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Perception naturalised: relocation and the sensible qualities

  • S.I. : Materialism & Metaphysics
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Abstract

This paper offers a partial defence of a Sellarsian-inspired form of scientific realism. It defends the relocation strategy that Sellars adopts in his project of reconciling the manifest and scientific images. It concentrates on defending the causal analysis of perception that is essential to his treatment of sensible qualities. One fundamental metaphysical issue in perception theory concerns the nature of the perceptual relation; it is argued that a philosophical exploration of this issue is continuous with the scientific investigation of perceptual processes. Perception, it is argued, can, and should, be naturalised. A challenge for any account of perception arises from the fact that a subject’s experiences are connected with particular objects. We need to supply principled grounds for identifying which external physical object the subject stands in a perceptual relation to when they have an experience. According to the particularity objection presented in the paper, naive realism (or disjunctivism) does not constitute an independently viable theory since, taken on its own, it is unable to answer the objection. In appealing to a ‘direct experiential relation’, it posits a relation that cannot be identified independently of the underlying causal facts. A proper understanding of one central function of perception, as guiding extended patterns of actions, supports a causal analysis of perception. It allows us to draw up a set of necessary and sufficient conditions for perceiving that avoids well-known counterexamples. An analysis of this kind is congruent with the scientific account, according to which experiences are interpreted as inner states: sensible qualities, such as colours, are in the mind (but not as objects of perception). A Sellarsian version of the relocation story is thus vindicated.

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Notes

  1. I defend a Sellarsian account of perception in Coates (2007, 2009a).

  2. See especially Russell (1927).

  3. See Sellars (1962) and other works; Feigl (1967), Maxwell (1970), Lowe (1996) and Heil (2012).

  4. There are indeed other strains in Sellars’s philosophy; however, I draw here on the strong “right-wing” interpretation that emphasises Sellars’s commitment to scientific realism.

  5. Sellars developed these ideas in his (1962) paper; bare page references will refer to it as it appears in his (1963) collection.

  6. Compare O’Shea (2016), Sect. 3, where Sellars’s different strategies for dealing with the points of tension between the images are noted.

  7. As Sellars emphasizes in his (1982) Sect. 92, and also in (1975) Lecture I, Sects. 44–55.

  8. That is, there is no direct experiential relation to the ice cube or its physical properties that constitutes a nonconceptual aspect of the subject’s experience.

  9. For additional argument along these lines see Heil (2012) Chaps. 4 and 13.

  10. Or perhaps better, spectral productance profiles; see the account defended in Byrne and Hilbert (2003).

  11. In Rosenthal (2016).

  12. Sellars (1982) footnote 2.

  13. See Rosenthal (2016), p. 153; the full Sellars quotation is from Sellars (1981), Lecture I, Sect. 66.

  14. Compare the excellent account of Sellars’s views on the “conceptual place” of colour in the manifest image given in Rosenberg (1982). According to Rosenberg’s exegesis of Sellars, ‘Our mature concept [in the manifest image] of a physical object’s (really) being red, then, is ontic through and through. It has no experiential component at all, but instead is the concept of an individuated quantum of red...’. Ontic here has the sense of an entity or stuff that is in the world, as opposed to in the mind.

  15. Sellars (1956). Compare for example, Sect. 54 of Lecture I, in his (Sellars 1975).

  16. This is not to deny that there are tensions between the claims made in Sellars (1956), that our reasoning about mental states can be likened to a theory of the mind, and his ideas about of the nature of the manifest and scientific images in (1962). See the discussions in deVries (2005) and also O’Shea (2007).

  17. See Valberg (1992) and Robinson (1994).

  18. deVries (2005), Chap. 1.

  19. I set out the different aspects of Sellars’s theory of experience more fully in Coates (2009a).

  20. Sellars defends these various claims in his (1981), Lecture III: ‘Is Consciousness Physical?’.

  21. Sellars’s ideas about absolute processes are defended in detail in Seibt (1990).

  22. See the arguments developed by Strawson in his (2006); for some sympathetic discussion of Sellars’s ideas on this issue see also Coleman (2015).

  23. See, from among the many contributors to the debate, Snowdon (1981), Martin (2002), Travis (2004), Brewer (2011), and Logue (2011); and compare Byrne (2001), Chalmers (2004), Siegel (2010) and Pautz (2010), and see also the collection Brogaard (ed.) (2014).

  24. In Chap. 2 of Coates (2007) and also Coates (2009b).

  25. In addition to the works cited above, for arguments in favour of the intentionalist view see the attempts by Tye (2000, 2009), and by Schellenberg (2010), and for criticism, see Block (2003), Johnston (2004), and in particular a more recent paper by Papineau (2013).

  26. See in particular Travis (2004).

  27. The use of ‘concept’ here is not intended to imply self-awareness or other higher level abilities; it connotes only a low-level classificatory ability.

  28. Here again, philosophical inquiry merges with scientific investigation. See Milner and Goodale (1995) on the thesis that conscious visual experience is a process dependent on the ventral system, and essentially linked to recognition of kinds; and the discussion of “seeing-as” in Block (2014).

  29. For a defence of the two-component view see the introductory paper by Reiland and Lyons (2015) to a special issue on the disunity of perception, and in particular the position defended in Berger (2015); compare also the introductory paper by Locatelli and Wilson (2017).

  30. One example is Tye (2009): see the remarks at the start of Chap. 4, and in the concluding chapter, where he makes explicit his sympathies for Naive Realism.

  31. It should be noted, therefore, that the particularity point is independent of debates about whether experiences have singular contents, as opposed to existential contents, and like issues.

  32. For a good discussion of these points see Schellenberg (2016).

  33. These quotations are from Hobson (2011) and Snowdon (2005).

  34. I have explored this objection more fully in my (2007).

  35. Lewis (1980), p. 239.

  36. See Grice (1961), and Jackson (1977), Chap. 7.

  37. See, e.g. Noë (2003).

  38. I defend the Navigational Picture in some detail in Coates (2007, 2015).

  39. As noted in the seminal work by Milner and Goodale (1995).

  40. I discuss some of the problems that arise for Noë’s account of perception in Coates (2007).

  41. It is arguable that in the case of an immobile subject we need to make some assumptions, either about how they would have acted, had they been able to do so, or, ultimately, about their biological similarity to other human beings capable of acting. An immobile subject may be able to act by requesting an object, and correcting the responses of another who is trying to help them, and so on; in the last analysis it is by reference to similarities in their verbal behaviour and neurophysiology that we would have grounds for attributions of perceptual contents to them. Thanks to an anonymous reviewer for pressing this point.

  42. There are other related functions of perception, for example in the close inspection of objects. I assume that the basic idea defended here, of identifying the appropriate causal chain necessary for perception by reference to function, can be extended to cover these other ways in which perception benefits a creature.

  43. See for example the work of Gray (2004) and of Ffytche (2013).

  44. A projectivist analysis of perception is defended in Coates (2015).

  45. This option is endorsed by Hobson (2011).

  46. See Campbell (1993) and McGinn (1996), and also the indirect reasons given in support of emergence in Cumpa (2014). It should be noted that, while on the primitivist conception of sensible qualities, colours themselves are considered to be non-relational properties, we still need to account for our awareness of them, as the ensuing argument indicates.

  47. The appeal to common sense does not help here; in the manifest image that reflects our commonsense beliefs, we know that people have experiences of colour, and we assume that, for the most part, objects really do have the colours they seem to have. We also know that experiences of colour occur to people when no coloured objects are present, though usually there is a correlation of experience and objective colour. But our commonsense knowledge of the world does not go beyond an awareness or belief in such a correlation, and it leaves open the question of what the relation might be. It does not include a positive theory about some unique kind of primitive experiential relation connecting experiences and objects. As argued above, any such relation would be imperceptible from an external viewpoint; and its absence is compatible with the subjective viewpoint.

  48. Sellars (1962).

  49. I would like to thank Sam Coleman for many useful discussions on the topics covered in this paper, and also two anonymous referees for helpful comments received.

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    Paul Coates

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Coates, P. Perception naturalised: relocation and the sensible qualities. Synthese 198 (Suppl 3), 809–829 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-017-1556-z

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