Contemporary scientific and philosophical literature on perception often focuses on the relationship between perception and action, emphasizing the ways in which perception can be understood as geared towards action or ‘action-oriented’. In this paper I provide a framework within which to classify approaches to action-oriented perception, and I highlight important differences between the distinct approaches. I show how talk of perception as action-oriented can be applied to the evolutionary history of perception, neural or psychological perceptual mechanisms, the semantic content or (...) phenomenal character of perceptual states, or to the metaphysical nature of perception. I argue that there are no straightforward inferences from one kind of action-oriented perception to another. Using this framework and its insights, I then explore the notion of action-oriented perceptual representation which plays a key role in some approaches to embodied cognitive science. I argue that the concept of action-oriented representation proposed by Clark and Wheeler is less straightforward than it might seem, because it seems to require both that the mechanisms of perceptual representation are action-oriented and that the content of these perceptual representations are action-oriented. Given that neither of these claims can be derived from the other, proponents of action-oriented representation owe us separate justification for each claim. I will argue that such justifications are not forthcoming in the literature, and that attempts to reconstruct them run into trouble: the sorts of arguments offered for the representational mechanisms being action-oriented seem to undermine the sorts of arguments offered for the representational content being action-oriented, and vice-versa. (shrink)

In this paper, I consider how the embodied approach can be applied to religious faith, and possibly other kinds of faith. I start with the reformed epistemologists’ idea that religious faith is similar to sense perception, and I argue that we can elaborate this idea by taking into account our capability perceptually to grasp what is not accessible by senses—the ‘presence in absence’ or, as I call it, perceptual faith. As perception necessarily involves not only a mental but also an (...) embodied relation to its object; an embodied relation can be seen as a constitutive component of faith as well. According to phenomenological accounts of perception, embodiment and enactment allow humans to transcend perspectival limitations and to perceive an object as it is beyond its appearances: constant despite changes of angle, light, and other conditions and whole even when only parts of it are visible. I argue that, in the same vein, embodied relations and particular normativity involved in perception-based faith allow humans to transcend the precariousness of our experience and to sustain a perception-like relation to religious objects, achieved in a ‘better look’ moments of religious experience. I conclude that an embodied account can provide new insights into the nature of religious faith and resolve some puzzles, such as how faith can be a virtue. (shrink)

Alva Noë understands what he calls “perceptual presence” as the experience of whole, voluminous objects being ‘right there’, present for us in their entirety, even though not each and every part of them impinges directly on our senses at any given time. How is it possible that we perceptually experience voluminous objects as voluminous directly and apparently effortlessly, with no need of inferring their three-dimensionality from experience of the part of them that is directly stimulating our sense organs? For Noë, (...) this is the ‘problem of perceptual presence’. In this paper, I integrate Noë’s view by articulating a different view of what perceptual presence at a more basic level amounts to. This new account of perceptual presence which, I believe, can clarify and make an enactive account of presence richer. The view I suggest revolves around the idea, developed especially by Merleau-Ponty and Kelly, that perceptual experience is in an important sense indeterminate. Indeterminacy, I argue, is key if we want to understand perceptual presence and the ‘problem’ Noë solves. (shrink)

My dissertation contributes to a central and ongoing debate in the philosophy of perception about the fundamental nature of perceptual states. Such states include cases like seeing, hearing, or tasting as well as cases of merely seeming to see, hear, or taste. A central question about perceptual states arises in light of misperceptual phenomena. A commonsensical view of perceptual states construes them as simply relating us to the external and mind independent objects. But some misperceptual cases suggest that these states (...) fall short of contact with the world. The result is that perceptual states are either thought to fundamentally consist in a highest common factor that falls short of perceptual contact with the world, or are thought to be disjunctive in nature, with some cases involving perceptual contact, and others receiving a different analysis. Contrary to these views, I argue that no misperceptual cases compromise perceptual contact with worldly objects, so perceptual states should be understood as relations to the external and mind-independent world. I call this view I defend Pure Relationalism, and the view of misperceptual cases that makes pure relationalism possible Illusionism. (shrink)

Some philosophers have argued that we do not hear sounds as located in the environment. Others have objected that this straightforwardly contradicts the phenomenology of auditory experience. And from this they draw metaphysical conclusions about the nature of sounds—that they are events or properties of vibrating surfaces rather than waves or sensations. I argue that there is a minimal, but recognizable, notion of audition to which this phenomenal objection does not apply. While this notion doesn’t correspond to our ordinary notion (...) of auditory experience, it does—in conjunction with our lack of an uncontroversial individuation of the senses and recent interest in distinctively multisensory features of perceptual experiences—raise the possibility of more expansive notions of audition, including some that do plausibly count as corresponding to our everyday notion of audition, that lack the spatial phenomenology cited in the objection. Until this possibility is ruled out, the phenomenal objection and metaphysical conclusions drawn from it remain inconclusive. (shrink)