Abstract
I argue that Husserl’s notion of horizon and Searle’s notion of background offer a contextual model of perception that significantly reformulates the debate about the conceptual vs. nonconceptual content of perception. I illustrate the model by using a test case: the perception of an ancient Roman milestone—an example given by Husserl—which both Husserl and Searle consider to be a direct and immediate perception without inferences involved. I further differentiate Husserl’s and Searle’s views, arguing that Husserl’s model has the advantage of accounting for the diachronic aspect of perception.
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Notes
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In this regard, I agree with Mulligan when he writes: “It is often suggested that Searle ’s analysis of intentionality was anticipated by Husserl’s Logical Investigations … This is not the case” (2003, 266–67).
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Husserl also gives the example of his wife: “I see an object. It is Malvine; she enters the room. Or I recognize her without a word – her first name – playing a role. This is the ‘wordless recognition’ of an individual object” (Hua XX/2, 263).
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This givenness does not de-realize objects, but remarkably grants them a persona; the object is something that “cries out to us” (Hua XXXVI, 86–87) or “knocks at the door of consciousness” (1989, 231).
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Husserl writes: “The factual world is experienced according to types. The things are experienced as tree, shrub, animal, snake, bird … The table is characterized as something we recognize and yet something new. What is experienced as individually new is, at first, known through what is actually perceived; it reminds us of something identical (or similar). What is grasped as typical also has a horizon of possible experiences with corresponding indications of what is known, thus a type of properties not yet experienced, but expected. If we see a dog, we immediately anticipate further behaviors, its typical manner of eating, playing, running, jumping, etc.” (1973a, 331; 1985, 398–99).
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On the role of sensations, see Moran 2005, 152f.
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He opposes signitiv to intuitiv (Hua XIX/2, 567).
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As Husserl further explains: “Countless signitive intentions lack either a fixed or a passing tie with expressions, though their essential character puts them in a class with meaning-intentions. I here recur to the perceptual and imaginative course of a melody, or of some familiar type of event, and to the definite or indefinite intentions and fulfillments which arise in such a course. I refer likewise to the empirical arrangement and connection of things in their phenomenal coexistence, in regard to whatever gives the things appearing in this order, and especially the parts in each unified individual thing, the character of a unity involving precisely this order and this form” (2001, 224).
However, in the reworkings of this work of 1913, Husserl criticizes his broad use of signitive intention. There was, Husserl says, an extension of the signitive intentions to all intentions that point beyond the sensory given but it was, he continues “a terminology about which we have misgivings and have therefore abandoned” (XX/1, 91).
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See also: “The essence of thinghood, with respect to all its moments, includes a stream of limitless continuity, a limitless realm of open possibilities a parte ante, which a parte post can ever be more precisely determined, delimited, and enriched, but which always have to await infinity” (1997, 114).
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This quotation makes explicit what can also be found in the Crisis where we read that the thing is nothing more than “a unity for consciousness of the openly endless multiplicity of changing experiences and experienced things, one’s own and those of others” (1970, 164). This is also confirmed by Dorion Cairns who reports in his conversations with Husserl that “today he [Husserl] sees that the object itself is, in its being and determinations, correlate of the horizon … Being is always and only given as correlate of a horizon; it is never self-given in originality” (1976, 97).
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Searle uses the expression of “mind/brain” in, among other places, Intentionality (1983, vii) as naming his own alternative to dualism. As he explains his view, “consciousness consists of inner, qualitative, subjective states and processes. It has therefore a first-person ontology” and “consciousness is, above all, a biological phenomenon. Conscious processes are biological processes” (1998, 53).
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I am very grateful to Peter Burgess and Zachary Hugo for their careful editing.
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Vandevelde, P. (2017). How Husserl’s and Searle’s Contextual Model Reformulates the Discussion About the Conceptual Content of Perception. In: Walton, R., Taguchi, S., Rubio, R. (eds) Perception, Affectivity, and Volition in Husserl’s Phenomenology. Phaenomenologica, vol 222. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-55340-5_4
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