“The philosophy of perception has many parts. Some border on epistemology, some on the philosophy of psychology, and some on enquiries into the metaphysics of consciousness.”
“The volume under review is concerned with the parts relating to perception’s structure.”
“Fiona Macpherson asks whether the twentieth century’s sense-data theory was on the side of representationalism or relationism. Her answer – unsurprisingly – is that it depends what one means by ‘representationalism’.”
“Her essay gives a systematic account of the several things that one might mean. It provides a clearly-drawn taxonomy, complete with a precise identification of the dimensions along which the positions in this taxonomy vary. Contributors to these debates should benefit from Macpherson’s meticulous work here, even if readers who are not already invested in those debates remain unconvinced of such an investment’s profitability.”
“Elsewhere in the recent literature blurriness has been treated as a challenge for the representationalist, since blur is – as French notes – a feature of their phenomenal character that experiences do not present, or represent, perceived things as having: Sharp things in my environment do not appear to lose their sharpness when I remove my glasses. Their sharpness merely ceases to be seen.”
“French’s solution to these difficulties – arrived at after rejecting some alternatives that have been assayed elsewhere – is that blurriness modifies the relation of seeing. Seeing a sharp-edged thing blurrily is, on this view, somewhat like sitting on a chair precariously: The person sitting precariously is not sitting on anything other than the chair, nor doing anything with the chair in addition to sitting on it. Her sitting on the chair is a relation to the chair itself, and not to some representation of it. Her sitting is precarious because it is done in a certain way. Similarly, a person who is seeing blurrily is not seeing anything other than the chair, nor doing anything with the chair in addition to seeing it. His perception of the chair is a relation to the chair itself, and not to some representation of it. His perception is blurry because it is done in a certain way.”
“If we ask which way of seeing is the blurry way then the representationalists can say that it is a way involving low-precision specifications of location.”
“The naive realists cannot say this (since precision is a property of representations). They must instead follow the line that French suggests when he writes “Maybe blurrily is a sui generis way of perceiving, maybe blurriness is a sui generis modification of consciousness, maybe it can be accounted for in terms of qualia, or sensational properties” (p. 47).”
“In the third paper Sebastian Watzl attempts to broaden our conception of perceptual contents, arguing that these include ‘guiding contents’. His idea is that perception does not merely tell us how the world is; it also motivates us to act on that world in perceptually-specified ways.”
“Watzl develops this suggestion with reference to three examples: seeing a delicious looking cake, hearing an attention-capturing explosion, and listening to music that invites dancing. His proposal goes beyond J.J. Gibson’s suggestion that perception tells us about the actions that our environment affords. It has more in common – as Watzl explains – with suggestions that can be found in the work of Maurice Merleau-Ponty, and of those he inspired.”
“Opponents of Gibson would say that perception presents Watzl’s cake only as having certain categorical properties, although these might include properties that are known to make good eating probable. They would say that something in addition to perception is needed for the formulation of a plan in which the cake gets eaten. Gibson rejects this, claiming that the action of eating is already given in perception, as something that the cake affords. Watzl agrees, and makes the further claim that the action of eating is given, not merely as something that could be done, but as something that one is motivated to do: The cake is seen, not merely as brown and shiny, nor merely as moist and sweet. It is not even seen merely as edible. Perception itself presents the cake as to-be-eaten. We can understand Watzl’s claim as being that a verbal representation of perception’s content would need to be given in a hortative mood (although Watzl himself does not put the point in those terms).”
“English is not especially rich in hortative moods, and its speakers typically resort to metaphor when trying to convey the phenomenology that Watzl wants to capture: We say that the cake looked like it wanted to be eaten; or that it was saying ‘eat me’. A literal-minded monoglot might take this to indicate that Watzl’s proposal requires us to see the world as being full of agents, including such strange creatures as cakes with mental states. Watzl carefully explains that his proposal makes no such requirement.”
“Like Richardson, Thomas Crowther addresses the temporal version of a problem that is more familiar when posed as a problem about space. In Crowther’s case the spatial problem is whether and how we see whole space-filling objects, when it is only the proximal surfaces of those objects that contribute to the character of visual experience. The temporal analogue is, he suggests, whether and how it can be true, during some proper temporal part of an experience, that we are directly experiencing an event, but not the whole of that event.”
“In addressing this puzzle Crowther puts a lot of apparatus on the table. We are told about Davidson’s ontology of events, about the debate between representationalists and relationalists, about M.G.F. Martin’s account of the contrast between direct and indirect perception, about perfective and imperfective verb aspects, and about controversies surrounding the metaphysics of constitution.”
“The apparatus of which Crowther makes most use is that with which he draws a distinction (to which several philosophers of mind have recently been attracted) between activities and processes; where the latter, but not the former, are understood as requiring that a complete trajectory of phase space be traversed.”
“Seeking one’s fortune would be an ‘activity’, in this sense, but finding or losing it would be a ‘process’.”
“Being the book of a journal’s special issue (collecting papers from a workshop that was hosted by the University of Reading in 2013), this is not a volume in which diverse views come together to give a picture that accomplishes more than the sum of its parts.”