Abstract
This paper develops a theory of perception that reconciles representationalism and relationalism by relying on pragmatist ideas. I call it the pragmatic view of perception. I argue that fully reconciling representationalism and relationalism requires, first, providing a theory in which how we perceive the world involves representations; second, preserving the idea that perception is constitutively shaped by its objects; and third, offering a direct realist account of perception. This constitutes what I call the Hybrid Triad. I discuss how Charles Peirce’s theory of perception can provide a framework for such a view and I devote the rest of the paper to developing my own pragmatic and Peircean theory of perception. In particular, I argue that considering perception as a continuous temporal process, which essentially involves interaction with the environment, allows us to do justice to the Hybrid Triad. I motivate this view by discussing how a pragmatic theory of perception would deal with issues such as the distinction between veridical and non-veridical experiences and the nature of perceptual objects.
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Notes
Although some relationalists, such as Fish (2009), deny that veridical and non-veridical experiences have the same phenomenology.
I am grateful to an anonymous referee for raising this point.
Some might worry that this view flirts with subjective idealism. However, the kind of dependence I have in mind is intersubjective dependence. In other words, we should recognize that the world is partly shaped by how multiple perceptual subjects interact with it, as opposed to one single subject (see Zahidi 2014 for related discussion). For more on this, see Section 3.2.
For convenience, I refer to Peirce’s work from the Collected Papers Pierce (1931–36, 1958).
Here we stumble on an important notion in Peirce’s philosophy, that of truth. For Peirce, a proposition would be true if, given enough inquiry about its nature (what he usually called “the end of inquiry”), it would generate agreement among inquirers. However, Peirce is not concerned with offering a theory of truth, in the sense of providing necessary and sufficient conditions for truth, but rather an analysis of what it means to say that something is true (see Misak 2004; Hookway 2012; Legg 2014a). As Cathy Legg (2014a) points out: “ [the] ‘end of inquiry’ [...] is not ‘end’ in the sense of ‘finish’. It is ‘end’ in the teleological sense of ‘aim’ or ‘goal’. Rather than a description of some future time where all questions are settled, Peirce’s explication of truth is an idealized continuation of what scientists are doing now, namely settling questions about which they genuinely doubt” (206). What I have in mind here is something similar, but now applied to perception: that is, a perceptual experience is said to be true or veridical if it generates agreement among relevant inquirers in relevant situations when their perspectives are taken into account. I develop this claim in more detail in Section 3.3.
One worry with this example is that it assumes that perception can represent high-level properties (see Peacocke 1992; Siegel 2006; Nanay 2011), such as kind properties, as opposed to low-level properties (see Tye 1997; Dretske 1995; Clark 2000), such as color and shape. While this is a controversial issue, it is only tangential to the idea being conveyed here, as the same points could be made in relation to low-level properties, e.g., in cases where we see objects as instantiating different colors because of different illumination settings.
While such methodological assumptions might seem controversial for some analytic philosophers, there has been a growing interest in how the phenomenological reduction can be a useful tool for philosophy of mind and cognitive science more generally (see Gallagher and Zahavi 2013: ch. 2, for a more detailed discussion).
This is not, however, Peirce’s initial formulation in How to Make Our Ideas Clear. As he later recognized, his first formulation of the maxim was too nominalist, in that it did not take into account how things would effect our experiences in possible but not actual experiences. Later in his works, Peirce provided a new formulation of the maxim in the Harvard Lectures on Pragmatism (CP 5.14), which is the one described here. Since I do not intend to provide a complete picture of Peirce’s philosophy, I will leave these exegetical subtleties aside.
This example has been adapted from Hausman’s (2006) discussion of the relationship between perception and semeiotics in Peirce.
This is where realism enters into the theory. Veridicality does not depend only on actual contexts of interaction, but also on possible but not necessarily actual contexts. Therefore, we do not need to say that it depends on the existence of individual subjects.
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Acknowledgments
I’m grateful to Kirk Michaelian, Andrew Moore, and Cathy Legg for their helpful comments over several drafts of this paper. I’d also like to thank Bob Hanna, Ligia Coutes, Chloe Wall, and audiences at the University of Otago and the University of Waikato for comments on previous drafts of the paper.
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Sant’Anna, A. Perception Pragmatized: a Pragmatic Reconciliation of Representationalism and Relationalism. Philosophia 46, 411–432 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11406-017-9919-8
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11406-017-9919-8