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 ision and Mind

Selected Readings in the Philosophy of Perception

edited by Alva Noë and Evan Thompson

Vision and Mind
This Page Intentionally Left Blank
Vision and Mind
Selected Readings in the Philosophy of Perception

edited by
Alva Noë and Evan Thompson

A Bradford Book

The MIT Press

Cambridge, Massachusetts
London, England
© 2002 Massachusetts Institute of Technology

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form by any electronic
or mechanical means (including photocopying, recording, or information storage and
retrieval) without permission in writing from the publisher.

This book was set in Sabon by SNP Best-set Typesetter Ltd., Hong Kong.

Printed and bound in the United States of America.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Vision and mind : selected readings in the philosophy of perception / edited by Alva Noë
and Evan Thompson.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 0-262-14078-0 (alk. paper)—ISBN 0-262-64047-3 (pbk. : alk. paper)
1. Perception (Philosophy) I. Noë, Alva. II. Thompson, Evan.
B828.45 .V565 2002
121¢.34—dc21 2002023533
Contents

Preface vii
Sources ix
1 Introduction 1
Alva Noë and Evan Thompson
2 Selections from Phenomenology of Perception 15
Maurice Merleau-Ponty
3 Some Remarks about the Senses 35
H. P. Grice
4 The Intentionality of Sensation: A Grammatical Feature 55
G. E. M. Anscombe
5 A Theory of Direct Visual Perception 77
James J. Gibson
6 Perception and Its Objects 91
P. F. Strawson
7 Perceptions as Hypotheses 111
Richard L. Gregory
8 Veridical Hallucination and Prosthetic Vision 135
David Lewis
9 Perception, Vision and Causation 151
Paul Snowdon
10 How Direct Is Visual Perception?: Some Reflections on Gibson’s
“Ecological Approach” 167
Jerry A. Fodor and Zenon W. Pylshyn
vi Contents

11 Selections from Vision 229

David Marr
12 Sensation and the Content of Experience: A Distinction 267
Christopher Peacocke
13 Linking Propositions 289
Davida Y. Teller
14 Molyneux’s Question 319
Gareth Evans
15 Ways of Coloring: Comparative Color Vision as a Case Study
for Cognitive Science 351
Evan Thompson, Adrian Palacios, and Francisco J. Varela
16 Conscious Experience 419
Fred Dretske
17 The Content of Perceptual Experience 443
John McDowell
18 On the Function of Visual Representation 459
Dana H. Ballard
19 Seeing Is Believing—Or Is It? 481
Daniel C. Dennett
20 Sensory Substitution and Qualia 497
Paul Bach-y-Rita
21 The Visual Brain in Action 515
A. David Milner and Melvyn A. Goodale
22 What Is a Neural Correlate of Consciousness? 531
David J. Chalmers
23 On the Brain-Basis of Visual Consciousness: A Sensorimotor Account 567
Alva Noë and J. Kevin O’Regan
Index 599
Preface

The writings in this volume investigate the nature of visual perception. Our goal
has been to produce a collection that can serve as a starting point for the philo-
sophy of perception. These writings provide, we believe, a clear statement of the
central issues confronting the philosophical study of perception today. It is our hope
that this volume will make a contribution to their ongoing study.
All the works collected here, except for one, have been previously published.
Many are classics; most have been important for philosophical discussion of per-
ception; all serve, we hope, to indicate clearly an important family of problems. In
order to make the book as useful as possible, we have resisted (in all but a few
instances) reprinting materials that are easily available elsewhere or that are
excerpted from larger works.
Vision and Mind has been long in the making. Through several incarnations, it
has grown leaner and more focused. We are grateful to many people for advice,
criticism, and encouragement. We would like to express our thanks to Ned Block,
Justin Broakes, Alex Byrne, Dave Chalmers, Dan Dennett, Sean Kelly, Erik Myin,
Luiz Pessoa, Susanna Siegel, and Francisco Varela. We are grateful to the authors
and to their original publishers for granting us permission to include their works
here. We offer special thanks to Carolyn Gray Anderson and to her predecessor at
The MIT Press, Amy Yeager, for their strong support of this project. We also wish
to thank Diane Zorn for her help in preparing the manuscript. Finally, A. N. grate-
fully acknowledges the support of faculty research funds from the Humanities Divi-
sion of the University of California, Santa Cruz.
This Page Intentionally Left Blank
Sources

Maurice Merleau-Ponty. Selections from Phenomenology of Perception. Trans. Colin Smith.

London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, [1945] 1962. Reprinted by permission of the publisher.
“The ‘sensation’ as a unit of experience.” (pp. 3–12)
“Experience and objective thought: The problem of the body.” (pp. 67–72)
“The theory of the body is already a theory of perception.” (pp. 203–206)
H. P. Grice. “Some remarks about the senses.” In R. J. Butler, ed., Analytic Philosophy,
15–153. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1962. Reprinted by permission of the publisher.
G. E. M. Anscombe. “The intentionality of sensation: A grammatical feature.” In Metaphysics
and the Philosophy of Mind: Collected Philosophical Papers, Vol. III, 3–20. Oxford:
Blackwell, 1965. Reprinted by permission of the publisher.
James J. Gibson. “A theory of direct visual perception.” In J. R. Royce and W. W.
Rozeboom, eds., The Psychology of Knowing, 215–240. New York: Gordon & Breach,
1972. Reprinted by permission of the publisher.
P. F. Strawson. “Perception and its objects.” In G. F. Macdonald, ed., Perception and Iden-
tity: Essays Presented to A. J. Ayer with His Replies, 41–60. London: Macmillan, 1979.
Reprinted by permission of the author and the publisher.
Richard L. Gregory. “Perceptions as hypotheses.” Philosophical Transactions of the Royal
Society B 290 (1980): 181–197. Reprinted by permission of the author and the Royal Society.
David Lewis. “Veridical hallucination and prosthetic perception.” In Australasian Journal
of Philosophy 58 (1980): 239–249. Reprinted by permission of the author and
the Australasion Journal of Philosophy. D. Lewis, “Postscript.” In Philosophical Papers
Volume 2, 287–290. Reprinted by permission of the author. Oxford: Oxford University Press,
1986.
Paul Snowdon. “Perception, vision and causation.” Aristotelian Society Proceedings New
Series 81 (1980–1981): 175–192. Reprinted by courtesy of the Editor of the Aristotelian
Society: © [1981] and by permission of the author.
Jerry A. Fodor and Zenon W. Pylyshyn. “How direct is visual perception?: Some reflections
on Gibson’s ‘Ecological Approach.’” Cognition 9 (1981): 139–196. Reprinted with permis-
sion from Elsevier Science.
x Sources

David Marr. “Part I: Introduction and Philosophical Preliminaries.” Selections from Vision:
A Computational Investigation into the Human Representation and Processing of Visual
Information. New York: W. H. Freeman and Company, 1982. Used with permission.
“General introduction.” (pp. 3–7)
“The philosophy and the approach.” (pp. 8–38)
Christopher Peacocke. “Sensation and the content of experience: A distinction.” In
Christopher Peacocke, Sense and Content, 4–26. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983.
Reprinted by permission of Oxford University Press.
Davida Y. Teller. “Linking propositions.” Vision Research 24, no. 10 (1984): 1233–1246.
Reprinted with permission from Elsevier Science.
Gareth Evans. “Molyneux’s question.” In Gareth Evans, Collected Papers, ed. John
McDowell, 364–399. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985. © Antonia Phillips 1985.
Reprinted by permission of Oxford University Press.
Evan Thompson, Adrian Palacios, and Francisco J. Varela. “Ways of coloring: Comparative
color vision as a case study for cognitive science.” Behavioral and Brain Sciences 15 (1992):
1–26. Reprinted with the permission of the authors and Cambridge University Press.
Fred Dretske. “Conscious experience.” Mind 102, no. 406 (1993): 263–283. Reprinted by
permission of Oxford University Press.
John McDowell. “The content of perceptual experience.” The Philosophical Quarterly
44, no. 175 (1994): 190–205. Reprinted by permission of the editors of The Philosophical
Quarterly.
Dana H. Ballard. “On the function of visual representation.” In Kathleen Akins, ed.,
Perception, 111–131. Vancouver Studies in Cognitive Science, vol. 5. Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1996. Used by permission of Oxford University Press, Inc.
Daniel C. Dennett. “Seeing is believing—or is it?” In Kathleen Akins, ed., Perception,
158–172. Vancouver Studies in Cognitive Science, vol. 5. Oxford: Oxford University Press,
1996. Used by permission of Oxford University Press, Inc., and by permission of the author.
Paul Bach-y-Rita. “Substitution sensorielle et qualia” [Sensory substitution and qualia]. In J.
Proust, ed., Perception et Intermodalité, 81–100. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France,
1996. Reprinted by permission of the author.
A. David Milner and Melvyn A. Goodale. “The visual brain in action.” Psyche: An
Interdisciplinary Journal of Research on Consciousness. Available at
·http://psyche.cs.monash.edu/au/v4/psyche-4-12-milner.htmlÒ. 1998. Reprinted by permission
of the authors.
David J. Chalmers. “What is a neural correlate of consciousness?” In T. Metzinger,
ed., Neural Correlates of Consciousness: Empirical and Conceptual Questions, 17–39.
Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2000. Reprinted by permission of the authors and MIT.
1
Introduction
Alva Noë and Evan Thompson

The philosophy of perception is a microcosm of the metaphysics of mind. Its central

problems—What is perception? What is the nature of perceptual consciousness?
How can one fit an account of perceptual experience into a broader account of the
nature of the mind and the world?—are problems at the heart of metaphysics. It is
often justifiably said that the theory of perception (and especially vision) is the area
of psychology and neuroscience that has made the greatest progress in recent years.
Despite this progress, or perhaps because of it, philosophical problems about per-
ception retain a great urgency, both for philosophy and for science.
Beyond these general remarks, however, it is difficult to state precisely what the
philosophy of perception comprises, and hence which topics, issues, and viewpoints
should be included in a book such as this one. Numerous philosophical problems
about perception and many different strands in the philosophy of perception exist.
For this reason, we have not tried to make this book a comprehensive collection of
philosophical writings on perception. Our aim, instead, has been more focused.
The works collected in this volume target a distinct philosophical and scientific
orthodoxy about the nature of perception. Some of the papers defend the ortho-
doxy; most criticize it; and some set forth positive alternatives to it. Each selection
provides, we believe, a crucial moment in the articulation of an important family
of problems for contemporary philosophy of perception. Our purpose in this brief
introduction is to sketch the philosophical and scientific setting of this family of
problems.

1 The Orthodox View

The defining problem of traditional visual theory is that of understanding how we

come to enjoy such rich, apparently world-representing visual impressions. You
2 Alva Noë and Evan Thompson

open your eyes and you take in an environment of meaningful objects and events
and of colors, forms, and movements. What makes such perceptual experience so
difficult to explain is the fact—if it is a fact—that when we open our eyes and con-
template a scene, we make no direct contact with that which we seem to see. What
is given to us, one might suppose, is not the world itself, but the pattern of light on
the retina, and that pattern does not supply enough information to determine how
things are in the environment. For example, from the retinal image of a table alone,
it may not be possible to tell whether it is large and far away, or small and nearby.
Visual scientists are quick to add that the problem is really even more baffling
than we have indicated. The eye is in nearly constant motion; the resolving power
(spatial and chromatic) of the retina is limited and nonuniform; passage to the retina
is blocked by blood vessels and nerve fibers; there is a large “blind spot” on the
retina where there are no photoreceptors; there are two retinal images, each of which
is upside down. Given this impoverished basis, how do we manage to enjoy such
richly detailed visual experiences of the environment? The central puzzle for tradi-
tional visual science has been to explain how the brain bridges the gap between
what is given to the visual system and what is actually experienced by the perceiver.
In the face of this puzzle, an orthodox or “Establishment View” of perception
(Fodor and Pylyshyn, chapter 10) has taken shape over the last fifty years. Accord-
ing to this orthodoxy, perception is a process whereby the brain, or a functionally
dedicated subsystem of the brain, builds up representations of relevant features of
the environment on the basis of information encoded by the sensory receptors. As
David Marr (chapter 11) surmises: “Vision is the process of discovering from images
what is present in the world, and where it is.” Because the patterns on the retina
are not sufficient by themselves to determine the layout of the surrounding envi-
ronment, perception must be thought of as a process of inductive inference. Per-
ceptions are, as Richard L. Gregory (chapter 7) suggests, hypotheses concerning the
distal causes of proximal stimulation. In the famous phrase of Helmholtz, percep-
tion is unconscious inference.
The orthodox view, in its modern computational form, treats perception as a
“subpersonal” process carried out by functional subsystems or modules instantiated
in the person’s or animal’s brain. For this reason, among others, it is often held that
much of perception—specifically “early vision,” in which a model of the surface
layout is supposed to be produced—is “cognitively impenetrable,” that is, impervi-
ous to the direct influence of cognition or thought. In other words, the beliefs and
expectations of the perceiver are thought to have no influence on the character of
 Introduction 3

the subpersonal computations that constitute perception. Thus, on the orthodox

approach, perception is thought-independent (see Pylyshyn 1999 for a recent state-
ment of this position).
Most adherents of the orthodox view also believe that for every conscious per-
ceptual state of the subject, a particular set of neurons exists whose activities are
sufficient, as a matter of scientific law, for the occurrence of that state. Davida Teller
(chapter 13) calls such neurons “the bridge locus” of visual perception; others, like
David J. Chalmers (chapter 22), call them the “neural correlate of consciousness”
(NCC) for visual perception. According to this viewpoint, to suppose that there is
no bridge locus or neural correlate of consciousness would be to give up all hope
of securing a scientific explanation of perceptual experience.

2 Heterodox Views

Although the orthodox view has dominated perceptual psychology, visual neuro-
science, and artificial vision and robotics, important alternative research programs
have existed for many decades. Collectively these alternatives constitute a signifi-
cant heterodoxy in visual science (and cognitive science more generally), one whose
influence seems to be felt increasingly in mainstream cognitive science and philoso-
phy. Important differences exist among these alternative research programs, but
what unites them is their convergence on certain fundamental criticisms of the ortho-
dox view and their insistence on the inseparability of perception and action.

The Ecological Approach

The theoretical and empirical research on vision undertaken by the perceptual psy-
chologist James J. Gibson (1966; 1979; chapter 5) marks an important break with
the orthodox view. Perception, Gibson argues, is not an occurrence that takes place
in the brain of the perceiver, but rather is an act of the whole animal, the act of per-
ceptually guided exploration of the environment. One misdescribes vision if one
thinks of it as a subpersonal process whereby the brain builds up an internal model
of the environment on the basis of impoverished sensory images. Such a concep-
tion of vision is pitched at the wrong level, namely, that of the internal enabling
conditions for vision rather than that of vision itself as an achievement of the
whole animal. Put another way, the function of vision is to keep the perceiver in
touch with the environment and to guide action, not to produce inner experiences
and representations.
4 Alva Noë and Evan Thompson

According to this animal-level account, the information directly available to the

perceiver in vision is not to be found in the pattern of irradiation on the retinal
surface, but rather in the world or environment that the animal itself explores. In
other words, Gibson denies the assumption of the orthodox view—and of repre-
sentational theories in general—that one makes no direct contact with that which
one sees. For Gibson, perception is direct: It is not mediated by sensations or images
that serve as the basis for reconstructing a representation of the things that we see.
Perception, one might say, is direct inspection, not re-presentation.
If perception does not operate according to mechanisms of inferential reconstruc-
tion on the basis of internal representations, then how does it operate, according to
Gibson? The central working hypothesis of this ecological approach is that the per-
ceiver makes direct contact with the environment thanks to the animal’s sensitivity
to invariant structures in the ambient light. Two points are important here. First,
perception is active: the animal moves its eyes, head, and body to scan the layout
visually, while simultaneously moving through the environment. Thus visual percep-
tion occurs not as a series of snapshots corresponding to stationary retinal images,
but as a dynamic visual flow. Second, there are lawful correlations between the struc-
ture of this flow and visible properties of the environment. Because perceivers are
implicitly familiar with these lawful correlations, they are able to “pick up” content
from the environment as specified in the light without having to reconstruct the
environment from impoverished images through information processing.
The ecological approach remains highly controversial. Perhaps the most well-
known criticism is that of Jerry A. Fodor and Zenon W. Pylyshyn (chapter 10). They
defend the Establishment View, and they insist that Gibson failed to make a serious
break with this view. At the end of the day, they suggest, the only significant contact
one makes with the world in perception is through the stimulation of one’s sensory
receptors by patterns of energy. Perception, therefore, must be indirect: It must be
a process of representation on the basis of that peripheral sensory contact. Accord-
ing to this way of thinking, perception remains, from a scientific viewpoint, a sub-
personal process of computational representation, and accordingly is not usefully
thought of as an animal-level achievement. On the other hand, John McDowell
(chapter 17) scrutinizes the conceptual and epistemological coherence of this Estab-
lishment position in the context of philosophical issues about the content of per-
ceptual experience and knowledge; he argues that the nature of perception will
continue to be misunderstood as long as perception is cast as an internal, subper-
sonal process.
 Introduction 5

The Enactive Approach

Another alternative approach to perception has emerged from the work of the neu-
roscientists Humberto R. Maturana and Francisco J. Varela. They argue that it is a
mistake to think of the nervous system as an input-output system that encodes an
internal representation of the outside world (Maturana and Varela 1980, 1987;
Varela 1979, 1995, 1997). Rather than representing an independent, external world,
the nervous system generates or brings forth, on the basis of its own self-organized
activity, the perceptuo-motor domain of the animal. (A similar viewpoint has also
been put forward by the neuroscientist Walter Freeman: See Freeman and Skarda
1995; Skarda and Freeman 1987; Freeman 1999). On the basis of this reappraisal,
Varela has presented an enactive approach to perception (Varela 1991; Thompson,
Palacios, and Varela, chapter 15), as one component of a comprehensive enactive
or embodied view in cognitive science (Varela, Thompson, and Rosch 1991; see also
Clark 1997). According to this view, meaningful perceptual items, rather than being
internally represented in the form of a world-model inside the head, are enacted
or brought forth as a result of the structural coupling of the organism and its
environment (see also Noë forthcoming).
A good example of the enactive approach is the account of color vision pro-
vided by Evan Thompson, Adrian Palacios, and Francisco J. Varela (chapter 15).
They reject the orthodox view, as exemplified in computational color vision research
(e.g., Maloney and Wandell 1986) and functionalist philosophy of mind (e.g.,
Matthen 1988; Hilbert 1992), according to which the function of color vision is to
recover from the retinal image reliable estimates of the invariant distal property of
surface spectral reflectance (the percentage of light at each wavelength that a surface
reflects). On the basis of cross-species comparisons of color vision, Thompson,
Palacios, and Varela argue that different animals have different phenomenal color
spaces, and that color vision does not have the function of detecting any single type
of environmental property. They then use these arguments to motivate an enactive
account of color, according to which color properties are enacted by the perceptuo-
motor coupling of animals with their environments (see also Thompson 1995,
2000).

Animate Vision
The research program of animate vision has emerged at the interface of computa-
tional vision, artificial intelligence, and robotics (Ballard, chapter 18; see also Ballard
1991; Ballard et al. 1997). Instead of abstracting perceptual processes from their
6 Alva Noë and Evan Thompson

bodily context, animate vision proposes what Ballard calls a distinct embodiment
level of explanation, which specifies how the facts of sensorimotor embodiment
shape perception. For example, the orthodox view starts from the abstraction of a
stationary retinal image and asks how the visual system manages to derive a model
of the objective world; in so doing, it decomposes visual processes into modules that
are passive in the sense of not being interconnected with motor processes. Animate
vision, however, starts from the sensorimotor cycles of saccadic eye movement and
gaze fixation, and asks how the perceiver is able to fixate points in the environment;
in so doing, it decomposes visual processes into visuomotor modules that guide
action and exploration. Such an embodied, action-based analysis reduces the need
for certain kinds of representations in vision, in particular for an online, moment-
to-moment, detailed world-model.

The Sensorimotor Contingency Theory

According to this theory, put forward by J. Kevin O’Regan and Alva Noë (see
O’Regan 1992; O’Regan and Noë 2001; Noë and O’Regan, chapter 23; Noë 2001,
2002, forthcoming), it is a mistake to think of vision as a process taking place in
the brain. Although the brain is necessary for vision, neural processes are not, in
themselves, sufficient to produce seeing. Instead, seeing is an exploratory activity
mediated by the animal’s mastery of sensorimotor contingencies. That is, seeing is a
skill-based activity of environmental exploration. Visual experience is not something
that happens in an individual. It is something he or she does. This sensorimotor con-
ception forms the basis of Noë and O’Regan’s challenge (chapter 23) to the wide-
spread view, articulated in this volume by Teller (chapter 13) and Chalmers (chapter
22), that the content of visual experience is represented at some specific stage of
neural processing (the “bridge locus” or the “neural correlate of consciousness”).

3 The Importance of Action and Embodiment

If one common theme emerges from the heterodoxy, it is that perception must be
understood in the context of action and embodiment. This theme is echoed by other
chapters in this book.
Chapter 21 by the neuropsychologists A. David Milner and Melvyn A. Goodale
provides an example from recent neuroscience that draws attention to the impor-
tance of perception-action linkages. Milner and Goodale argue that two visual
systems exist, one of which is dedicated to the visual guidance of action (chapter
 Introduction 7

21; see also Milner and Goodale 1995). In support of this finding they adduce clin-
ical studies in which the reports that perceivers make indicate misperception even
though their motor responses seem to be based on accurate visual assessments of
the environment.
Paul Bach-y-Rita (chapter 20) discusses his work on tactile-vision substitution
systems. This research suggests that it is possible to “see” by means of tactile sen-
sations, if these sensations are appropriately embedded within a sensorimotor
framework.
In a different vein, Gareth Evans (chapter 14) emphasizes the importance of skill-
ful capacities of bodily movement for perception, in his philosophical analysis of
the classic “Molyneux Question” posed by William Molyneux to John Locke—
whether a man blind from birth, who is able to distinguish a sphere and a cube by
touch, would be able to tell, upon having his sight restored, which is which by sight
alone before touching them. Evans argues that mastery, by the perceiver, of a set of
perceptuo-motor skills is a condition on the perceiver’s ability to experience space.
Finally, the importance of action and embodiment has long been emphasized by
philosophers and psychologists working in the tradition of phenomenology derived
from Edmund Husserl; for this reason, there is significant convergence between
the concerns and analyses of this tradition and action-oriented approaches to per-
ception in recent cognitive science (see Petitot et al. 1999). Husserl, in his ground-
breaking and extensive analyses of the phenomenology of perceptual experience,
delineated the intricate functional interdependencies of perception and kinaesthesis
(Husserl 1997; see also Mulligan 1995), and these analyses were taken up and devel-
oped by Maurice Merleau-Ponty in his 1945 book, Phenomenology of Perception,
selections of which are reprinted here.

4 Perceptual Experience and the New Skepticism

We now turn to another recent topic of discussion in philosophy and visual science
that also brings critical pressure to bear upon the orthodox view. The issue con-
cerns the kind of experience one takes oneself to have in seeing: Does one enjoy the
sort of richly detailed visual impressions that perceptual scientists and philosophers
have typically assumed one does? A growing number of philosophers and scientists
challenge this basic presupposition of the orthodox stance (see Dennett 1991,
chapter 19; Ballard, chapter 18; O’Regan 1992; Mack and Rock 1998). As Dana
H. Ballard (chapter 18) puts it: “You Don’t See What You Think You See.” This
8 Alva Noë and Evan Thompson

challenge has given rise to a new form of skepticism about perceptual experience.
Whereas traditional skepticism challenged whether we can know, on the basis of
experience, that things are as we experience them as being, the new skepticism ques-
tions whether we even have the perceptual experience we think we have. Perceptual
consciousness, according to the new skepticism, is a kind of false consciousness.
Perceptual experience is a “grand illusion.”
The skeptical reasoning goes as follows. It seems to us as if we enjoy picturelike
visual experiences that capture everything before us in sharp focus and uniform
detail. You open your eyes and there it all is. This idea about the character of visual
experience is beautifully captured by Ernst Mach, who represented his (monocular)
visual field in a now famous drawing (see figure 1.1). In Mach’s drawing, the visual
field is in sharp focus and uniform detail from the center out to the periphery where

Figure 1.1
From The Visual Field (Mach 1959).
 Introduction 9

it suddenly fades to white. Yet there is ample reason to believe that visual experi-
ence is not as Mach’s picture would have us believe.
First, because of the relatively limited number of photoreceptors at the periphery
of the visual field, humans have very poor parafoveal vision. Hold a playing card
at arm’s length just within your field of view. You will not be able to tell its color.
The visual field is not sharply focused from the center out to the periphery, con-
trary to what Mach’s drawing suggests.
Second, there is in each eye a stretch of the retina—the optic disk—where there
are no photoreceptors. As a result, one is in fact blind to what falls on this region
(the “blind spot”). One does not normally notice the gap, even in monocular vision.
If you fix your gaze at a wall of uniform color, with one eye shut, you will not notice
a gap in your impression of the wall corresponding to the part of the wall you
cannot see because of the blind spot. Your perceptual experience, so runs the skep-
tical reasoning, deceives you as to its true character. The visual field is not contin-
uous and gap free, as Mach’s picture would suggest.
Third, psychologists have recently demonstrated the attention-dependent charac-
ter of perception. Unless you actively attend to detail in your environment, you do
not perceive that detail. In one demonstration, you are asked to watch a videotape
of a basketball game and to attend to some aspect of play. A person in a gorilla suit
walks onto the court, stops in the middle to do a little jig, and then continues his
way across the court (Simons and Chabris 1999). Very few people watching the
tape will report seeing the gorilla! In another series of demonstrations, changes are
made to the scene before you, and you are asked to report the change. It is very dif-
ficult to do this because, unless you attended to the change when it happened, you
are unlikely to be able to tell. What makes these experiments striking is that they
seem to challenge Mach’s conception of what seeing is like. Despite the impression
of seeing everything, people see only very little of what is there before them.
From these facts, one can conclude that the way of thinking about perceptual
experience captured by Mach in his drawing is, in fact, a mischaracterization of
what experience is really like. It may seem to you as if your perceptual experience
is detailed, continuous, and gap-free. In fact, it is fragmentary, discontinuous, and
sparsely detailed. You have false beliefs about the character of experience. You do
not actually enjoy the experience you think you do.
This rejection of the phenomenological assumptions implicit in the orthodox
approach to perception has important implications for framing the key problems
of perceptual science. As we have seen, the central problem for traditional visual
science is that of understanding how you see so much given such limited perceptual
10 Alva Noë and Evan Thompson

contact with the world. A new approach, taking its start from the new skepticism,
seeks to understand instead why it seems to you as if you see so much, when in fact
you see so very little!
Is perceptual experience a grand illusion? What is the character of perceptual
experience? The chapters in this volume by Daniel C. Dennett, Dana H. Ballard,
and Alva Noë and J. K. O’Regan all touch on these questions.
Finally, it bears mentioning that these questions about the nature of visual expe-
rience are relevant to another long-standing issue in the philosophy of perception—
that of how to understand the differences between the sensory modalities. One way
to appreciate this issue is to notice that there is nothing about the character of the
neural impulses in the brain that indicates whether they are caused by stimulation
of the retina, cochlea, or other sensory membranes. Many scientists seem satisfied
with some variant of Mueller’s (1838) idea of “specific nerve energy,” according to
which the senses are differentiated by the different pathways along which they prop-
agate neural activity. An alternative and widely influential philosophical proposal
is advanced by H. P. Grice (chapter 3), who argues that the senses can be individ-
uated by their distinct qualitative characters. O’Regan and Noë (2001) and Noë
and O’Regan (chapter 23) have challenged these proposals, arguing instead that the
senses are to be distinguished by the different patterns of sensorimotor contingency
by which they are governed. Their position is compatible with Bach-y-Rita’s work
on tactile-vision substitution systems (chapter 20), which suggests that it is possi-
ble to “see” or experience the world “visually” through sensory systems other than
vision.

5 The Argument from Illusion

In a different context from that of the foregoing discussion, some philosophers have
attacked the conception of perceptual experience implicit in the orthodox approach.
J. L. Austin, and then after him Paul Snowdon and John McDowell, have attacked
the well-known Argument from Illusion. According to this argument, it is not pos-
sible to tell the difference between a veridical visual experience and a corresponding
hallucinatory one. That’s why hallucinations can fool you. Therefore, it must be
that there is no difference in what you are aware of when you undergo a percep-
tual experience and what you are aware of when you undergo the corresponding
hallucination. You know, in the hallucinatory case, that what you are aware of is
a mental figment. It follows, then, that what you are aware of in the veridical case
 Introduction 11

is also, at least in the first instance, a mental figment. The conclusion of the argu-
ment is that the direct objects of perceptual awareness are not things in the world,
but mental items called “sense data.”
Snowdon (chapter 9) and McDowell (1982, 1986), building on ideas of Austin
(1962) and Hinton (1973), reject the claim that there is a common experiential con-
tent to perceptual experiences and the corresponding hallucinations. There is all the
difference in the world between something’s looking a certain way to one, and its
merely seeming to one as if something looks a certain way to one. In the first case,
one’s experience involves an object in the world. In the second, it does not. Because
there is no common content to veridical and hallucinatory experiences, the idea that
an individual is aware of one and the same thing when he or she perceives/halluci-
nates can be rejected.
Philosophers have explored the further implications of this way of thinking about
perceptual experience (the so-called disjunctive view of experience). One important
further implication concerns the status of what is known as the causal theory of
perception. On one natural interpretation, this theory rests on the idea that cases
of genuine perception and some cases of misperception turn only on the absence of
an appropriate causal dependence between the experience and what the experience
is of. It might seem, however, that this cannot be right, at least on the disjunctive
conception. After all, on the disjunctive conception, there is no one experiential
content common to both the hallucinatory and the veridical episodes. This issue is
explored by Snowdon (chapter 9). David Lewis (chapter 8) provides a now classic
presentation of the causal theory of perception.

6 Thought and Experience

The thought-independence of perceptual experience is another important theme in

recent philosophy of perception. It has been defended and elaborated, over the years,
by both Fred Dretske (1969; chapter 16) and by Peacocke (1992). It is rejected,
however, by some of the philosophers collected in this volume—G. E. M. Anscombe
(chapter 4), Grice (chapter 3), Strawson (chapter 6), Peacocke (chapter 12)—and
also by Sellars (1963). The central idea of these writers—central also to the phe-
nomenological tradition—is that perceptual experience has intentional content—
that is, it purports to represent the world as being this way or that. For experience
to have perceptual content in this way, the perceiver must have some grasp, however
primitive, of how the experience represents the world as being. The intentional,
12 Alva Noë and Evan Thompson

world-referring character of perceptual experience has a further important conse-

quence. It is a common claim that perceptual judgments made on the basis of per-
ceptual experience—such as, for example, that there’s a tomato on the table—go
beyond what is, strictly speaking, given in the experience itself. The experience itself,
is after all, compatible with there being no tomato on the table at all, but merely a
tomato likeness of one kind or another. A strictly accurate description of experi-
ence, so runs this line of reasoning, must abjure all mention of the stuff of the mind-
independent world and confine itself to the raw sensory data the presence of which
is guaranteed by the mere occurrence of the experience itself. This argument falters,
however, because, as Strawson (chapter 6) insists, it utterly misdescribes the char-
acter of our perceptual experience, which presents itself to us precisely in the terms
needed to frame the relevant judgment. It would be impossible to describe accu-
rately the experience in question, so the rebuttal runs, without mentioning toma-
toes. The concept tomato enters immediately into the content of the experience.

7 Conclusion

It would be difficult to overstate the degree to which the problems dealt with by
the writers in this book are alive and unresolved. Insofar as these problems are
empirical, much work remains to be done. But what is at stake is not merely the
correct empirical account of the workings of perception, and hence the standing of
various approaches in visual science. Rather, because perception is such a pervasive
feature of one’s conscious life, what is at stake is ultimately one’s understanding of
consciousness itself and one’s conception of one’s place in the natural world.

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MA: The MIT Press.
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2
Selections from Phenomenology of Perception
Maurice Merleau-Ponty

The “Sensation” as a Unit of Experience

At the outset of the study of perception, we find in language the notion of sensa-
tion, which seems immediate and obvious: I have a sensation of redness, of blue-
ness, of hot or cold. It will, however, be seen that nothing could in fact be more
confused, and that because they accepted it readily, traditional analyses missed the
phenomenon of perception.
I might in the first place understand by sensation the way in which I am affected
and the experiencing of a state of myself. The greyness which, when I close my eyes,
surrounds me, leaving no distance between me and it, the sounds that encroach on
my drowsiness and hum “in my head” perhaps give some indication of what pure
sensation might be. I might be said to have sense-experience (sentir) precisely to the
extent that I coincide with the sensed, that the latter ceases to have any place in the
objective world, and that it signifies nothing for me. This entails recognizing that
sensation should be sought on the hither side of any qualified content, since red and
blue, in order to be distinguishable as two colours, must already form some picture
before me, even though no precise place be assigned to them, and thus cease to be
part of myself. Pure sensation will be the experience of an undifferentiated, instan-
taneous, dotlike impact. It is unnecessary to show, since authors are agreed on it,
that this notion corresponds to nothing in our experience, and that the most rudi-
mentary factual perceptions that we are acquainted with, in creatures such as the
ape or the hen, have a bearing on relationships and not on any absolute terms.1 But
this does not dispose of the question as to why we feel justified in theory in distin-
guishing within experience a layer of “impressions.” Let us imagine a white patch
on a homogeneous background. All the points in the patch have a certain “func-
tion” in common, that of forming themselves into a “shape.” The colour of the
16 Maurice Merleau-Ponty

shape is more intense, and as it were more resistent than that of the background;
the edges of the white patch “belong” to it, and are not part of the background
although they adjoin it: the patch appears to be placed on the background and does
not break it up. Each part arouses the expectation of more than it contains, and
this elementary perception is therefore already charged with a meaning. But if the
shape and the background, as a whole, are not sensed, they must be sensed, one
may object, in each of their points. To say this is to forget that each point in its
turn can be perceived only as a figure on a background. When Gestalt theory informs
us that a figure on a background is the simplest sense-given available to us, we reply
that this is not a contingent characteristic of factual perception, which leaves us
free, in an ideal analysis, to bring in the notion of impressions. It is the very defi-
nition of the phenomenon of perception, that without which a phenomenon cannot
be said to be perception at all. The perceptual “something” is always in the middle
of something else, it always forms part of a “field.” A really homogeneous area
offering nothing to be cannot be given to any perception. The structure of actual
perception alone can teach us what perception is. The pure impression is, therefore,
not only undiscoverable, but also imperceptible and so inconceivable as an instant
of perception. If it is introduced, it is because instead of attending to the experience
of perception, we overlook it in favour of the object perceived. A visual field is not
made up of limited views. But an object seen is made up of bits of matter, and spatial
points are external to each other. An isolated datum of perception is inconceivable,
at least if we do the mental experiment of attempting to perceive such a thing. But
in the world there are either isolated objects or a physical void.
I shall therefore give up any attempt to define sensation as pure impression.
Rather, to see is to have colours or lights, to hear is to have sounds, to sense (sentir)
is to have qualities. To know what sense-experience is, then, is it not enough to have
seen a red or to have heard an A? But red and green are not sensations, they are
the sensed (sensibles), and quality is not an element of consciousness, but a prop-
erty of the object. Instead of providing a simple means of delimiting sensations, if
we consider it in the experience itself which evinces it, the quality is as rich and
mysterious as the object, or indeed the whole spectacle, perceived. This red patch
which I see on the carpet is red only in virtue of a shadow which lies across it, its
quality is apparent only in relation to the play of light upon it, and hence as an
element in a spatial configuration. Moreover the colour can be said to be there only
if it occupies an area of a certain size, too small an area not being describable in
these terms. Finally this red would literally not be the same if it were not the “woolly
 Selections from Phenomenology of Perception 17

red” of a carpet.2 Analysis, then, discovers in each quality meanings which reside
in it. It may be objected that this is true only of the qualities which form part of
our actual experience, which are overlaid with a body of knowledge, and that we
are still justified in conceiving a “pure quality” which would set limits to a pure
sensation. But as we have just seen, this pure sensation would amount to no sen-
sation, and thus to not feeling at all. The alleged self-evidence of sensation is not
based on any testimony of consciousness, but on widely held prejudice. We think
we know perfectly well what “seeing,” “hearing,” “feeling” are, because percep-
tion has long provided us with objects which are coloured or which emit sounds.
When we try to analyse it, we transpose these objects into consciousness. We commit
what psychologists call “the experience error,” which means that what we know to
be in things themselves we immediately take as being in our consciousness of them.
We make perception out of things perceived. And since perceived things themselves
are obviously accessible only through perception, we end by understanding neither.
We are caught up in the world and we do not succeed in extricating ourselves from
it in order to achieve consciousness of the world. If we did we should see that the
quality is never experienced immediately, and that all consciousness is conscious-
ness of something. Nor is this “something” necessarily an identifiable object. There
are two ways of being mistaken about quality: one is to make it into an element of
consciousness, when in fact it is an object for consciousness, to treat it as an incom-
municable impression, whereas it always has a meaning; the other is to think that
this meaning and this object, at the level of quality, are fully developed and deter-
minate. The second error, like the first, springs from our prejudice about the world.
Suppose we construct, by the use of optics and geometry, that bit of the world which
can at any moment throw its image on our retina. Everything outside its perimeter,
since it does not reflect upon any sensitive area, no more affects our vision than
does light falling on our closed eyes. We ought, then, to perceive a segment of the
world precisely delimited, surrounded by a zone of blackness, packed full of qual-
ities with no interval between them, held together by definite relationships of size
similar to those lying on the retina. The fact is that experience offers nothing like
this, and we shall never, using the world as our starting-point, understand what a
field of vision is. Even if it is possible to trace out a perimeter of vision by gradu-
ally approaching the centre of the lateral stimuli, the results of such measurement
vary from one moment to another, and one never manages to determine the instant
when a stimulus once seen is seen no longer. The region surrounding the visual field
is not easy to describe, but what is certain is that it is neither black nor grey. There
18 Maurice Merleau-Ponty

Figure 2.1

occurs here an indeterminate vision, a vision of something or other, and, to take

the extreme case, what is behind my back is not without some element of visual
presence. The two straight lines in Müller-Lyer’s optical illusion (figure 2.1) are
neither of equal nor unequal length; it is only in the objective world that this ques-
tion arises.3 The visual field is that strange zone in which contradictory notions jostle
each other because the objects—the straight lines of Müller-Lyer—are not, in that
field, assigned to the realm of being, in which a comparison would be possible, but
each is taken in its private context as if it did not belong to the same universe as
the other. Psychologists have for a long time taken great care to overlook these phe-
nomena. In the world taken in itself everything is determined. There are many
unclear sights, as for example a landscape on a misty day, but then we always say
that no real landscape is in itself unclear. It is so only for us. The object, psycholo-
gists would assert, is never ambiguous, but becomes so only through our inatten-
tion. The bounds of the visual field are not themselves variable, and there is a
moment when the approaching object begins absolutely to be seen, but we do not
“notice” it. But the notion of attention, as we shall show more fully, is supported
by no evidence provided by consciousness. It is no more than an auxiliary hypoth-
esis, evolved to save the prejudice in favour of an objective world. We must recog-
nize the indeterminate as a positive phenomenon. It is in this atmosphere that quality
arises. Its meaning is an equivocal meaning; we are concerned with an expressive
value rather than with logical signification. The determinate quality by which
empiricism tried to define sensation is an object, not an element, of consciousness,
indeed it is the very lately developed object of scientific consciousness. For these
two reasons, it conceals rather than reveals subjectivity.
The two definitions of sensation which we have just tried out were only appar-
ently direct. We have seen that they were based on the object perceived. In this they
were in agreement with common sense, which also identifies the sensible by the
objective conditions which govern it. The visible is what is seized upon with the
eyes, the sensible is what is seized on by the senses. Let us follow up the idea of
sensation on this basis,4 and see what becomes of this “by” and this “with,” and
 Selections from Phenomenology of Perception 19

the notion of sense-organ, in the first-order thinking constituted by science. Having

shown that there is no experience of sensation, do we at least find, in its causes and
objective origins, any reasons for retaining it as an explanatory concept? Physiol-
ogy, to which the psychologist turns as to a higher court of appeal, is in the same
predicament as psychology. It too first situates its object in the world and treats it
as a bit of extension. Behaviour is thus hidden by the reflex, the elaboration and
patterning of stimuli, by a longitudinal theory of nervous functioning, which estab-
lishes a theoretical correspondence between each element of the situation and an
element of the reaction.5 As in the case of the reflex arc theory, physiology of per-
ception begins by recognizing an anatomical path leading from a receiver through
a definite transmitter to a recording station,6 equally specialized. The objective world
being given, it is assumed that it passes on to the sense-organs messages which must
be registered, then deciphered in such a way as to reproduce in us the original text.
Hence we have in principle a point-by-point correspondence and constant connec-
tion between the stimulus and the elementary perception. But this “constancy
hypothesis”7 conflicts with the data of consciousness, and the very psychologists
who accept it recognize its purely theoretical character.8 For example, the intensity
of a sound under certain circumstances lowers its pitch; the addition of auxiliary
lines makes two figures unequal which are objectively equal;9 a coloured area
appears to be the same colour over the whole of its surface, whereas the chromatic
thresholds of the different parts of the retina ought to make it red in one place,
orange somewhere else, and in certain cases colourless.10 Should these cases in which
the phenomenon does not correspond to the stimulus be retained within the frame-
work of the law of constancy, and explained by additional factors—attention and
judgement—or must the law itself be jettisoned? When red and green, presented
together, give the result grey, it is conceded that the central combination of stimuli
can immediately give rise to a different sensation from what the objective stimuli
would lead us to expect. When the apparent size of an object varies with its appar-
ent distance, or its apparent colour with our recollections of the object, it is recog-
nized that “the sensory processes are not immune to central influences.”11 In this
case, therefore, the “sensible” cannot be defined as the immediate effect of an exter-
nal stimulus. Cannot the same conclusion be drawn from the first three examples
we have mentioned? If attention, more precise instructions, rest or prolonged prac-
tice finally bring perception into line with the law of constancy, this does not prove
the law’s universal validity, for, in the examples quoted, the first appearance pos-
sessed a sensory character just as incontestable as the final results obtained. So the
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