The Character of Perceptual Experience

Abstract

Our discussion hitherto has been concerned to point to the distinction between perceptual awareness and conceptual processes of inference; it has not assumed any view as to the status of sensa, apart from their rôle as contents of awareness, nor as to their relation to events transcending the percipient. We have, however, said that the distinction between conception and perception suggests that the latter arises within some situation of interrelated events or processes. The experience of percipient awareness within such a situation is of two types — the experience of involuntary process which would ordinarily be described as sensitive reaction to stimulus, and the experience of voluntary process, as when we set ourselves to obtain further sense data in order to interpret those we already have. These two types might be called the lower and upper limits of percipient activity. How far down the scale of nature the lower limit extends is a question which we cannot yet answer; “ sensitivity “ is a word used (perhaps analogically?) for what appears to be purely chemical reaction, as when we say a photographic film is sensitive to light.