Précis of<i>Action In Perception</i>

Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, 2008

Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society (Hardback), 2006

What is the relation between perceptual experience and the suite of sensorimotor skills that enable us to act in the very world we perceive? The relation, according to 'sensorimotor models' (O'Regan and Noe¨2001, Noe2 004) is tight indeed. Perceptual experience, on these accounts, is enacted via skilled sensorimotor activity, and gains its content and character courtesy of our knowledge of the relations between (typically) movement and sensory stimulation. I shall argue that this formulation is too extreme, and that it fails to accommodate the substantial firewalls, dis-integrations, and specialpurpose streamings that form the massed strata of human cognition. In particular, such strong sensorimotor models threaten to obscure the computationally potent insensitivity of key information-processing events to the full subtleties of embodied cycles of sensing and moving. I T he Painter and the Perceiver. Seeing, according to Noe¨2004, is like painting. Painting is an ongoing process in which the eye probes the scene, then flicks back to the canvas, then back to the scene, and so on, in a dense cycle of active exploration and partial, iterated cognitive uptake. It is this cycle of situated, world-engaging activity that constitutes the act of painting. Seeing (and more generally, perceiving) is likewise constituted (Noe¨claims) by a process of active exploration in which the sense organs repeatedly probe the world, delivering partial and restricted information on a need-to-know basis. It is this cycle, of situated, world-engaging, whole animal activity, that is the locus, on Noe¨'s account, of genuine cognitive interest, at least for perceptual experience. An important implication of this, according to Noe¨, is that appeals to internal representations (if such there be) cannot tell the whole story, either for painting or for seeing:

Mind, 2006

Consciousness and Cognition, 2008

Journal of Philosophy, 2005

This is a charming and engaging book that combines careful attention to the phenomenology of experience with an appreciation of the psychology and neuroscience of perception. In some of its aims-for example, to show problems with a rigid version of a view of visual perception as an ''inverse optics'' process of constructing a static 3-D representation from static 2-D information on the retina-it succeeds admirably. As Noë points out, vision is a process that depends on interactions between the perceiver and the environment and involves contributions from sensory systems other than the eye. He is at pains to note that vision is not passive. His analogy with touch is to the point: touch involves skillful probing and movement, and so does vision, although less obviously and in my view less centrally so. This much is certainly widely accepted among vision scientists-although mainstream vision scientists (represented, for example, by Stephen Palmer's excellent textbook 1) view these points as best seen within a version of the inverse optics view that takes inputs as nonstatic and as including motor instructions (for example, involving eye movements and head movements). 2 The kind of point that Noë raises is viewed as important at the margins, but as not disturbing the main lines of the picture of vision that descends-with many changes-from the pioneering work of David Marr in the 1980s (and before him, from Helmholtz). But Noë shows little interest in mainstream vision science, focusing on nonmainstream ideas in the science of perception, specifically ideas from the antirepresentational psychologist J. J. Gibson, and also drawing on Wittgenstein and the phenomenology tradition. There is a sense throughout the book of revolution, of upsetting the applecart. This is a review from the point of view of the applecart. My comments are in two parts, one mainly a priori, the other largely empirical: first, I will consider Noë's version of externalism in the light of the distinction between causation and constitution. Second, I will argue that on the most obvious reading of Noë's view, one that identifies perceptual experience with the skilled bodily exercise of ''sensorimotor knowledge'' (I will leave off the scare quotes in what follows) that includes visually guided action, there are empirical results that suggest that such knowledge does not reflect the phenomenology of conscious vision.

Oxford Handbook of 4E Cognition, 2018

Philosophical discussions of perception tend to focus principally on vision. However, there is the concern that what applies to vision may not apply to perception more generally, and that other senses can offer different insights into its nature. 1 A stronger claim, made by Alva Noë, is that many philosophical treatments of perception not only over-emphasize vision; they are also rooted in a mistaken "photographic model" of vision. Touch, he suggests, offers a better starting point from which to understand the nature of perception:

Synthese, 2021

Philosophy of perception is guilty of focusing on the perception of far space, neglecting the possibility that the perception of the space immediately surrounding the body, which is known as peripersonal space, displays different properties. Peripersonal space is the space in which the world is literally at hand for interaction. It is also the space in which the world can become threatening and dangerous, requiring protective behaviours. Recent research in cognitive neuroscience has yielded a vast array of discoveries on the multisensory and sensorimotor specificities of the processing of peripersonal space. Yet very little has been done on their philosophical implications. Here I will raise the following question: in what manner does the visual experience of a big rock close to my foot differ from the visual experience of the moon in the sky?

In this paper, I want to focus on the claim, prominently made by sensorimotor theorists, that perception is something we do. I will argue that understanding perceiving as a bodily doing allows for a strong non dualistic position on the relation between experience and objective physical events, one which provides insight into why such relation seems problematic while at the same time providing means to relieve the tension. Next I will show how the claim that perception is something we do does not stand in opposition to, and is not refuted by the fact that we often have perceptual experience without moving. In arguing that cases of motionless perception and perception-like experience are still doings it will be pointed out that the same interactive regularities which are engaged in in active perception still apply to them. Explaining how past interactive regularities can influence current perception or perception-like experience in a way which remains true to the idea that perception is a doing, so I will argue, can be done by invoking the past—the past itself, however, not its representation. The resulting historical, non-representational sensorimotor approach can join forces with Gibsonian ecological psychology—provided that such is also understood along lines that don't invoke externalist remnants of contents.

The condition of ‘genuine perceptual synaesthesia’ has been a focus of attention in research in psychology and neuroscience over the last decades. For subjects in this condition stimulation in one modality automatically and consistently over the subject’s lifespan triggers a percept in another modality. In hearing→colour synaesthesia, for example, a specific sound experience evokes a perception of a specific colour. In this paper, I discuss questions and challenges that the phenomenon of synaesthetic experience raises for theories of perceptual experience in general, and for theories that see the content and modality of conscious experience as being constituted and determined by the active and skilful exploration of the environment in particular. The focus of my paper will be on the latter, ‘enactive’ view of perception and its theory of what determines the modality-specific ‘feel’ of a perceptual experience In the first part of the paper I introduce the phenomenon of ‘genuine perceptual synaesthesia’. I then, in the second part, sketch the theory of active perception that I want to endorse: enactivism. This is done by focusing on two basic assumptions underlying enactivism, and by defining two claims that a rather narrow ‘sensorimotor enactivism’ derives from these assumptions. These claims are: (a) the modality of a perceptual experience is constituted by the sensorimotor signature (i.e. the specific dependencies relating movements to stimulations) and the larger body-involving cycle underlying this modality; and: (b) distorting ele-ments get integrated and become transparent for the perceptual systems over a learning time span. These claims are challenged by cases of genuine synaesthesia. In part three, I discuss possible replies of the more narrowly defined sensorimotor enactivism to the first challenge and show that those replies either fail or betray important enactive insights. I will argue in particular that a promising way to meet the challenge (i.e. to claim that synaesthetic colours lack the properties of ‘bodiliness’ and ‘grabbiness’ of normal perceptual experience) fails. In part four, I suggest that enactivism, because it is unable to explain the perception-like experiences in cases of genuine perceptual synaesthesia, has to focus, instead, on typical realizers of perceptual experiences and on a more general enactivism in order to meet the two challenges. I show that this goes hand in hand with the inclusion of other adaptive time spans (in the course of which the perceptual system of an organism is shaped) in the explanations of phenomena like synaesthesia. In my view enactivism has not made this recourse to longer time spans as opposed to the ‘here-and-now’ explicit enough, though it is inherent to enactivism, even in the narrower, sensorimotor version of the theory. In order to explain and integrate certain atypical expressions of a perceptual mechanism – as I will argue in the last part of the paper – it is necessary to also take into view the embodiment of cognitive solutions shaped over evolutionary time spans and to adopt a heuristics and engineering perspective on such phenomena. This, I conclude, allows us to meet the challenges and hold on to central tenets of an enactive theory of perception.

European Journal of Philosophy, 2017

In her paper, “Action and Self-location in Perception”, Susanna Schellenberg argues that perceptual experience of an object’s intrinsic spatial properties, such as its size and shape, requires a capacity to act. More specifically, Schellenberg argues that, to have a perceptual experience of an object’s intrinsic spatial properties, a subject needs to have a certain practical conception of space, or a spatial know-how. That, in turn, requires self-locating representations, which locate the subject, relative to the perceptual object, as a perceiver and an agent, viz., someone who has a capacity for actions. She also makes two objections, viz., the unification objection and the sentient statue objection, to Alva Noe’s sensorimotor view, a different account of how perceptual experience depends on actions. I will argue that her objections jointly render problematic not only Noe’s but also her own view.