the mit ress vision and mind selected readings in the philosophy of perception sep 2002

edited by Alva Noë and Evan Thompson ision and Mind Selected Readings in the Philosophy of Perception 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 The MIT Press Cambridge, Massachusetts London, England A Bradford Book © 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 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 vi Contents 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. [...]... 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 perception retain... feel justified in theory in distinguishing 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 “function” 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... 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 establishes 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 perception begins by recognizing an anatomical... 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... 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... 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?... 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 experience 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... 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 environment, perception must be thought of as a... Minnesota Studies in the Philosophy of Science, Volume I: The Foundations of Science and the Concepts of Psychology and Psychoanalysis, 253–329 Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press Simons, D J., and C F Chabris 1999 Gorillas in our midst: Sustained inattentional blindness for dynamic events Perception 28: 1059–1074 Skarda, C., and W Freeman 1987 How brains make chaos in order to make sense of the world... Volume 9 Oxford: Oxford University Press Varela, F J 1979 Principles of Biological Autonomy New Jersey: Elsevier North-Holland Varela, F J 1991 Perception and the origin of cognition: A cartography of current ideas In F J Varela and J.-P Dupuy, eds., Understanding Origins: Contemporary Ideas on the Origin of Life, Mind, and Society Boston Studies in the Philosophy of Science, Vol 130 Dordrecht: Kluwer . and Evan Thompson ision and Mind Selected Readings in the Philosophy of Perception Vision and Mind This Page Intentionally Left Blank Vision and Mind Selected Readings in the Philosophy of Perception edited. 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. 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