X-The Agential Profile of Perceptual Experience

Abstract

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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