1

Anti-representationalism and

perception

Jonathan Knowles

2

Overview

• Anti-representationalism: the case for

• Representationalism about perception: the case for

• Relation between perceptual representationalism and anti-

representationalism

• What is perceptual content?

• Gibsonean account

• Reconciliation with anti-representationalism

3

Anti-representationalism

• (Propositional) knowledge of the world does not consist in/is not explained by (even in part) our correctly representing (i.e. tokening symbols for) suitably formed bits of the world (‘facts’) or parts thereof: Wittgenstein, Davidson, Putnam, Rorty, Price, Horwich et al.

• AR entails (in my view) a kind of anti-realism: Without representationalism, what we know is concept-relative. One could still uphold realism by claiming there is a reality our concepts seeks to capture, but since such a putative reality ex hypothesi is concept-independent, we can make no sense of it.

• AR also connected to ‘anti-realism’ in epistemology (cf Rorty, Davidson, Williams): no ‘world’ to ‘capture’/get right in thought.

• AR still employs deflationary notions of truth, reference, fact, even representation.

• AR is common sense realistic and not idealistic.

4

Arguments for AR (mostly negative)

• Intuitive plausibility of minimalism about truth (redundancy arguments).

• Naturalistic theories of representation (Fodor, Millikan et al) are, arguably, failures.

• Davidson’s scheme/content arguments/Sellars on ‘the given’. (Rorty lasy stress on these but difficult to assess.)

• Putnam’s model theoretic argument (controversial).

• Boghossian: naturalism about representationalism is incoherent because it allows for semantic irrealism as an open empirical possibility (cf. Price ‘Naturalism without representationalism’),

• Stich: substantial reference relations are indeterminate or arbitrary and hence don’t help solve theoretical issues (e.g. are there beliefs, what are they?). An indirect argument for AR: if such reference relations don’t so help, then knowledge probably doesn’t involve referring/representing in this sense. (Cf. Price ‘NWR’).

5

Price’s argument against

representationalism

• Theory T:’refers’ is relation RT

• Theory S:’refers’ is relation RS

• Do these conflict? No, because they both must use

their own theory to spell out these claims. So

reference isn’t a substantial, empirically scrutable

relationship.

6

Riposte and counter-riposte

• Price (and Stich) assume, question-beggingly, that

reference is not a natural kind. If it is, at most one of

the theories stands in the reference relation to the

property it claims to be reference. (Devitt)

• Counter-riposte: Reference intuitively is not a natural

kind: doesn’t support ‘twin-earth’ intuitions about its

extension.

7

Another argument for AR

A(ssumption)1: According to representationalism, knowledge of any fact involves a representation of it.

A2: It is possible to have/it is not incoherent to suppose we have knowledge of all facts.

Given A1 and A2, we can argue against representationalism by showing that it cannot give a naturalistically coherent picture of how knowledge of all facts is possible.

8

My argument contd

9

My argument contd

10

My argument contd

11

Perception and representation

12

The everyday intuitions behind

perceptual representationalism

(PR) - In perception, we see (hear etc.) some part of the

world as being a certain way.

- This ‘seeing’ can justify a belief about what is there

and how it is.

- The seeing is not the believing, nor is it just a causing

to believe.

- These intuitions may need to be ‘massaged’ but we

should be able to respect them in some form.

13

Sub-personal vs personal

• For many, ‘representationalism’ (call it ‘R’) is a thesis first and foremost about the sub-personal computational workings of cognitive systems, including perceptual systems: the system builds up complex internal data structures from sensory stimulation.

• R not at issue here: unless experiencing subjects enter the picture, ‘R’ would arguably beg the question if it took itself to show AR is wrong (AR could see its attributions of representations as in some way metaphorical/technical/instrumental). R is not necessary for PR either. PR is personal/organismal level phenomenon.

14

Is PR compatible with AR?

• Davidson, Burge (Origins of objectivity), many others: NO. PR enunciates for these the idea that perception gives us our basic epistemic contact with a mind-independent reality through representing it, first independently of thought, though also in a way that thought can build on to provide more refined/abstract representations of the same world. (This doesn’t assume particular view on what perceptual content is - conceptual, propositional etc.) Thought thereby substantively representational, contra AR.

• Davidson removes threat to AR by denying PR outright but that is implausible.

• My view: YES. Perception is not an epistemological foundation for thought/theory, nor something we can understand in terms of an epistemic ‘meeting’ between mind and a physical world. Given this there is no threat to AR in it having autonomous correctness conditions.

15

Naive realism as sidestepping

problem?

• NR: phenomenal character of perceptual experience

given in terms of external objects and properties

themselves.

• Problems: – Tendencies to idealism

– Too wedded to common sense conception of perception

– Hallucination

– Illusion

– Qualitatively identical scenes phenomenologically identical.

16

Brad Thompson on ‘non-objective’

content (cf. e.g. ‘The spatial content of

experience’, forthcoming PPR)

• X and Y can have phenomenally identical experiences that stem

from different objective properties without being mistaken - e.g.

colour-inverted world, ‘doubled’-world, ‘el greco’ world etc.

• Consequences (for Thompson):

– We don’t see the world ‘as it is in itself’, the content of experience doesn’t

involve attributing particular properties to things.

– Through ‘Fregean’, narrow contents, we can nevertheless specify physical

conditions of accuracy for experience (‘the environmental feature that

typically gives rise to this experience’), cp. Chalmers.

– This would still refute AR: Thought constructs representations of these

possible causes on the basis of perceptual representation.

17

Objection to Thompson’s

construal of the data ‘Spatial content undoubtedly places something like a causal

condition on reference. In order for my experience as of something roughly twenty meters away to be veridical it must surely be the case that the object perceived has a property that typically causes experiences in me that are phenomenally like that, under relevant conditions’. (p. 29, net version)

Must content be specified this way? Assumes an epistemological model for perception. Why should perception – a capacity presumably many animals possess – have as (part of) its function to determine such causal-dispositional properties in the physical world?

18

An alternative

• We agree that perceptual experience does not ‘give’ us objective, physical properties, but say instead that what are represented are possibilities for movement and action afforded by some part of the physical environment at a given time. Spatial case: I represent the Müller-Lyer arrows as having a certain spatial characteristics = my perception specifies my possibilities for movement/action in relation to them.

• Different physical properties can afford the same movement/action for a creature and vice versa.

• Upshot: When I see something as being a certain way, we can say, with the folk, that this is independent of and can justify my belief that it is this way, but this not an objective property, and hence my perceptual content in no way contributes to a representation in thought of any such property.

19

Link to enactivism/Gibsonianism about

perception

• Phenomenal character/content of perception is determined in large part by possibilities for action in relation to an environment (cf. Merleau-Ponty, Noë, O’Regan).

• Though perhaps not all experience is thus understandable, it is arguably only this kind of experience can be assessed as verdical or not (so differences in, say, some aspects of colour experience that have no implication for action are neither correct nor incorrect, except perhaps in some ‘conventional’ sense).

• The ‘things’ we see or mis-see - affordances in Gibson’s sense – are not necessarily the everyday things and properties of common sense, but must ultimately be determined by theoretical work in psychology and biology.

• Affordances can be just as ‘real’ as things posited in physics, for they do not compete with the latter (so need not be seen as projected), even though they also only make sense in the context of a physical world.

• Affordances are (perhaps) ‘features’ of organism-environment systems, rather than properties of physical objects (Chemero) (or relational properties, à là Evan Thompson?).

20

Objection from Thompson (p. 23)

21

Flaw in this

• Thinking that the specification of the

movement/muscle activity has to be in purely

objective, physical terms. It doesn’t, and wouldn’t on

a view of perception that stressed its ecological

aspects together with a non-reductive view of biology.

What we relate to in the world through acting is partly

constituted by our own activities.

22

Two pathways objection

• Cf. by now familiar literature surrounding Milner and Goodale’s

distinction between dorsal (acting-guiding, unconscious) and

ventral (knowledge-yielding, conscious) visual pathways. Only

latter seems directly connected to action.

• E.g.: DF’s inability to recognize objects cannot plausibly be

explained away by idea of a failure to conceptually use

information that is available (Clark on Wallhagen)

23

My response

• Both forms of vision are connected to action insofar as higher

cognitive function is. This link may be quite holistic and such

holism is one of the reasons classical cognitive science posits

internal representations for use in down-stream reasoning,

planning etc. But AR must have faith in a kind of cognitive

science that will avoid this kind of explanation.

• I am not here in any case concerned first and foremost to argue

for the empirical correctness of my view of perception, but rather

it’s compatibility with AR

24

How does perception give

evidence for theory?

• Never directly or unmediatedly, though this is what

you would expect on a non-foundationalist, anti-

realist epistemological view (i.e. a broad coherentism

of the kind defended by AR). What we see supports

our theories only, ultimately, in light of our theories,

inter alia about what we see.

• FIN!