we ‘set eyes upon’ people, mountains, the Battle of Midway, Naples for the first time, and in general upon objects and phenomena. And we do not ‘set eyes upon’ truths.

We glimpse or ‘catch a sight of’ or study or scrutinize objects, faces, phenomena, scenes: in short, visible items! The Causal Theory of Perception governs the relation between objects and events in the environment and the event in the attention of noticing in which they come to awareness, and the causal relation holds not between a fact in physical nature and a mental event in which that fact comes to awareness, but between the phenomenal particular and the bare awareness of it.

And yet some might insist that the primary unit of perception is the perception that something of a certain kind is present to one. It might be claimed that while we perceive objects, we do so only as elements of perceptions of propositions involving them. That is, that the event of seeing that a state of affairs obtains involves the seeing of objects, and this last is an undetachable though deductible element of the whole, being the only way such events occur. As one might deduce ‘he saw a smile’ from ‘he saw a smile on her face’, without supposing smiles might be seen without wearers, so in the case of perception. In short, that objects come to the attention only insofar as propositions involving them do. After all, is not the essential function of perception to convey information? In my opinion this theory is to be resisted. This is because the relation between the seeing of objects and facts is causal. We see that it is snowing because we see and recognize snow, and understand the situation (know ‘what's what’). The visual recognition of snow is not awareness of the presence of snow: these phenomena are two, and the first is the causal foundation of rather than an undetachable element of the second.

We would be less inclined to suppose the primary content of perceptual experience to be propositional, if we better understood the contribution of the Understanding to perception. The first thing to remember is, that since the function of perception is to lead to cognition, recognitional perception must be the norm. Therefore while we ‘set eyes on’ things, the claim is with more illumination to be expressed as follows. We ‘set eyes on’ structured entities; and not just on them, but in a structural mode. For we recognize objects when we not merely see them, but (and

with justification) see them as the complexentities they are. While perception is of things rather than facts about things, it is not of ‘bare particulars’. It involves conceptualization of the contents of (say) the visual field. Now this phenomenon depends in turn upon one's knowledge of certain propositions, and this fact might lead one to substitute a proposition in place of the interpretational content of the perceptual experience. But this would be an error. The conceptual content of the experience is not to be identified with any proposition: after all, the veridical visual field contains nothing but phenomenal items of diverse types, which typically our minds identify in the experience. The imposition of concepts upon the visual data is not to be confused with its ‘propositionalization’.¹ An important distinction exists between the conceptual content of, and the cognitive propositional import of, perceptual experience.

Much of this becomes clearer when (in Part II of this work) we examine perceptual experiences directed to negative items like silence, darkness, emptiness, absence, and so on.

(3) In my opinion two of the main dangers facing Perception Theory are intellectualization and over-interiorization. In perception things come to us ‘in the flesh’, as ‘raw presences’ one might say, and this is true of no other experience. Because of this singularity there is a tendency to understand this phenomenon in terms suited instead to the non-perceptual occupants of ‘experiential consciousness’, so to say in more mental terms. We encountered over-intellectualism just now in the above theory. Thus, while the understanding is involved in perceptual recognition, the content it imposes is of an interpretational rather than propositional order, it is impressed upon a core which owes no such debt to the understanding, and that core is significantly unlike the proposition in not being constituted of concepts. The primitive elements present in the make-up of this developmentally primitive phenomenon are nowhere represented in the doctrine of the propositional type of its objects.

And as I see the matter we encounter over-interiorization in the doctrine that the essence of perception is purely intentional. The position I endorsed earlier was that perceptual experience is essentially extensionally directed to sensory objects, and that typically intentional interpretation is imposed upon that base. This property of perception, taken in conjunction with the concrete nature of its encounter with objects, demonstrates the unlikeness of perception to properly interior experiences like thought and thought-derivatives such as emotion or imagery. Then it is with these issues in mind that in Part II of this work I investigate the main differences between perceptual experience on the one hand, and cognitively significant experiences like those of thought or imagination or discovery on the other. The aim of that enterprise is the distinguishing of perception from its closest experiential neighbours: it is the differential delineation of this elemental event in which the mind comes face to face with the physical world. But it is in the final analysis an attempt to put on display its somewhat blunt and unthinking nature.

1 To use a favourite expression of Prof. John Anderson, of Sydney, and bygone era.