Abstract
What makes a perception a perception “of” a particular object? Specifically, what is it about a visual experience that makes it a direct perceptual awareness of an object visually before one? In part, it is the “demonstrative” content in the experience, which presents or prescribes “this” object visually before one. That type of content, and its intentional force, will be the focus of this chapter. We begin with a broad account of the general structure of perceptual experience.
This chapter develops results in: David Woodruff Smith [1979], “The Case of the Exploding Perception”; D.W. Smith [1982a], “The Realism in Perception”; and Smith and McIntyre [1982], Husserl and Intentionality, Ch. IV, sec. 3.4, and Ch.VIII, part 2. D.W. Smith [1983], “Is This a Dagger I See Before Me?”, extends some of the ideas here. Related views of demonstrative reference are developed in D.W. Smith [1981], [1982b], and [1982c]. The initial influences on this chapter were Hintikka [1969], “On the Logic of Perception”, and Clark [1973], “Sensuous Judgments”. Some corroborating accounts of perception, differing in various ways from my own, are found in Castañeda [1977], Miller [1984], Husserl, Perception, and Temporal Awareness, and Searle [1983], Intentionality.
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Notes
This chapter develops results in: David Woodruff Smith [1979], “The Case of the Exploding Perception”
D.W. Smith [1982a], “The Realism in Perception”
Smith and McIntyre [1982], Husserl and Intentionality, Ch. IV, sec. 3.4, and Ch.VIII, part 2.
D.W. Smith [1983], “Is This a Dagger I See Before Me?”, extends some of the ideas here. Related views of demonstrative reference are developed in D.W. Smith [1981], [1982b], and [1982c]
The initial influences on this chapter were Hintikka [1969], “On the Logic of Perception”,
Clark [1973], “Sensuous Judgments”
Some corroborating accounts of perception, differing in various ways from my own, are found in Castañeda [1977], Miller [1984], Husserl, Perception, and Temporal Awareness,
Searle [1983], Intentionality.
Cf. Anscombe [1963], “The Intentionality of Sensation: A Grammatical Feature”
Hintikka [1969], “On the Logic of Perception”. Husserl and Merleau-Ponty used verbs of perception in a phenomenological sense throughout their writings.
Cf. Smith and McIntyre [1982], Husserl and Intentionality, Ch. IV, sec. 2.6.
For a history of the origins of the sense-data approach to perception, see Hirst [1959], The Problems of Perception.
See: Husserl [1900–01], Logical Investigations, VI, §§ 1–5
Hintikka [1969], “On the Logic of Perception”
Clark [1973], “Sensuous Judgments”
Castañeda [1977], “Perception, Belief, and the Structure of Physical Objects and Consciousness”. On Kant’s notion of intuition see Sellars [1967] (pp. 3ff) and Hintikka [1970]. On Husserl [1900–01], see D.W. Smith [1982c]; cf. Miller [1983]. On Russell [1900–11] on acquaintance see the Introduction above.
Cf. Husserl [1913], Ideas, § 131. See Smith and McIntyre [1982], Ch. IV, sec. 3.1, on Husserl’s notion of “X”.
Different modes of singular presentation are distinguished in Smith and McIntyre [1982], Ch. VIII. The notion of sensuous presence that we shall develop has roots in Husserl and Merleau-Ponty. A suggestive discussion critiquing Husserl’s view from a perspective like Merleau-Ponty’s is found in Hubert Dreyfus, “Husserl’s Perceptual Noema”, in his anthology [1982], The notion of “perceptual Individuation” was introduced in Hintikka [1969], “On the Logic of Perception”, with a very different explication there; cf. D.W. Smith [1979].
This will be argued in a way parallel to John Perry’s arguments in his [1979], “The Problem of the Essential Indexical”
which has roots in works by Hector-Neri Castañeda, including his [1967], “Indicators and Quasi-Indicators”.
See D.W. Smith [1982a], “The Realism in Perception”.
John Searle has called perception an “experience of causation” insofar as causation is part of what he calls the “conditions of satisfaction” of (the intentional content of) a visual experience. Taking perception to be propositional, Searle articulates the intentional content of a typical visual experience as follows: “there is something before me and the fact that there is something before me is causing this experience”. Thus, Searle says, a visual experience is “causally self-referential”. See Searle [1983], Intentionality. Searle’s account of perception and mine were developed independently but converge on some important points. Searle began by stressing “intentional causation” and the “causally self-referential” character of visual experience, whereas I began by stressing the demonstrative content of perception, stimulated by views of Husserl, Hintikka, and Clark cited in a note 8 above. Both Searle’s account and my account were presented during the week of June 30 - July 4, 1980, at the University of California, Berkeley, at the summer institute on “Continental and Analytic Perspectives on Intentionality” sponsored by the Council for Philosophic Studies and the National Endowment for the Humanities and directed by Hubert Dreyfus. Both accounts converge also with certain points in the insighful studies by Castañeda and Miller cited in previous notes.
Cf. Clark [1973], “Sensuous Judgments”, and [1976], “Old Foundations for a Logic of Perception”. Clark has argued that the semantics of “this” requires that “this” refer independently of any modifying sortal — basically, if I have understood him, a semantics must in the end offer truth-conditions for sentences of the form “this is F”, which express basic perceptual judgments.
On Husserl’s view, seeing “this F” would be a “pre-predicative” experience while judging that “this is F” would be a predicative experience. See Husserl [1948], Experience and Judgment, and Miller’s explication of the distinction in his [1984]. At the surface level of experience, Husserl seems right: seeing “this F” seems typically prior to judging that “this is F”; the latter seems the result of explicitly thinking about what one so sees. However, when we tentatively suggest that the latter is more basic than the former, we are talking of deep structure, or unconscious mental processing.
Cf. D.W. Smith [1979], and [1981b], “The Ortcutt Connection”, and Smith and McIntyre [1982], Ch.VIII.
The distinction between naive and hip hallucination is drawn more carefully in D.W. Smith [1983b], “Is This a Dagger I See Before Me?”.
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Smith, D.W. (1989). Perceptual Awareness. In: The Circle of Acquaintance. Synthese Library, vol 205. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-009-0961-8_2
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