§69. Perceptual Content
A theory in philosophy holds that perceptions are about or represent objects and make claims that are true or false. In other words, perceptions have so- called intentional content.
“A perceptual experience represents the world as being a certain way,” says one theorist. For another, “A subject’s experiences represent the world to her as being a certain way. These experiences may be correct or incorrect In short, experiences have representational or semantic properties; they have content.” Perception presents not just things but a way things are, a propositional synthesis. The content of experience is the “sort of thing one can... judge,” namely, a thought or proposition. Sounding like an old Stoic, John McDowell says, “How one’s experience represents things to be is not under one’s control, but it is up to one whether one accepts the appearance or rejects it.”183
As the principal reason for taking this view, proponents point out that the same perceptual objects can be presented in many ways, with “content” being the specific way that they are represented in any case. “The basic commitment one incurs in saying that experience has content is the commitment that experience represents the world.” There are many ways you can represent the Eiffel Tower, from many perspectives. The difference between seeing the Tower from the west at one hundred meters and seeing it from the south at five hundred meters is a difference in the representational content of the perception. This way of thinking about vision seems obviously to derive from our experience with language. Venus falls under the description “morning star” and under the description “evening star.” These different predicates are equally true descriptions of what the name refers to. Supposedly, perception is like that too, presenting the same object in intentionally, semantically different guises.184
It seems wrong to assimilate perception and propositions.
No proposition is information-equivalent to any stretch of perception, which has no determinate content. Propositions and perceptions have as it were the wrong cardinality to be comparable. Perception is continuous and densely heterogeneous, whereas logical content is as contained, bounded, and discontinuous as the signs of language. When is a perception complete? When has it changed? We cannot individuate the “content” of perception without introducing temporal boundaries, though that is hard to do and practically never happens in natural perception, which must flow to be perceived at all. Perception never stands still long enough to be equated with a propositional content.That was why Plato found perception unfit for science. It cannot offer a definitely true-or-false thought about reality, an argument Oxford philosopher J. L. Austin updates. “Our senses are dumb—though Descartes and others speak of the testimony of the senses, our senses do not tell us anything at all, true or false.” Earlier, C. S. Peirce used the same image. A visual percept “is absolutely dumb. It acts on us, it forces itself upon us; but it does not address the reason.... It obtrudes itself upon my gaze; but not as a deputy for anything else, not ‘as’ anything. It simply knocks at the portal of my soul and stands there in the doorway.”185
It seems right to conclude that perception is not representation and does not have intentional content. Perception is not by itself a reason for belief, and does not admit of semantic evaluation in terms of truth or reference. That was Gibson’s conclusion. It is also a conclusion of phenomenologist Lambert Wiesing, who observes that “no knowledge of the world is forced upon a human being simply on the basis of his situation in the world.” Instead of a logical content, true or false, perceptions disclose affordances, modulating environmental interaction. What is truly imposed in perception is not the sensory impression; it is the interaction, the compulsion to prepare for it, that is inescapable.186
The certainty of perception is existential, not epistemological; it is the certainty of pain rather than rational evidence.
“That the perceived world is real is not knowledge but a stark certainty: when I perceive, I must be aware, as I would be of pain, that I am in a real world and that quality of reality about what I perceive is no interpretation that might be different.” Perception “sees to it that human beings cannot deny their worldliness. My perception just does not permit me to be an onlooker in the world. Rather I am forced, because I perceive, to participate in the real events of the world—and, furthermore, I must be aware of it.”187It seems likely that an animal’s sensory powers are biological adaptations, powers shaped by natural selection in the course of evolution, the reproductive advantage of sharper eyes, acuter hearing, subtler smell, and so on. However, it would be a mistake to think that perception is such an adaptation. Vision, yes, olfaction, yes, echolocation, definitely. However, these are modes of perception, ways perception happens, and not the action itself, which is not an adaptation at all. What evolves are the differentiations, the modalization of perception, but perception itself is just another word for life. Anything alive is to some degree perceiving, that is, sensing and remembering (experiencing) an environment in terms of its capacity to interact. That is not panpsychism, endowing everything with a soul. But everything alive is endowed with perception, and since perception is maladaptive without memory, anything alive is affected and changed by experience.188