Perception as Representation. A Conceptual Clarification of Intentionalism (original) (raw)
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In this paper, I intend to review the intentionalist account of perceptual experience in order to deal with some difficulties that it faces in adequately specifying the nature and object of perceptual experience. My aim is to show that it is possible for the intentionalists to incorporate the disjunctivist thesis that the object of perception is part of perceptual experiences, without renouncing the common factor principle. I argue that, in order to do this, it is necessary to engage with the concept of biological function and to review the concept of a perceptual object.
Mental Representation and Consciousness
Intentionality and consciousness are the fundamental kinds of mental phenomena. Although they are widely regarded as being entirely distinct some philosophers conjecture that they are intimately related. Prominently it has been claimed that consciousness can be best understood in terms of representational facts or properties. Representationalist theories vary in strength. At their core they seek to establish that subjective, phenomenal consciousness (of the kind that involves the having of first-personal points of view or perspectives on the world - perspectives that incorporate experiences with specific phenomenal characters) are either exhausted by, or supervene on, capacities for mental representation. These proposals face several serious objections.
Intentionality and the Content of Perceptual Experience
One of the questions that Wittgenstein was concerned with during his lifetime is the question of how to understand the idea of intentionality. How can we understand the fact that inanimate things in the outer world become animated in our consciousness while finding ourselves in mental states that refer to them? Wittgenstein calls this the " old problem of the harmony between thought and reality ". In the first part of this paper I briefly present his way of dissolving the problem arguing that the relation between the content of mental states and reality is not representational. In the second part of the paper I explore whether this argument also applies with respect to perceptual experience. It is often assumed that perceptual experience is a form of intentionality, i.e. that it has representational content. I show that Wittgenstein's conception of intentionality is not quite suitable for either approving or rejecting this assumption. However, I shall give a further argument claiming that at least in some cases the content of perceptual experience is indeed not representational. As a conclusion I present the view that perceptual experience should be understood as the ability to arrange sensations, rather than as mental states that have representational content.
In this paper, I intend to review the intentionalist account of perceptual experience in order to deal with some difficulties that it faces in adequately specifying the nature and object of perceptual experience. My aim is to show that it is possible for the intentionalists to incorporate the disjunctivist thesis that the object of perception is part of perceptual experiences, without renouncing the common factor principle. I argue that, in order to do this, it is necessary to engage with the concept of biological function and to review the concept of a perceptual object.
Representation and content in some (actual) theories of perception
1988
Recent discussions in the philosophy of psychology have examined the use and legitimacy of such notions as “representation”, “content”, “computation”, and “inference” within a scientific psychology. While the resulting assessments have varied widely, ranging from outright rejection of some or all of these notions to full vindication of their use, there has been notable agreement on the considerations deemed relevant for making an assessment. The answer to the question of whether the notion of, say, representational content may be admitted into a scientific psychology has often been made to hinge upon whether the notion can be squared with our “ordinary” or “folk” style of psychological explanation, with its alleged commitment to the idiom of beliefs and desires. In this article, I proceed the other way around, starting with experimental psychology itself and asking whether such notions as the above play a legitimate role within a particular area of contemporary theory, the psychology of perception. My conclusion will be that especially the first three have a legitimate place in theories of perception, albeit one that differs from that ascribed to them in a significant portion of the philosophical literature. Along the way I develop a notion of noncognitive functional analysis, which separates the notion of contentful perceptual processing and perceptual representation from cognitive or conceptual content. (This paper has been reprinted, with stylistic revisions, in Perception and Cognition, Essays in the Philosophy of Psychology, Oxford, Clarendon Press, 2009, pp. 50-87.)
Perception Without Representation
2017
Introduction to a forthcoming special issue of Topoi focusing upon the debate between relational and representational views of perception, and in particular upon emerging non-representational views of experience. Being historically more recent and less widely held, relational views have all too often been poorly understood by their detractors, many of whom have taken such views to be implausible, incompatible with perceptual science, or simply inscrutable. Indeed, for those steeped in the representationalist tradition, it can be difficult to understand why one might want to deny what may seem an obvious truth about perceptual experiences: that they represent how things in the world are. Against this tendency, we aim to shed further light upon the nature, motivations for, and theoretical commitments of non-representational views of perception in a way that facilitates a more nuanced debate (Brewer, Travis, Martin, this volume). Other contributions explore the phenomenal character of experience and its explanatory role (Brogaard, Dokic & Martin, Eilan), and reappraise existing arguments both for (Brogaard) and against (O’Sullivan, Judge, Ivanov) relational views. We hope that this goes some way towards demonstrating that, far from being an implausible fringe view, relational theories constitute a significant and genuine attempt to overcome some central problems in the philosophy of perception and, as such, are worthy of further consideration—not least by their opponents. This article available via Open Access under a Creative Commons BY 4.0 licence.