I wrote this essay during the1st_Semester at theUniKonstanz for the course on Theoretical Philosophy by Dorothea Debus. This essay is explicitly very connected to The Frequency of Telling Stories and in particular I stressed the comparison with Sydney Shoemaker and Jennifer Church.
Abstract
There are two very different kinds of questions on perception, the first ones regard the relationship of what we perceive with the world itself and the second ones regard the intrinsic structure of the perceived. My focus will lay solely in the latter questions, trying to characterise the widest possible range of the perceived.
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\title{The Structure of the Perceived}
\author{Simone Testino}
\date{March 2023}
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\maketitle
\begin{abstract}
There are two very different kinds of questions on perception, the first ones regard the relationship of what we perceive with the world itself and the second ones regard the intrinsic structure of the perceived. My focus will lay solely in the latter questions, trying to characterise the widest possible range of the perceived.
\end{abstract}
\section*{Introduction}
The first part of the essay explains the division of the two ways one can take in investigating perception, I’ll very briefly expose the issues we encounter in the first way, namely the one concerning the relationship between what we perceive and the world and will then dedicate the whole second part to the second way, namely the one investigating the intrinsic structure of the perceived.
\section{Two Ways of Investigating Perception}
There are many things that deserve to be discussed when talking about perception, though, approximately all of them can be splitted into two categories. The first one regards the relationship between the way we perceive them, their images, their qualia respect what we presume as being their cause in an actual, external world. The second one does not stress at all the relation that the perceived has with the outer world, instead they focus solely on their structure, on the categories one could form on the perception itself. Under a methodological point of view, one notices that the two categories of questions very influence each other, for example, one might simply say (as it’s commonly done), that thoughts aren’t perceived since they have no correspondent in the world; from that it would simply derive that we can’t give thoughts a role inside the structure of the perceived, because they’ve been said to be not perceived by investigations on the other front. Because of this, in order to talk about the actual core of this essay, namely some categories we can build inside the perceived, it is useful to first analyse the different contexts that can be given to us by the perceived - world relationship and then choose the one that allows the most things to count as perception, such that the most categories can be found in the second analysis on the intrinsic structure.
\subsection{Perceived - World Relationship}
Questions regarding the perceived-world relationship are surely of most importance for all the debates in philosophy of mind and play a crucial role in the mind-body problem. The mind-body problem, in fact, seems to be the one \emph{above} the perceived-world problem, since, in order to answer how we perceive the world we need (implicitly or explicitly) to have already some context on how the mind takes its place in the world. Though here I have no particular interest in explaining the variety of models one could have when talking about the perceived-world relationship, a couple of examples might be the direct realism or the representationalism, though what I’m looking for, among the variety of these models, is the one that \emph{allows the most}. What I mean with \enquote{allowing the most} is that, the model I’m willing to choose should let count as perception as many things as possible in order to let me make the distinctions I will be able to make on the other level, on their intrinsic structure. When I say that I want thoughts to count as perception what I mean is not that I have a good reason to redefine perception in a weird and unusual way in order to get thoughts and other unusual things to count as perception, instead I need them just to pass quickly under this first analysis (the one on the perceived - world relationship) in order to allow me to distinguish them in the other analysis (the one on the intrinsic structure). This has some important and practical implications: if we show that, no matter how wide we take the perceived-world relationship to be and we can still come to the same definition we want of perception (e.g. letting the \enquote{inner sense} to count or not among them) that means that all the issues on the mind-body problem, the world and the perceived shall (in a sense) all be left behind since such definitions (e.g. the one of perception but also the one of thought or will) can all be done on a deeper level that will be doable no matter the mind-body context we choose.
\subsubsection{The Widest Model}
In order to choose the widest model we shall find the one that allows for the most concepts to be seen as part of perception considering their relation with the world.
Given this point, the easiest result that might come to mind is something in the direction of idealism, namely we should deny the existence of a certain external world and, in such a context, what perception is would be basically everything (by considering its sole relation with the non-existing world). Considering such a model allows us to have all the things we are used to exclude from perception because of their relation with the world, a simple example of it are thoughts. It comes very naturally to say that thoughts can’t be perceived, though the first reason that comes to our mind when saying that, is that we can’t find anything in the actual and external world that should correspond to a thought and therefore we can’t perceive it. This would not be a valid argument anymore if we start by considering the idealist theses, it allows us to let the most things possible to count as perception so that the further analysis I’ll do on the structure will be the richest possible
\section{The Structure of the Perceived}
As I have exposed before, an analysis on the sole structure of the perceived can be way better driven by a specific purpose and a specific mind-body context. Though it is fun and, for the reason I explained before, useful to see what we might be able to say when talking about a general context. The aim here is to categorise all the things we perceive and I will do that in two main general ways. The first way is a very popular way in the history of philosophy and has its first cultural and philosophical roots in ancient Greece, though I will focus on how more contemporary philosophers, like Kripke and Shoemaker, use such a concept in very different contexts.\\
The second part will focus on the will and the role it has in such a discourse, I’ll refer to it as the sole thing we can safely distinguish among all we perceive and then I’ll attempt to define the reference of \enquote{I} thanks to it.
\subsection{The Realm of Concepts}
Probably the most important question we encounter when dealing with the internal structure of what we perceive is to find out what a concept is. It is a very ancient debate whether what we perceive forms by itself objects, concepts that we can distinguish and follow over time or if the perception per se consists of disconnected apparences like random colours on a TV without signal.
\subsubsection{Kripke}
In the \emph{Locke Lectures}\footnote{S. Kripke, \emph{Reference and Existence, Locke Lectures}, 1973: in particular in Locke Lecture II} Kripke distinguishes two different uses of the language: someone could, when talking about what he perceives, talk \emph{in fiction}, namely referring to the (unreal) direct impression he has of what he sees, e.g. of a plate on a table just refer to nothing but the ellipsoid he sees from his point of view, without understanding in any way what he’s seeing or distinguishing it from the rest of the table. On the other hand, one could talk about the plate \emph{out and out}, namely referring to the (real) indirect concept he has built of the plate, considering its shape, position in space, (eventually) its material and so on… This makes us understand that the underlying perception model that Kripke has when dealing with those terms is one that allows some non-concepts, the bare impressions, to be part of perception. This is a popular point of view, we’ll see as Shoemaker does similarly, though it is not that obvious that it must be like that; it might well be that we can’t actually perceive something that is not a concept at all, whatever we see we might immediately (because of a non-well explained neurological process), at least at a minimum level, get conceptualised inside a certain context we formed.
\subsubsection{Shoemaker}
Shoemaker\footnote{S. Shoemaker, \emph{Self-Knowledge and \enquote{Inner Sense}}, 1994} very interestingly does precisely follow the schema I presented above, namely the one that suggests us to firstly determine a desidered relation between the perception and the world and secondly see if there are some internal structures we desire for perception. In fact Shoemaker distinguishes two different kinds of perception, the former is called \emph{broad perception} and it concerns (almost) solely the relation that the perceived has to have with the world. He imposes (1)\footnote{The numbers refer to the ordering Shoemaker used in the quoted paper} that what we perceive needs an organ able to give us such informations and (8) assumes a certain realism of \enquote{objects and states of affairs which the perception is of}\footnote{ibidem: p. 252}. (2) and (7) which are highly correlated don’t directly regard the relation between the perceived and the world: (2) imposes that \enquote{perception involves the occurrence of sense experiences, or sense impressions, that are distinct from the object of perception, and also distinct from the perceptual belief (if any) is formed}\footnote{ibidem}. This seems to be more related to the internal structure of perception, though, it also seems to be a very reasonable and not particularly exclusive assumption.\\
Secondly Shoemaker talks about \emph{object perception} in which he most importantly assumes (4), namely:
\begin{quote}
(4) Sense perception affords "identification information" about the object of perception. When one perceives one is able to pick out one object from others, distinguishing it from the others by information, provided by the perception, about both its relational and its nonrelational properties. The provision of such information is involved in the "tracking" of the object over time, and its reidentification from one time to another.
\end{quote}
The perceptions he allows here are, most evidently, the concepts I described above and so, he seems, in this second model of perception, to impose an important limit to the structure that perception must have.
\subsection{The Role of the Will}
Inside the realm of concept, one might try to distinguish some of them even further, namely, by considering the intentionality of the subject. Among the concepts that a subject \enquote{perceives} (I’m using this term in its very general version, it should be redefined in a more proper way once the analysis on structure has been done) one might still distinguish the one that the subject wants or not. By definition of will (if it's more precise definition won’t be too far from the meaning it usually has) the subject should always be able to distinguish precisely what she desires and this enables us to make a further distinction inside the realm of concepts.
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