Perception, Cognition and Aesthetics

Dena Shottenkirk, Manuel Curado, Steven S. Gouveia

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9781138615939
• eBook ISBN: 9780429870279
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Mind & Body in Philosophy

This volume addresses key questions related to how content in thought is derived from perceptual experience. It includes chapters that focus on single issues on perception and cognition, as well as others that relate these issues to an important social construct that involves both perceptual experience and cognitive activities: aesthetics. While the volume includes many diverse views, several prominent themes unite the individual essays: a challenge to the notion of the discreet, and non-temporal, unit of perception, a challenge to the traditional divide between perception and cognition, and a challenge to the traditional divide between unconscious and conscious intentionality. Additionally, the chapters discuss the content of perceptual experience, the value of traditional notions of content, disjunctivism, adverbialism, and phenomenal experience. The final section of essays dealing with perception and cognition in aesthetics features work in experimental aesthetics and unique perspectives from artists and gallerists working outside of philosophy. Perception, Cognition and Aesthetics is a timely volume that offers a range of unique perspectives on debates in philosophy of mind surrounding perception and cognition. It will also appeal to scholars working in aesthetics and art theory who are interested in the ways these debates influence our understanding of art.

Section II

Cognition

7 Consciousness and Content in Perception¹

Bill Brewer

Introduction

Normal perception involves conscious experience of the world. What I call the Content View (CV) attempts to account for this in terms of the representational content of perception (Brewer, 2011: esp. ch. 4). I offer a new argument against this view in this chapter.²

Ascription of personal-level content, either conceptual or nonconceptual, depends on the idea that determinate predicational information is conveyed to the subject. This determinate predication depends upon the exercise of certain personal-level capacities for categorization and discrimination. Exercise of such personal-level capacities depends in turn upon conscious selective attention. Yet conscious visual acquaintance with the world is the prior ground for the possibility of any such conscious selective attention. Acquaintance obtains throughout the visual field: Where conscious attention is not actually directed as well as where it is. So acquaintance does not depend upon conscious selective attention. Thus, acquaintance is not sufficient for the exercise of the relevant personal-level capacities. Exercise of these capacities is nevertheless necessary for personal-level content. Therefore, visual acquaintance cannot be understood in terms of perceptual content: Basic conscious experience of the world is not a matter of anything like the predication involved in perceptual content. It is rather the relational ground for the possibility of such predication.

Clearly every move in this argument needs clarification and defense. I offer this in Section 1. In Section 2, I consider the implications for the Content View. Section 3 concludes.

1. The Key Argument

My Key Argument (KA) may be set out in abbreviated form as follows.

• (1) P-Level Content → P-Level Predication
• (2) P-Level Predication → P-Level Capacities
• (3) P-Level Capacities → Conscious Selective Attention
• (4) Not-(Acquaintance → Conscious Selective Attention)
• (5) So Not-(Acquaintance → P-level Capacities)
• (6) So Not-(Acquaintance → P-level Content)

This section offers elucidation of its constituent notions and motivation for its substantive premises.

(1) P-Level Content is the proposition that:

A subject, S, is in a conscious perceptual state with personal-level representational content.

This means that S’s perceptual experience represents it as being the case that certain elements of the world around her are some more or less determinate way.³⁴ Now her perceptual experience is a personal-level representational state, rather than one deployed only subpersonally. So this more or less determinate predication is conveyed in some way to her.

This is P-Level Predication, the proposition that:

There is a more or less determinate way that certain worldly elements are experientially represented as being to S herself.

Thus:

• P-Level Content → P-Level Predication

(2) It follows from P-Level Predication that S is in receipt of more or less determinate predicational information, or misinformation, about the world around her. Now the predication involved here is in principle indefinitely variable in what might be called its fineness of grain. More precisely, any specific case will involve the ascription of a more or less determinate property to an object, where this will be one of a range of mutually exclusive and jointly exhaustive such determinates of a given determinable; and that determinable may in turn be partitioned into distinct such ranges of determinates in indefinitely many ways. Each of these ranges will contain a determinate, or multiple determinates, whose extensions overlap with that of the determinate ascribed in the initial case in question. Ascriptions of these alternatives would be predications at a different fineness of grain.

A highly simplified example in the case of color may help to clarify the point. Suppose we begin with a content ascribing a blue color to an object, b. Candidate more or less determinate predications here might be any of those illustrated in the diagram below, as follows: (a) b is blue as opposed to green or purple; (b) b is dark blue as opposed to light blue; (c) b is medium blue as opposed to navy, Duke, light or sky blue, (d) b is B₅, as opposed to any of the other fine B_n shades.⁵

The point generalizes quite straightforwardly to other basic predications made on the basis of visual perception, such as direction, distance, size, orientation, shape, texture and so on.

Thus, the ascription to the subject, S, of more or less determinate predicational information, or misinformation, about the world around her requires a principled account of where in this indefinite variety we are to locate the correct fineness of grain involved. The argument for premise (3) is that this principled account of the more or less determinate predication involved in perceptual content is to be given in terms of the specific capacities for categorization and discrimination that are exercised in her experience conveying that information. Furthermore, since the predication involved here is at the personal level, the capacities in question must also be personal-level capacities: Capacities exercised by S herself. The predication involved in personal-level perceptual content conveys more or less determinate information (or misinformation) of a specific fineness of grain to the subject herself. Her receipt of information of that fineness of grain rather than any other is determined by her exercise of the relevant specific personal-level capacities for categorization and discrimination rather than any other such capacities.

So, from the assumption of P-Level Predication, we may derive P-Level Capacities, the proposition that:

S exercises certain specific personal-level capacities for categorization or discrimination in her perceptual experience: Those that account for the specific fineness of grain of the more or less determinate predicational worldly information or misinformation that is conveyed to her.

Again, some examples may help to fix and motivate the principle further.

Let us begin with the conceptual paradigm for representational content. Conceiving of S’s perceptual experience as a conscious state with conceptual representational content, that a is F, say, commits the theorist to regarding S as actually deploying the relevant predicational concept, “F,” in her experience, regardless of whether or not she endorses the full content in judgment. A certain worldly element is conceptually categorized as F in her experience. This is an exercise of the very conceptual capacity that is equally involved in her judgment that a₁ is F, a₂ is F, a₃ is not F and so on, as opposed to the distinct capacity conceptually to categorize such things as F’, F’’ and so on, for other candidate predications at a different fineness of grain.⁶ Thus, a version of the claim in question here is that, in the conceptual case, a principled account of the fineness of grain of the more or less determinate predicational information that is conveyed to the subject in her perceptual experience is given by the specific capacities for conceptual categorization that she exercises in that perception.⁷

I contend that the general principle extends equally to the nonconceptual case. In terms resonant of Peacocke’s related Discrimination Principle (1988: 468), this may be formulated as follows.

For each content that may be assigned to a representational state of a subject, there is an adequately individuating account of what makes it the case that her state has that content rather than any other.

Premise (2) of (KA) elaborates this principle further in two ways. First, it emphasizes that the more or less determinate predication involved in conscious perceptual content is personal-level predication, accessible in some way to the subject herself. From this it derives the qualification that the relevant adequately individuating accounts are equally to be given in personal-level terms. Second, it insists that such personal level individuating accounts make essential reference to certain capacities that she exercises in her perceptual experience. In the nonconceptual case, these are less demanding than any explicit conceptual categorization; but, in order to provide a principled specification of the level of fineness of grain of the predication involved, they must constitute the actual discrimination of a more or less determinate worldly element in such a way as to sustain relevant sorting or other differential behavior in relation to elements alike in that way, rather than in some similar way at a different fineness of grain. Thus, a second version of the claim in question here is that, in the nonconceptual case, a principled account of the fineness of grain of the more or less determinate predicational information that is conveyed to the subject in her perceptual experience is given by the specific capacities for discrimination that she exercises in her perception that sustain her sorting and other differential behavior in relation to worldly elements alike at the relevant fineness of grain.

Finally, it may be illuminating to comment on the place of considerations of causal antecedence in content determination. Although these surely make a significant contribution to the determination of perceptual content, they fail to engage directly with the central issue of concern here, which is the principles constraining our ascription of more or less determinate fineness of grain in the predicational information, or misinformation, about the world that is conveyed to the subject in perception. In this connection, I claim, we have to appeal in addition to the personal-level capacities that are actually exercised in her receipt of precisely that fineness of grain of worldly information, or misinformation.

Thus:

• P-Level Predication → P-Level Capacities

(3) Recall that P-Level Capacities is the proposition that S exercises certain specific personal-level capacities for categorization or discrimination in her perceptual experience: Those that account for the specific fineness of grain of the more or less determinate predicational worldly information or misinformation that is conveyed to her. Premise (3) asserts that her exercise of those capacities depends upon her attention to the elements of the world around her that this predicational information concerns, consciously selecting them precisely for the further processing that constitutes her exercise of the capacities in question.

Categorizing and discriminating require sustained attention to the specific environmental elements concerned that set the norms for like categorization and discrimination in future judgment and sorting or other differential behavior. Just those elements have to be selected from the full range of alternatives available in order to sustain the capacities in question and control and coordinate the subject’s behavior in actually realizing them. This is a necessary consequence of the processing limitations that govern our cognitive lives and shape our conscious personal-level perspectives upon the world around us. Furthermore, since the personal-level capacities for categorization and discrimination involved are exercised with understanding on the part of the subject herself, in the sense required for her grasp of the perceptual contents in question and their provision of a rational basis for subsequent thought and action, the attentional selection involved here involves conscious attention.⁸

So, P-Level Capacities imply Conscious Selective Attention, the proposition that:

S is consciously attending selectively to certain specific elements of her environment: Those that are the focus of her exercise of the relevant personal level capacities.

This premise is highly consonant with the assumptions shaping empirical work on visual attention over the last 50 years and with the main results that have been obtained.⁹ The basic assumption lying behind the design and interpretation of experimental work on perceptual attention in cognitive psychology is that attention involves a form of subpersonal selection, or filtering, of information for further processing that is essential to deal with the capacity limitations of the brain and with the bodily limitations on simultaneous and sequential action. Wu’s reading of the central results of this empirical work is that this subpersonal processing filter is governed at the personal level by the conscious selection of specific environmental elements as targets to guide and control performance on relevant tasks. His general conclusion is that attention is selection for (mental or physical) action. In any case, the vast body of empirical work and associated psychological theorizing about perceptual attention confirm the central point here, that attention is necessary for the processing in relation to consciously selected elements that constitutes the exercise of personal-level capacities for categorization and discrimination.

Thus:

• P-Level Capacities → Conscious Selective Attention

(4) Acquaintance is the proposition that:

• S is acquainted with certain elements of the world around her.

That is to say, in the current context, that S is visually conscious of those elements. In other words, as I use the notion here, S is acquainted with all and on...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Section I Perception
• Section II Cognition
• Section III Perception and Cognition in Aesthetics
• Notes on Contributors
• Index