Abstract
What sort of an episode is perception? What are the objects of such episodes? What is the grammatical and logical form of perceptual reports, direct and indirect? Each of these questions has been the subject of recent discussion. In what follows I set out one answer to each of them and explore some of the ways these answers support and complement each other. The answers adopted are: to perceive — and I shall normally only have in mind visual perception — is not to judge or to conceptualize but a sui generis mental mode or activity involving non-conceptual content; perception is of particulars only; the complements of perceptual verbs are, with one exception, non-propositional and indirect perceptual reports are made true by direct perceptual relations between subjects and particulars of various sorts.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
Notes
Warnock 1955. Cf. Husserl, Logical Investigations, VI §§ 1–6, 40; Husserl’s account of perception is analysed in Mulligan 1995. The present paper is in many ways a development of Husserl’s account.
Cf. Dretske’s 1969 Seeing and Knowing and chapter 6 of his 1981 Knowledge and the Flow of Information; Jackson 1977, 37ff. & ch. 7; Evans’ account of non-conceptual perceptual information (Evans 1982 §§5.2, 6.3, 7.4); Peacocke 1986, 1989; Ebert 1991.
Rock 1983, 57. Rock is a renegade gestaltist. The minority, gestaltist view in psychology that to see is not to judge goes back to Benussi (cf. Stucchi 1993) and has been ably defended by Gaetano Kanizsa (eg 1985) in his analyses of what he calls perceptual integration.
Dretske 1981, ch. 6. Cf. Peacocke 1989, especially p. 315 on Dretske, Lewis 1971, Turvey 1977.
Brunswik 1934 128, cf. 119f. On this distinction and for a variety of arguments in favour of the view that perception is cognitively impenetrable, see Fodor 1983.
Cf Evans’ (1982, 123, 227) two distinctions (a) between perceptual information and information we obtain by listening to a story (and which is therefore conceptually articulated), and (b) between belief and informational content.
Cf. Evans 1982, 123, Brunswik 1934 128f.
Broad 1925, 153, cf. 208–9
Broad 1925, 153, cf. 208–9.
The internal, phenomenologically immediate connections between perception and action have been analysed as indirect transitions involving kinaesthetic information and body images (Husserl 1973, Evans 1982) and as direct transitions (Koffka 1925, V, §9). Cf. also Prinz 1987.
Cf. Evans 1982, 157: “[t]o say that these things are perceived in a particular manner is not at all to imply that these things are not themselves perceived”; Peacocke 1989, 303.
Cf. Dokic 1998.
The view mentioned above that content is a tokening of mentalese can be combined with the view that there are tokenings of formal concepts other than those mentioned here — non-logical concepts.
Cf. Mulligan, Smith and Simons 1984, Campbell 1990, Simons 1987, ch. 8. The present section develops a claim made at §4 of the first of these.
The view that all universals are formal has much to recommend it.
On the view I favour, an independent particular is composed of tropes that are specifically (or token-) dependent on one another (cf. Husserl’ s third Logical Investigation, Simons 1992). An independent particular, like all particulars, is in time. But its inner internal relations are outside time. This is the grain of truth in the claim that a thing has a history but no temporal parts (cf. Mulligan 1992).
Cf. Mourelatos 1977.
Dretske 1969, 14, 166; cf. Warnock 1955, 209.
In his analysis ofprimary epistemic seeing, Dretske (1969, 141) talks not of simple perception of a relation but of simple seeing of the terms of a relation and the condition that these would not look the way they do unless the relation obtained.
One distant ancestor of the view is Bolzano’s analysis of impersonal sentences such as “It ‘s snowing” as “There is a snow fall” (Wissenschaftslehre § 172).
Armstrong 1978, I, Johansson 1989, ch. 3.
Mulligan, Smith and Simons 1984.
See, for example, Brunswik 1934,1956, von Fieandt 1966.
See Dokic 1998. For an objection to this view, see Mulligan 1996.
Cf Hirsch’s (1982, 106f, 244f) discussion of the views of Quine and the Gestalt psychologists on this matter.
On the related Romance construction, the pseudorelative, cf. Guasti 1992.
The interesting limit case, “a saw John standing”, is perhaps due to the fact that this state is nevertheless an act, something John does.
Cf. Falkenberg 1989.
Perhaps “Sam naked is a sight for sore eyes” is acceptable, perhaps because the main predicate refers to perception. Cf. Parsons 1990, 193.
Cf. Falkenberg 1989.
On perceptual identities see Dretske 1969, 60–61.
Cf. Parsons 1990, ch. 10.
For the view that the truth-maker relation between a truth-bearer and a trope need not involve a detour via quantification over the trope in the form of the truth-bearer, cf. Mulligan, Smith and Simons 1984, 308.
Higginbotham 1983,112f.
Barwise & Perry 1986, 182; Higginbotham 1983,111.
On constructions with “as”, cf Aarts 1992, 111 f.
Even Dretske is of this opinion, Dretske 1990, 133.
This claim involves giving up the strong requirement mentioned in § 1 according to which concepts are employed only in the context of propositions. For an alternative to the strong requirement, see Mulligan 1997, 1997a.
Austin 1962, 101.
On this aspectual difference see Guasti 1992, ch. 6.
Dretske 1969, ch. IV; Jackson 1977, 159–167.
Dretske 1969, 20. “For” might be better.
Cf. Rock 1983, 51.
Goldmeier 1972, 62.
Wittgenstein notes that perceptual reports may describe perception of internal relations (LWPP § 152, § 155, § 156).
Elsewhere (Mulligan 1993, 1998 forthcoming) I have given some reasons for thinking that the relational material tropes introduced here as the objects of much perception, can be reduced to different types of internal relations and that things are structured wholes of monadic tropes.
Cf. Mulligan 1988.
PI II, ix. Wittgenstein, however, concentrates on awareness of internal relations in experiences of change of aspect rather than on perception tout court.
Jackson 1977, ch. 2; Kelley 1986, 234ff.
But see Millikan 1991.
Cf. Mulligan 1998.
Cf. McDowell 1994, 7; Bouveresse 1995,10.
Cf. Horn 1989, §5.2. Horn also notes (323) that factives, such as “see that”, are not Neg raisers. De Sousa (1971) argues that one type ofprobability, Bayesian, attaches to belief, another, Bernouillian, to the leap ofjudgement. On this claim, see Dennett 1985.
Cf. Mulligan 1997a, Mulligan & Smith 1986.
Cf. Mulligan 1998.
Acknowledgments are due to the Swiss FNRS (7OUT-029707), which supported the Geneva project on the philosophy of perception and thanks, for comments and criticisms, to the members of the project, Teresa Guasti, Roberto Casati and Jerome Dokic; to audiences in Gargnano (1990), Paris, Aix and Berne, Canberra, Valencia, Prague, Irvine and elsewhere; to Theo Ebert, Gianfranco Soldati and Brian Garrett.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 1999 Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Mulligan, K. (1999). Perception, Particulars and Predicates. In: Fisette, D. (eds) Consciousness and Intentionality: Models and Modalities of Attribution. The Western Ontario Series in Philosophy of Science, vol 62. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-015-9193-5_8
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-015-9193-5_8
Publisher Name: Springer, Dordrecht
Print ISBN: 978-90-481-5300-8
Online ISBN: 978-94-015-9193-5
eBook Packages: Springer Book Archive