There has been relatively little discussion, in contemporary philosophy of mind, of the active aspects of perceptual processes. This essay presents and offers some preliminary development of a view about what it is for an agent to watch a particular material object throughout a period of time. On this view, watching is a kind of perceptual activity distinguished by a distinctive epistemic role. The essay presents a puzzle about watching an object that arises through elementary reflection on the consequences of two apparent truths about watching an object throughout a period of time. It proposes that the puzzle can be resolved by a view according to which for an agent to watch an object throughout a period of time is for that agent to maintain visual awareness of that object with the aim of perceptually knowing what that object is doing. The essay goes on to make some further suggestions about how the apparatus developed in connection with the notion of watching may enable us to offer related explanations of other kinds of perceptual activity. It proposes that a useful distinction can be drawn between perceptual activities like watching which have as their aim knowledge of what an object is doing and activities like looking or visually scrutinizing which have as their aims knowledge of the states or conditions of the objects of perceptual awareness.
This chapter works towards a better understanding of the contribution made by the state of wakeful consciousness to the stream of consciousness over time. It does this through reflection on what is missing in certain cases of non-wakeful consciousness. Granting the assumption that dreaming is a mode of perceptual imagination, the chapter contrasts perceptual imagination in the wakeful condition with perceptual imagination in dreaming sleep. It makes a suggestion about what is missing that draws on claims about the wakeful condition made by Brian O’Shaughnessy. According to this suggestion, what is missing is the occurrence of intentional mental action accompanied by non-inferential self-awareness. Building on a critique of O’Shaughnessy’s discussion, the chapter develops a ‘Capacitation Thesis’ about wakeful consciousness, according to which wakefulness is a state of being capacitated with respect to a range of relevant capacities. Imagination in the dream is discussed in the light of this thesis.
Reflection on cases involving the occurrence of various types of perceptual activity suggests that the phenomenal character of perceptual experience can be partly determined by agential factors. I discuss the significance of these kinds of case for the dispute about phenomenal character that is at the core of recent philosophy of perception. I then go on to sketch an account of how active and passive elements of phenomenal character are related to one another in activities like watching and looking at things. 1.Much recent discussion in the philosophy of perception has focused on the explanation of the phenomenal character of perceptual experience; the property or properties of experience in virtue of which there is something it is like for a perceiving subject to have such an experience.2 Most of these discussions of the determinants of the phenomenal character of perceptual experience have focussed on aspects of mind in which the perceiver is a passive subject. That a perceiver is acquainted with some mind-independent object and various properties it possesses, for example, or that he has an experience with a correctness condition that involves some object's possessing some property, are not facts the obtaining of which consist in the exercise of his capacities to act. It isn't surprising that features such as this have occupied the attention of those interested in perceptual phenomenology. After all, there is an obvious sense in which perceiving things or perceptually experiencing things is not something that we do; it is something that just happens to us, or that goes on in us, or that we which we are passive, or in which we are mere subjects of such experience. Indeed, there is a family of interesting puzzle cases that emerges from reflection on the way that agency can manifest itself in our perceptual lives that suggests that the phenomenal character of perceptual experience is partly determined by active features of mind. 4 In the first part of this essay I present a range of these cases, and explore the consequences of these types of case for some familiar views about the nature of phenomenal character of perceptual experience. I then go on to offer some further discussion of the nature of perceptual activities themselves, focussing on the structure of the phenomenal character of these episodes, and on the distinctive nature of the kind of involvement of passive sensory aspects in an active occurrence that is the mark of a core category of perceptual activity. 2.Though perceiving is itself something in which we are passive, that is, it is not something that we agentially do, there are characteristically perceptual types of activities. Amongst such activities are watching, looking, listening, tactually feeling, as well as watching out for, and looking for. (2000), ch.14, discusses the phenomenon of listening. 6 It is natural to think of the determinable basic form of activity of which these perceptual activities are determinations as 'perceptually attending to O'. In this essay, I avoid the term...
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