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draft of 20 September 2023

Affordances and the Contents of Perception

Susanna Siegel * draft of October 2011final version will be forthcoming in B. Brogaard, ed. Does Perception Have Content? Oxford University Press.

A hole in the ground protects some creatures but endangers others. Dry ground is passable by creatures who can walk, but fatal for a fish. These environments provide different possibilities for different creatures.

J. J. Gibson invented the word “affordance” to denote possibilities of action for a creature.1 In principle, an environment can provide a creature with the possibility of an action, even when the creature is not aware of that possibility at all. And in principle, a creature can register an affordance without perceiving it. For instance, suppose you consult a map to find the most direct route to the nearest state park. You learn from the map that State St will take you there, but you haven’t figured out yet where you are in relation to State St. Here you register State St’s affordance of exiting the city, but the affordance is not perceptually salient to you. In general, given that an action is possible for a creature in a given environment, it is a further question whether this possibility of action is perceptually salient to them. Perhaps dry ground is fatal for fish, even though they can’t perceive this affordance of fatality. Perhaps holes in the ground protect certain creatures, who in addition perceive this affordance.

It is controversial whether any affordances are perceptually salient. In this paper, I assume that some are, and explore how such affordances interact with the idea that perceptual experiences – the conscious episodes of perception - are in the business of representing how things are in the space around the perceiver. The idea that such experiences have representational properties is summed up in the thesis that all perceptual experiences have contents, where contents are a kind of accuracy condition. I call this thesis the Content View. The Content View entails that if you see something to your left that looks red, then your experience is accurate, only if there is something red on your left. The result is that experiences in this respect are belief-like. Beliefs are true or false, depending on whether their contents are true or false. Analogously, experiences as the Content View construes them are accurate or inaccurate, depending on whether their contents are true or false.

One might think that if there are perceptually salient affordances, then affordances figure in the contents of experience. Just as visual experiences represent colors and shapes, for instance, one might think they represent affordances as well. If affordances figured in experience in this way, there would be no friction with the Content View at

1 Gibson (1977), “The Theory of Affordances”

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all.2 But according to some philosophers, certain complex affordances are simply experienced, not represented, and they are experienced in a way that differs from the way in which we experience color and shape. When you experience these complex affordances, your perceptual experience is exhaustively structured by how you are already acting in a situation - not only by how you can act or are disposed to act in it.3 The environment pulls actions out of you directly, like a force moving a situation, with your actions in it, from one moment to the next. Such complex affordances are described by Hubert Dreyfus and Adrian Cussins, among others, though not always under this label. My aim is to draw out from their descriptions a trio of positions that are at odds with the Content View in various ways, and then to argue against those positions. I suspect that both Dreyfus and Cussins would sympathize with the challenges to the Content View that are implicit in these positions. But since they don’t orient their discussions around the Content View, I take their descriptions of experiences as a starting point from which to articulate the trio of positions, rather than as texts that develop any of the alternatives directly.

The Content View is distinct from a stronger thesis known as intentionalism, according to which the phenomenal character of all perceptual experiences supervenes on representational properties.4 Representational properties are properties of having accuracy conditions. Since the Content View allows that there could be pairs of experiences that are phenomenally different yet representationally the same, it is compatible with the denial of intentionalism. We can thus distinguish moderate anti-representational approaches to affordances, which oppose intentionalism but tolerate the Content View, from extreme anti-representational approaches to affordances, which oppose the Content View as well. For instance, a moderate anti-representational approach could construe certain perceivable affordances (or even all perceivable affordances) as phenomenal features of experience that do not supervene on representational features, putting affordances on par with shifts of attention and color experiences involved in spectral inversion as putative counter-examples to intentionalism.5 These putative counter-examples to intentionalism leave the Content View intact, because they target local phenomenal features of experience, rather than entire experiences. They are not put forward as cases in which the perceptual experience as a whole lacks content or fails to represent anything. Rather they are supposed to pinpoint specific phenomenal features that are not reflected by any representational feature, allowing that by having other representational features, the experience is evaluable for accuracy.

2 For developments of this idea, see Bengson (ms) and Nanay (2011).3 This initial characterization of the complex affordances I go on to discuss assumes that color and shape experiences are not structured by how we are already acting in a situation. Kelly (2005) denies this assumption, arguing that in both the colors nor shapes we perceive solicit us to view them in certain ways. 4 For defenses of intentionalism, see Tye (2000), Byrne (2001), Pautz (2009).5 Block (200x), Nickel (2006), Nanay (2010), Watzl (ms).

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In contrast to moderate anti-representational approaches to affordances, extreme anti-representational approaches to affordances are motivated by affordances that have a good claim to pervading the entire perceptual experience one has at a time (or a over a short stretch of time). On this kind of approach, the phenomenal features of experience constituted by these affordances encompass an entire perceptual experience, providing a putative counter-example to the claim that all perceptual experiences have contents.

In this paper I assess both moderate and extreme anti-representational approaches to affordances. One might think that only the extreme approaches bear on the Content View, since it is plainly incompatible with such approaches. But although the moderate anti-representational approaches tolerate the truth of the Content View, I argue that some versions of them, if correct, would undermine the Content View indirectly. The overarching challenge to the Content View at issue in both approaches stems from the idea that some affordances are salient, not just as possible actions that might happen or might not, but instead as necessities or mandates. I call such affordances afforded mandates. So an afforded mandate is a special kind of experience, not a special kind of affordance.

How might afforded mandates challenge the Content View? In an afforded mandate, the current situation seems to determine the subsequent one. Since the subsequent situation seems already to be on the way when one has the current experience, one might think there is no need for the current experience to represent the possibility of acting in the way the situation mandates, and more generally no need for experiential representations to feed in to the mandated actions and associated beliefs. According to this line of thought, when it comes to guiding action, any such experiential representations would be explanatorily superfluous.

I argue that this idea can be developed in three ways. On an extreme anti-representational approach to afforded mandates, the experiences involved lack contents altogether. On a differently extreme approach, the afforded mandate extinguishes properly perceptual experiences, leaving behind only experiences of tension and relief in responding to the mandate. On a moderate anti-representational approach, the experience involved in afforded mandates has some contents, but there are no contents, the having of which constitutes or otherwise determines the afforded mandates. In discussing this last approach, it is useful to have a term for the contentful aspect of an overall experience - the aspect that is not constituted by the afforded mandate. I’ll call these contentful subexperiences, to emphasize that there is one overall experience that encompasses distinct elements: it is partly constituted by the afforded mandates, and it also has some contents. The main bone of contention between the extreme and moderate anti-representational approaches is whether afforded mandates involve contentful subexperiences at all. The moderate approach says yes, the extreme approaches say no. The moderate approach could then be seen as undermining the

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main motivation of the Content View, by charging that even if there are contentful subexperiences in afforded mandates, these subexperiences don’t play any significant role in guiding belief or action. In this way, it challenges the central place the Content View gives to the idea that a subject’s experiences constitute a way of representing her immediate environment.

Neither Cussins nor Dreyfus is easily pigeon-holed into any of these positions, whether they would actually endorse any of these positions is less important than the tenability of the positions themselves, and the phenomenon of afforded mandates they address – a phenomenon to which Cussins and Dreyfus (among others) have done much to bring to our attention. If all three positions on afforded mandates are untenable, then the prominence of representing in experience is affirmed, and the Content View is vindicated as potentially illuminating a wide range of perceptual experiences, including the important category of afforded mandates.

I begin in section 1 by developing the notion of an afforded mandate out of the core notion of an affordance as a perceptually salient possibility of action, by suggesting that afforded mandates are found in a wide range of experiences, and that Cussins and Dreyfus have something like an afforded mandate in mind in their discussions of skilled action. Section 2 clarifies the Content View, and outlines a positive case for it that is made more fully elsewhere.6 Section 3 gives reasons to think that Cussins and Dreyfus are broadly sympathetic with anti-representational approaches. In section 4, after describing the three main non-representational positions on afforded mandates in more detail, I explain how, each in their own way, these positions are at odds with the Content view, and then I argue against them.

1. Affordances and afforded mandates

The core notion of affordance is a possibility of action for a creature. For instance, suppose that dry ground affords walking for creatures who walk, while affording fatality for fish. And suppose that hidden holes in the ground afford protection for a rabbit but danger for a person walking. These affordances are constrained by the creature’s shape, their predators, and their standing motor abilities and dispositions. But some affordances depend not just on standing ecological features of the creature, but on the creature’s current states and activities. For instance, for someone in a hurry to get to point B from point A, the forest in between points A and B is an obstacle to be crossed, whereas for someone trying to get away from rain, it provides shelter. For someone exhausted, an invitingly fluffy bed provides a place to plop down and rest. For someone carrying a heavy backpack, a steep hill is not easily climbable. As before, it is a

6 Siegel 2010, Ch 2.

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substantive question about the contents of perception whether these possibilities (relative to a creature and its state or activity) are perceptually salient for that creature.7

The examples above involve relatively local aspects of the environment. It is the hill, the ground, the forest or the hole that affords climbing, walking, protection or danger. In the cases of the backpack-wearer or the hasty traveler, one could think of the hill or the forest as anti-affording passability, or as affording avoidance. In contrast, other affordances are not localized in this way, but rather stem from a whole situation or scene. Suppose you are alone on a narrow sidewalk, walking. The sidewalk affords passability. Then someone turns a corner and begins walking toward you. They are still far off, and no one else is in between. In this completely ordinary situation, without having to think about it all, you assume that the person is going to continue walking toward you until you pass. And now the affordance of passability is more complicated. When your paths cross, the part of the sidewalk traversed by them will not be passable. But you don’t yet know exactly which part this will be. The space has to be negotiated by adjusting your relative positions. Passability is afforded, but it is not afforded simply by the sidewalk. It is afforded by the sidewalk together with the passerby, contingent on their cooperation. It remains to be seen what form the cooperation will take. The same possibilities are open to both of you. Step aside to let the other pass, or continue on the path that they open up for you? Make clear gestures designed to acknowledge the other person, or play down the fact that there’s any interaction? Acknowledge any adjustment they make, or just carry on? Besides these possible modes of full cooperation, there is also the possibility of grudging cooperation, borderline non-cooperation (barely move out of the way), or at an extreme, collision.8 The passerby’s behavior and yours will make some possibilities more likely and others more distant.

Which of these possibilities may figure in perceived affordances? It is easy to imagine someone to whom the situation affords only a single, cooperative possibility: moving aside with overt magnanimity to let the other person pass, for example. It is also easy to imagine someone at the other extreme, for whom the situation affords all of the possibilities: collision, the other modes of non-cooperation, various modes of cooperation. What determines which possibilities of action in a situation become perceptually salient? It is hard to say. Presumably it is determined by a combination of the perceiver’s activity, their habits, and occurrent psychological states such as what they’re paying attention to, their mood, fears, and so on. Whatever factors determine

7 Proffitt and associates have a large body of experiments aimed to show that motor intentions affect affordances even in the stricter sense. A small sample includes Witt and Proffitt (2008), Lessard et al (2009), and Linkenauer et al (2009).

8 For vivid description of non-cooperation in this context, see T.G. Seuss story The Zax, which describes a north-going Zax and a south-going Zax who are stopped in their tracks because neither will move out of the other’s way.

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this will also be factors relative to which the same possibility of action facing two perceivers will be an affordance for one of them but not for the other.9

In this example, the affordances stem from the overall situation, not simply from a person in it (the passerby) or an object (the sidewalk). The affordances are simultaneously spatial and social, resulting from the interplay between the initial spatial affordance of possibility and the social interaction.

We started with the core idea that affordances are perceptually salient possibilities of action. Another variation on this core idea extends the core notion from mere possibilities that are perceptually salient, to perceptually salient necessities, imperatives, obligations, or mandates. Of the varieties of affordances discussed so far, this one is the most obscure, because the idea that a mandate, imperative, obligation or necessity could be experienced has many interpretations. For now I focus on mandates, ignoring vast differences between physical, moral, and conventional mandates. Some of these differences emerge later.

We can distinguish merely experiencing an action as mandatory, from experiencing an action not merely as mandatory, but as one that is or will actually be carried out as a result of the mandate.10 We can also distinguish between three temporal relationships an experience can bear to an action whose possibility it presents. First, one might experience an action not yet undertaken as mandatory. Second, one might experience an action now being completed as mandatory. Third, one might retrospectively experience an action just completed as having been mandatory.

9 Could someone misrepresent the possibilities, and if so would they still be affordances? It would be natural to adjust the notion of affordances to allow this. Here I sideline this adjustment, however, since it inches toward assuming the Content View, and my aim is to describe the phenomena that give rise to an objection to it. It is best to characterize the phenomena from which the objection arises in terms that the objectors would accept. For similar reasons the initial gloss on “experience” as conscious episodes of perceiving did not include hallucination.10 In an excellent discussion of similar phenomena, Bengson (in progress) distinguishes between feeling that an action is simply pulled out of you by the situation (in something like the way a reflex might be), from the feeling that it is pulled out of you by the situation, because the situation mandated it. Since Bengson wants to distinguish between actions, and reflexes aren’t actions, ultimately he glosses his distinction in terms of different levels or kinds of understanding of the situation that elicits (he says “extorts”) the action from the subject. I think the contrast with reflexes is important, but am unsure how to draw the further distinction Bengson is aiming at. In the examples I go on to discuss, it is clear that the subject has some kind of understanding of the situation, but I don’t try to characterize what kind of understanding that is.

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That leaves us with many interpretations of afforded mandates. I focus on three. All of them are formulated with respect to perceptually salient possible action A: (i) an experience of A being such that you should undertake it, because the situation demands it.(ii) an experience of being about to undertake A, without the possibility of doing otherwise, because the situation demands it.(iii) an experience of now carrying out A, without the possibility of having done otherwise, because the situation demanded it.

In case (i), you experience the mandate without executing the mandated action right then and there – before executing it, or without ever executing it.11 In principle, a situation could present the same mandated affordance, first in way (i) and then subsequently in ways (ii) and (iii). But we shouldn’t assimilate (i) to an anticipation of executing the action. Just as you might receive a mandate from someone else that you go on to ignore, so too you might experience a potential action as mandatory in way (i) without going on to execute it, though possibly only at the cost of some dissonance.

In cases (i) and (ii), where the affordances are prospective, there are two ways in which a possibility might be afforded as a mandate. (Here when I speak of a possibility being “afforded as a mandate”, I mean to imply that the affordance is experienced by the subject.) First, it might be afforded this way by default, because it is the only affordance – as with our simple perceiver on the sidewalk, who is unburdened by the experience of multiple possibilities. Second, it might be afforded as mandatory, alongside other affordances that are mere possibilities. For instance, a fork in the road might afford two continuations, with the right fork afforded as a mandate, and the left fork afforded as a mere possibility.

On an influential interpretation of case (iii), where an action is already underway, one is afforded the mandate by being afforded a series of mandates of types (i) or (ii) (or both). An afforded mandate of type (iii) is an artifact of a dynamic process of meeting a situation with a response that it seems to require of you. Dreyfus and Cussins focus on skilled motor activity as potential examples of such dynamic processes. Here Dreyfus describes an experience of playing tennis:

[C]onsider a tennis swing. If one is a beginner or is off one's form one might find oneself making an effort to keep one's eye on the ball, keep the racket perpendicular to the court, hit the ball squarely, etc. But if one is expert at the

11 Kelly (2005) suggests that experiences characterized in (i) are typical in perceiving shape and color constancies. In perceiving the color or shape of something, he argues, we are sensitive to an optimal point from which it could be viewed. He does not claim however, that every experience of perceptual constancies is one in which actually optimize our bodily position viz a viz the thing we’re seeing.

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game, things are going well, and one is absorbed in the game, what one experiences is more like one's arm going up and its being drawn to the appropriate position, the racket forming the optimal angle with the court -- an angle one need not even be aware of -- all this so as to complete the gestalt made up of the court, one's running opponent, and the oncoming ball. One feels that one's comportment was caused by the perceived conditions in such a way as to reduce a sense of deviation from some satisfactory gestalt. But that final gestalt need not be represented in one's mind. Indeed, it is not something one could represent. One only senses when one is getting closer or further away from the optimum. (“Intelligence without Representation”)

According to this description, one adjusts one’s movement to “complete the gestalt” of the tennis game. When the ball is in just the right spot, it affords hitting and the opponent affords receiving. These affordances would seem to belong to types (i) and (ii). In addition, one “feels that one’s comportment was caused by the perceived conditions”, which suggests that one’s comportment feels mandatory in way (iii). One feels oneself to be carrying out an action (hitting the ball) without the possibility of doing otherwise, given one’s activity of playing tennis.

Adrian Cussins describes a similar type of situational affordance. His example also involves skilled motor activity:

“I used to ride a motorcycle around London…and… exceed the speed limit. One time I was stopped by a policeman, who asked me "Do you know how fast you were travelling?" ….I was unable to tell the policeman my speed, yet surely I did know…how fast I was travelling. … The speed was presented to me as a certain way of wiggling through and around heavy traffic … as a felt rotational pressure in my right hand as it held the throttle grip, a tension in my fingers and foot in contact with brake pedals or levers, a felt vibration of the road and a rush of wind, a visual rush of surfaces, a sense of how the immediate environment would afford certain motions and resist others; embodied and environmental knowledge of what it would take to make adjustments in these felt pressures and sensitivities.”12

Cussins focuses on the overall experience of riding the motorcycle, just as Dreyfus focuses on the overall experience of playing tennis. In these examples, the felt mandate seems tied specifically to the perceiver’s motor skill. The player or rider “knows what it would take to adjust” in response to the previous condition. Much of what we do is skilled action - a fact easily observed by watching toddlers, for whom walking across a

12 Cussins (2003), p. 150. Notice Cussins’s assumption that he can know by reflection alone what cues he uses to determine how fast he is moving. In contrast, many experimentalists have assumed that controlled experiments are needed to find this out, for instance to determine what sorts of cues optic flow and vestibular sensations each contribute (assuming that cues of both sorts are used). [Chen 2011?]

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room or putting on shoes takes immense effort. But skilled action seems to be only a special case of afforded mandates. In the passerby example, one can imagine feeling that stepping aside to let the other person pass is mandatory, in the sense that among the possible modes of passing on the path, moving aside to let the other person pass is the only one afforded. Perhaps the passerby is frail, or moves only with difficulty, and the felt mandate stems from moral sensitivity.13 Or perhaps one has cultivated a habit of always letting the other person pass, out of politeness, or because one enjoys the feeling of determining how such micro-interactions with the public unfold. Here too, the mandatory aspect stems not from specialized motor skill, but from a broadly social sensitivity. In yet other cases the felt mandate might be broadly aesthetic. Suppose a tuft of your interlocutor’s hair falls just in front of their left eye, making it a little harder to read their expression. You might feel strong impulse to move the hair out of the way. Or in an exhausted state, a fluffy bed in an empty room might afford plopping down on it for rest. The felt mandate does not come from skilled action or its dynamics of execution in any of these examples. In a simple affordance, a possibility is made salient as something that might happen or might not. If the perceiver went on to complete the action, it would be plausible to suppose that the affordance guided the action, either by being represented in the experience alongside other properties (e.g., when a downward slope affords moving downwards, visual experience at the top of hill represents the possibility of moving downwards by going down the hill), or by the experience representing properties related to the affordance (e.g., a downward slope). In contrast to simple affordances, in afforded mandates, possibilities are salient as something that will happen. Do subjects of such experiences need to represent the environment through the experiences? We can feel the force of this question more sharply by examining reasons to think that all perceptual experiences have accuracy conditions.

2. The Content View

According to the Content View, all perceptual experiences (‘experiences’ for short) have contents. The Content View is distinct from theses about the underlying basic structure of perceptual experiences. For instance, some intentionalists argue that perceptual experiences fundamentally consist in a special type of attitude toward a proposition. Naïve Realists, in contrast, argue that experiences fundamentally consist in perceptual relations to objects and properties. The Content View says that all experiences have contents, but it does not take a stand on the underlying structure of experience, except to the extent that accuracy conditions can be derived from them. It is thus compatible with both intentionalism and Naïve Realism. Any challenge from

13 Bengson discusses an example of this sort, where someone gives up their seat on the bus to someone else who is visibly tired.

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afforded mandates that targets the Content View thus also targets any theory according to which contents can be derived from the underlying structure of experience.14

In the case of visual experiences, which are central to the examples of afforded mandates from Dreyfus and Cussins, the central motivation for the Content View is phenomenological. When you see things, they look to you to be a certain way. And when they look to you to be a certain way, they look to have certain properties. For instance, when you look at the tennis court during a game, you see the opponent and the ball, and these look to be a certain way. Which ways they look will depend on many factors, including what you’re doing – such as whether you’re playing the game, watching the players, or studying the court in order to draw it. But if the court, or the things in it, or the situation on the court didn’t look any way to you at all, then you would not be seeing them. (Even if you are hallucinating rather than seeing, the same basic phenomenological point holds.) Properties characterize the way things look to us, when we see them. And if things look to have certain properties, then, it seems, the experience is accurate, only if things have the properties that they look to have.

I won’t repeat an earlier full defense of the transition from ‘X looks to have property F’ to ‘The experience of X’s having F is accurate only if X has F’.15 This defense is the core of my case for the Content View, which moves from the phenomenological premise that in all experiences, there is a way things look, to the conclusion that all experiences have accuracy conditions that derive from this phenomenology. In principle, the positive case could be applied directly to affordances, resulting in a representational approach: if it looks to the perceiver as if action A is possible, then the experience is accurate only if the A is possible for the perceiver.

Representational approaches to affordances could vary in how they treat the special case of afforded mandates. The simplest representational proposal would incorporate the mandate into the contents: if it looks to the perceiver as if action A is mandated, then the experience is accurate only if A really is mandated.16 But it is also open to the representational approach to treat the mandatory aspect of the affordance as a non-representational feature, and incorporate the affordance but not its status as an afforded mandate into the contents of the experience.17 Assuming that an afforded mandate differs phenomenally from a mere affordance, such a representational approach would be compatible with the Content View, though not with intentionalism.

In contrast to these representational approaches, non-representational

14 Siegel 2010, Chapter 2 argues that standard forms of Naïve Realism entail the Content View.15 Siegel 2010 Chapter 2, though there I focus exclusively on visual experiences.16 [Bengson on concepts w/practical dimension]17 The challenge facing this option is to explain how the afforded mandate can be both belief-like in some respects while also being desire or drive-like in others.

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approaches to affordances hold that affordances are simply experienced, not represented. We can distinguish between non-representational approaches to affordances that constitute alternatives to the Content View, and non-representational approaches to affordances that constitute alternatives to intentionalism, while tolerating the Content View. To see the difference, consider a simple localized affordance, such as a downward slope affording downward movement, and suppose the affordance does not occupy much of the perceiver’s attention. The possibility of downward movement is perceptually salient, but so are lots of other features of the scene, so that the affordance does not come close to exhausting the experience. What about the rest of the experience? For all a non-representational approach to this kind of affordance says, the rest of the experience may have contents, such as contents that characterize how the rest of the scene surrounding the downward slope looks. The sky might look blue, the surrounding ground rocky, the trees billowing, etc. The thesis that experience represents the sky as blue, the ground as rocky, or the trees as moving is compatible with the non-representational approach to the localized affordance of downward movement. Of course the non-representational approach is at odds with intentionalism. But so long as the affordance does not exhaust the perceptual experience (or even just the visual aspect of it), it is not the type of affordance that can motivate the position that the visual experience on has in being afforded downward movement lacks contents altogether.

In contrast, a type of affordance that does motivate this position has a strong claim to exhausting the experience, either by occupying all of the perceiver’s attention, or by affecting the entire experience in some other way. In principle, a localized affordance could fully occupy a perceiver’s attention: one might fixate intently on the downward slope, or the protectiveness of the forest. And in principle, afforded mandates could fail to exhaust the experience: one might feel mandates to move one’s interloctor’s hair of their eyes to reveal their face, while still visually experiencing much else in addition. But typically, simple affordances do not occupy full attention, whereas many types of afforded mandates do, and these types are the ones Cussins and Dreyfus seem to focus on.18 The type of affordance that motivates alternatives to the Content View is phenomenologically all-encompassing. A non-representational approach to potentially all-encompassing affordances will come up against the Content View, not just intentionalism. For our purposes, this kind of non-representational approach is the kind that matters.

We can consider as a limiting case of such a non-representational approach the position that the afforded mandate is not experienced alongside typical perceptual experiences, in which ordinary objects (such as tables and chairs) and spaces (such as rooms and doorways) look to have various properties, such as being flat, round, empty, painted red, and so on. Instead, in the limiting case, the afforded mandate is

18 [Dreyfus on attention shifts messing up action, Cussins’s assumption that nothing besides speed is given as a truth-condition]

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experienced as nothing but a play of “tension and relief” (we’ll shortly see Dreyfus using this terminology) involved when experts are solicited by their goal (even when they do not represent that goal). This is a limiting case because the experience does not belong to the category of perceptual experience to which the Content View is addressed. At the opposite extreme, a non-representational approach to afforded mandates could allow that they are experienced as part of perceptual experiences, but deny that these experiences have any contents.19 Or they can allow that the experiences have contents, but deny that these contents play any significant explanatory role.

In these three options we have three non-representational approaches to afforded mandates. They share the overarching idea that afforded mandates trigger action, without any mediation, or without any significant mediation, by an experiential representation. To varying degrees, they are structurally similar to behaviorism about the mental, with its denial that any representations mediate between stimulus and behavior. I now examine Dreyfus’s and Cussins’s main lines of thought about the experience involved in all-encompassing skilled action, and suggest that they are sympathetic with the overarching idea that being assessable for accuracy is not constitutive of afforded mandates.

3. Dreyfus and Cussins on representation and experienceAt the start of one of his many discussions of skillful action, Dreyfus connects the

central behaviorist idea that representations are not needed to mediate between the environment and behavior to the work of existential phenomenologists such as Merleau-Ponty and his notion of the “intentional arc”:

Existential phenomenologists hold that the two most basic forms of intelligent behavior, learning, and skillful action, can be described and explained without recourse to mind or brain representations…. The intentional arc names the tight connection between the agent and the world, viz. that, as the agent acquires skills, these skills are “stored”, not as representations in the mind, but as more and more refined dispositions to respond to the solicitations of more and more refined perceptions of the current situation. Maximum grip names the body’s tendency to respond to these solicitations in such a way as to bring the current situation closer to the agent’s sense of an optimal gestalt. I will argue that neither of these abilities requires mental or brain representations. (p. 1)

(I’ve highlighted a part to which I return shortly). Since instances of skillful action in which the subject’s attention is fully absorbed provides a likely example of afforded mandates, let us focus on Dreyfus’s reasons to think that “mind or brain representations” are not needed for the action to unfold. Explicating Merleau-Ponty’s

19 [Kelly 2005 would reject the coherence of this suggestion]

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notion of the intentional arc, Dreyfus appeals to the idea that skilled action is guided by a feeling of “tension” that tracks the status of the situation relative to one’s goal:

“In our skilled activity we move to achieve a better and better grip on our situation. For this movement towards maximum grip to take place, one does not need a mental representation of one’s goal. Rather, acting is experienced as a steady flow of skillful activity in response to one's sense of the situation. Part of that experience is a sense that when one's situation deviates from some optimal body-environment relationship, one's activity takes one closer to that optimum and thereby relieves the "tension" of the deviation. One does not need to know what that optimum is. One's body is simply solicited by the situation to get into equilibrium with it.” (p. 12)

In these explications of the intentional arc, Dreyfus emphasizes that representation of one’s goal is not needed. His tennis example discussed in section 1 applies the same idea: there he says the tennis player moves, and feels oneself to move, “so as to reduce a sense of deviation from satisfactory gestalt” (op cit), without having to represent the final gestalt toward which one is moving. It is further interpretative question whether Dreyfus thinks that representations of anything else, such as the “refined perceptions” or the “perceived conditions”, guide behavior in skilled action (“One feels that one's comportment was caused by the perceived conditions in such a way as to reduce a sense of deviation from some satisfactory gestalt.”) Dreyfus suggests explicitly that skilled action can be explained “without recourse to mind or brain representations” as such, but perhaps these is just the statement of an idea before it is refined.

For us, the important idea from Dreyfus is that action is guided primarily by the ‘feeling of tension’ that is sensitive to the deviation from one’s goal. Suppose that, thanks to the guidance provided by the feeling of tension, contentful perceptual experiences are not needed for such guidance – as Dreyfus at least superficially suggests, along with the stronger idea that beliefs are not needed for guidance either. From here, one could reason one’s way to the three positions we met at the end of section 2. We can now see how each of these positions is an alternative to the Content View.

First, one might think that since the action can be explained without contentful experiences, the experience is best characterized exclusively in terms the tension and relief that accompanies solicitation, rather than a perceptual experience in which thing looks to have certain colors, shapes, positions, textures, or other perceptible properties.On this view, there are no perceptual experiences at all in certain afforded mandates, hence no contentful perceptual experiences. I call this Position 1.

Second, one might think that since actions of the sort Dreyfus and Cussins describe can be explained without contentful experiences, these actions are accompanied by perceptual experiences that lack contents in the relevant sense - accuracy conditions that are satisfied or unsatisfied depending on which properties the things in the

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perceiver’s immediate environment have. This conclusion would be incompatible with the Content View, and if Dreyfus endorsed this position he would need some other account of the “perceived conditions” that figure in the tennis example, and “refined perceptions” mentioned in Dreyfus’s explication of the intentional arc. The fact that certain conditions are perceived, on this interpretation, will not be cashed out in terms of one’s having contentful experiences. I call this Position 2.

Third, one might think that since the action can be explained without contentful experiences, then even if there are other reasons to think the experience has contents that characterize the “perceived conditions” - reasons such as the phenomenological motivation of the Content View - these contentful subexperiences contribute little of significance to theories of the mind. I call this Position 3.

Position 2 is suggested by Cussins’s discussion of the nature of theories of content. According to Cussins, theories of content in general are theories of the forms of guidance they offer the subject. (p. 153). What sort of content a state or episode has depends on the form of guidance it offers. The motorcycle experience, according to him, guides the subject entirely through environment affordances and resistances: as we saw earlier, he says “The speed was given to me…as a sense of how the immediate environment would afford certain motions and resist others.” In contrast, Cussins says, the speed is “not made available to me…as that which would render true certain propositions and false certain others. The speed was given to be not as a truth-maker, for example the truth-maker for the proposition that I am exceeding the speed limit”. To have speed-related accuracy conditions, further capacities must be exercised, and those capacities are not exercised in the example. Cussins does not explicitly stipulate that in the motorcycle experience, nothing is “given as a truth-maker”, though his exclusive focus on the experiencing the speed of the motorcycle suggests that the only experience he has on his ride is his experience of the speed on the motorcycle, which is not given to him as a truth-maker.20 From these remarks, one could reason one’s way to Position 2 as follows: since experience can guide the subject in this way without having speed-related accuracy conditions, there is no reason to think it has such accuracy conditions. If the only thing experienced is speed, then there is no explanatory need or rationale for positing any contents.

Other remarks by Cussins point in the same direction. He writes:

20 One could reasonably question whether the speed of the motorcycle is presented to Cussins in any way at all in this experience. Naturally Cussins is traveling at some speed on the motorcycle. But that fact alone doesn’t make the speed an experienced property. Perhaps there is no perceptually salient speed at all in the experience, one just experiences movement with a visual dimension in which things look (inter alia) as if you are moving past them. In the discussion above I grant for the sake of argument that speed is presented in some way to Cussins (or to the subject of experiences similar to the one he describes).

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“The great advantage of experiential content is that its links to action are direct, and do not need to be mediated by time-consuming—and activity-distancing— inferential work… which may at any point be subject to sceptical challenge. Experiential knowledge of the kind possessed by the skilled motorcyclist may be subject to resistance, but not to sceptical challenge.” (p. 18)

Extrapolating slightly, if being “subject to skeptical challenge” involves being challenged for accuracy, this kind of challenge cannot get off the ground if the experience is not assessable for accuracy in the first place. And if it isn’t assessable for accuracy, then it doesn’t have contents – leaving us either with Position 1 or Position 2.

Even apart from the fate of Positions 1-3, there seems strong reason to think that afforded mandates must involve contentful experiences somewhere in the picture. In describing the seemingly ‘automatic’ navigation through the busy street and return of the tennis serve, part of Dreyfus and Cussins’s insight is that these actions are rational, despite the absence of anything remotely resembling explicit or even implicit reasoning, construed as a psychological process we undergo along the way to completing the action. If we think of the solicitation of the environment as making afforded mandates into experiences that are in some respects like desires, we could put these observations together and reason as follows:

P1. The kinds of actions involved in afforded mandates are rational.P2. Afforded mandates are conative: they are structured at least partly like desires or drives.P3. Conative states don’t make actions rational without something belief-like to supplement them.

Conclusion: A belief-like state is always nearby in afforded mandates. (Perhaps the belief-like state is the experience itself).

This argument would not establish that afforded mandates are partly constituted by contentful experiences, since its conclusion is merely that something belief-like is in the picture. But if the argument succeeds, a contentful experience is an excellent candidate for containing belief-like component, even if it has drive-like aspects as well.21

I now turn to three positions on afforded mandates that lead us away from the Content View, and argue against them.

4. Three positions on afforded mandates In Position 1, perceptual experiences themselves drop out of the picture. At the opposite extreme, Position 3 allows that afforded mandates are aspects of contentful experience, but denies that these contents play any significant role. Both positions tolerate the Content View, but can be seen as challenging its significance. In contrast,

21 I’m indebted to Sebastian Watzl for suggesting something like this argument, and for lots of other helpful discussion as well.

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Position 2 holds that afforded mandates can result in experiences that have no contents, and so is incompatible with the Content View. I argue that none of these positions do justice to afforded mandates.

Position 1: Afforded mandates are exclusively tension-relief experiences. If afforded mandates extinguish perceptual experience, we can think of this extinction as an extreme case of an ordinary occurrence, in which we exercise skills or habits without any guidance from perceptual experience. A proponent of Position 1 might think we arrive at this state gradually. Over the course exercising skills or habits, our experiences may become so inattentive that eventually certain experiences we may have had in earlier stages of habit or skill-formation fade out completely by the time the habit or skill is well-established. Perhaps in some such cases, we form beliefs about what’s around us, without basing those beliefs on any experience. One often doesn’t need to look carefully, or at all, to see where to reach for a familiar doorknob, because one’s body ‘knows’ already, out of sensory-motor habit, or thanks to unconscious visual processing in the dorsal stream.22 Similarly, according to the most extreme form of Position 1, the motorcycle and tennis cases in their entirety are periods in which the subject proceeds without guidance from current perceptual experience. In a less extreme form, Position 1 says only that there are periods within these cases in which their behavior is executed and perceptual beliefs are formed “directly”, without any perceptual experience to guide them.

It seems doubtful that the entire duration of the motorcycle rides or tennis games exclude perceptual experiences. It is more plausible that once they are underway, actions such as stuffing the racket back into its case or putting down the kickstand of the motorcycle after a ride sometimes seem to be completed on automatic, without much need for perceptual experience at all. The same might be true of belief: one might believe that the racket is back in the case, without any conscious experience or memory of putting it there or seeing it slip in. It is uncontroversial that such actions proceed without deliberation. Position 1 says they proceed without experience as well.

Position 1 challenges the significance of the Content View, while tolerating its truth. If there is no perceptual experience at all in even part of the motorcycle ride or the tennis game, then these stretches non-perceptual experiences do not provide an example of contentless perceptual experiences, since they are not perceptual experiences at all. But such cases may provide examples of perceptual belief and action without perceptual experience. And if the normal, standard way in which perception fed into belief and action when mandates are afforded bypassed experience, then having perceptual experience would be exception. In that case, even if the Content View were true about those exceptional experiences, as a thesis about experience, it could not even potentially illuminate the role of perception in action or belief in cases of afforded mandates.

22 Milner and Goodale (1995)

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But there is little reason from afforded mandates to think having experiences in such cases is the exception, rather than the norm. It is one thing for motor habits to carry you through the actions of putting away the racket, or stepping aside so that the oncoming person can pass you on the narrow sidewalk, so that these aspects of your perceptual experience become highly inattentive and inaccessible to memory. It is something else for the habitual motion to blip out all surrounding perceptual experience, or for stepping aside to prevent you from consciously seeing the oncoming passer-by and the rest of the scene at all. If such occurrences were normal, our conscious lives would be interrupted with waking but blank durations, like seizures sprinkled throughout the day, triggered by habitual actions like putting away a tennis racket, filling up one’s tea kettle, or opening the mailbox. The habit-discontinuity thesis (HD) is that such discontinuities occur on a regular basis with habitual actions.

The HD thesis predicts that we could never take in novel stimuli or notice anything unusual while completing habitual actions – actions that presumably don’t use up much attention. Since habitual actions would seem to free up attention rather than expending it, this prediction is likely to be false, if the usual moral drawn from inattentional blindness experiments are correct. The usual moral is that draining our overall attentional resources with a demanding visual task that reduces our capacity for experience, or our capacity to remember it. The HD thesis also predicts that most of the time when we reflect afterward on whether anything was visible to us while we were completing such actions, we would find that our memories were blank. Yet it’s a familiar occurrence that we complete a habitual action, realize afterward we were paying little attention to what we were doing, and yet can still remember how other parts of the scene looked as we were completing it. You might not realize that you were sliding the tennis racket back into its case, or adjusting your position on a path to let other pass more easily, yet plainly these inattentive actions are sometimes accompanied by your noticing the sunset or hearing that the passerbys were speaking German. It seems plain this prediction too is wrong. Of course, even if it is granted to Position 1 that there are experiences in cases of afforded mandates, and that those experiences have contents, it is a further question what role contentful experiences in afforded mandates play. According to a different alternative to the Content View, contentful experiences occur regularly alongside afforded mandates, but play no significant role. If so, then one might think there is nothing much for the Content View to illuminate. Given the implausibility of Position1, together with the phenomenological motivation for the Content View, of the three anti-representational approaches to afforded mandates, this one might seem the most plausible. I turn to this position last, after considering the simpler position that holds that some afforded mandates are experiences that lack contents altogether.

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Position 2: Experiences without contents. Position 2 says that even when one’s experience consists entirely in afforded mandates, it maintains its perceptual character. Things still look a certain way when you see them. But according to Position 2,these experiences do not have contents.

One can see why Position 2 only attempts to characterize experiences where afforded mandates are pervasive. If the afforded mandate was localized (as it is in the example where your interlocutor’s hair falls in front of their left eye), there would still be the rest of the experience to consider, with the perceiver experiencing much else besides the trigger of the afforded mandate. For all the example of a localized afforded mandate suggests, the experience represents parts of the scene that aren’t experienced as mandating any response. This is why the position is easily illustrated using examples of skilled motor action: these seem to completely absorb the subject’s attention. In principle, however, even as simple a situation as passing someone on a path could generate a pervasive afforded mandate.

The central observation favoring Position 2 is that in the motorcycle, chess and tennis examples, the subject is easily, immediately, intuitively solicited by their environment. There seems to be no explanatory role for contents of experience to play.

In reply, the fact that while acting easily in an environment one is propelled by it does not undermine the phenomenological motivation of the Content View. For instance, the fact that Cussins can so easily navigate the motorcycle in busy streets does not entail that the things he sees on the street – the traffic cones, the oncoming cars, the spaces between the obstacles – fail to look any way to him at all. Without seeing the street scene, it would be hard to have the “sense” that Cussins describes “of how the immediate environment would afford certain actions and resist others”. These descriptions of the experiences suggest that there is a way that some parts of the scene look to the perceiver. Finally, without seeing the court, it would be hard to perceive the gestalt to be completed. As Dreyfus observes, in the experience of playing tennis, there are some “perceived conditions” in response to which one adjusts one’s movement. Since the adjustments are made to “complete the gestalt” of the tennis game, these perceived conditions presumably include the components of the gestalt, such as the positions of the opponent and the ball.

Of course positive reason is needed to think that in general, when things you see look to you to have certain properties, the experience are accurate only if the things are the way they look. Here I advert to earlier defense of the general position. What’s important here is that nothing specific to afforded mandates forces any departure from the starting point of this general argument.

Position 3: An insignificant role for experience contents

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Position 3 holds that (a) in some afforded mandates, possibilities of action are mandated and not represented; (b) the experience embedding the afforded mandate has contents, and so includes contentful sub-experiences; and (c) these contentful sub-experience are explanatorily insignificant relative to the afforded mandates.

To bring this position into focus, it is useful to step back from Position 3 itself and consider two ways in which contentful sub-experiences could be related to afforded mandates. First, there could fail to be any systematic relationship between the two kinds of sub-experiences. Second, the two kinds of sub-experiences could be related through what we can call rationalizing properties. This notion is best introduced through examples. When the interlocutor’s hair looks out of place, it mandates adjustment. When the fluffy bed looks inviting, it mandates plopping down on it. When the forest’s undergrowth looks protective, it mandates entering the forest. The ways the hair, the bed and the forest look in these examples (out of place, protective, fluffy) are rationalizing properties in the sense that the hair’s being out of place rationalizes the feeling that it should be adjusted, the bed’s being fluffy rationalizes plopping down on it, and so on. If rationalizing properties figured in the accuracy conditions of these examples, then experiences would be accurate only if: the hair is out of place, the bed is fluffy, the forest is protective.

When afforded mandates and contentful sub-experiences are related through rationalizing properties, their relationship could take different forms, depending on the direction of explanatory priority. In the content-first direction, you are afforded a mandate, because your experience represents the rationalizing property. Here the forest mandates entering it, at least partly because it looks protective. Alternatively, in the action-first direction, your experience represents a rationalizing property, because a mandate is perceptually salient. In this case, the forest would look protective, at least partly because the mandates entering it. A third option is neither factor is explanatorily prior to the other (perhaps they are connected by a feedback loop).

In the content-first and feedback loop options, the contentful sub-experiences clearly play a significant explanatory role. First, they contribute to making the mandate salient, and this helps explain how the mandate is afforded. Second, since on these options the contentful sub-experiences are explanatorily upstream of the afforded mandate, they help explain the role of the afforded mandate in guiding action. Since Position 3 denies that contentful sub-experiences have any explanatory role, it must hold that if any afforded mandates are systematically related to contentful sub-experiences, they must be related in the action-first direction (e.g., the bed looks fluffy because it affords plopping down on it).

Consider an afforded mandate that is explanatorily upstream of a sub-experience that represents a rationalizing property. Given the assumption that the afforded mandate is experienced without itself being represented, this kind of case suggests the rationalizing contents are an artifact of the affordance. One might then

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reason as follows: it’s the afforded mandate, rather than the contentful sub-experience, that guides the action. If so, then the Content View is not a theory about any aspect of these experience that plays any explanatorily significant role.

In reply, this reasoning should be rejected. Even if rationalizing contents are downstream of afforded mandates, that does not make the objects and properties that figure in those contents perceptually any less salient. And if those objects and properties are perceptually salient, then even if the sub-experiences that represent them fail to provide the reason for which the mandated action is actually performed, nonetheless the sub-experiences provide a different kind of reason for those actions (and for belief).

Suppose a bed mandates collapsing onto it, and the bed looks fluffy only because collapsing onto it is mandated. The perceiver collapses onto the bed because she is exhausted, not because of the way the bed looks to her. And here a tricky question arises. Can the bed’s looking fluffy make plopping down on it a reasonable thing for the perceiver to do, given that she is tired – even though the bed looks fluffy only because collapsing onto it is already mandated? One might say that the bed’s looking fluffy can’t play make the collapse reasonable, on the grounds that the bed’s looking fluffy would have to be available to use as a reason that causes her collapse on the bed, in order for it to provide a reason to collapse onto the bed. On the other side, one might hold that experiences can provide reasons for action, even if the perceiver can’t exploit those reasons, given her psychological constraints. In this case, the constraint is the afforded mandate.

We do not have to answer this question in order to make a case that the contentful sub-experiences in these cases play an important role in the perceiver’s cognitive life. On the first option, the contentful sub-experience provides reason to collapse on the bed of the same sort as the reason provided in case where a fluffy-bed experience is upstream of an afforded mandate (rather than being a side-effect of it). If so, then those sub-experiences play a robust rational role in the perceiver’s cognitive life, and the aspect of experience that the Content View tells us about is not explanatorily idle.

On the second option, the contentful sub-experiences merely rationalize plopping onto the bed, without making the perceiver’s collapse onto the bed reasonable given her exhaustion. Here the sub-experiences do not play any normative role, but they still play an important psychological role in the life of the perceiver, by contributing to the perceiver’s intellectual coherence and integrity. Their role could be compared to beliefs that are formed as a way of relieving cognitive dissonance. Suppose that when people with excessive fear of heights stand on high balconies, their acrophobia ends up exaggerating how high they believe the balcony to be, compared to height estimates by

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non-acrophobics.23 Let us suppose for the sake of argument that they don’t fear the height because the balcony seems so high off the ground, but rather than the balcony seems so high off the ground in part because they are afraid of heights. On the assumption that with all else equal, it is more reasonable to be nervous about standing on a higher balcony than a lower one, the acrophobics’ mistaken belief about how high the balcony is brings their fear into harmony with beliefs – even if the beliefs themselves are unreasonable - caused as they are by a fear, rather than by an accurate assessment of the situation. Even the craziest, most irrational subjects sometimes display this type of internal cognitive harmony, such as the schizophrenic patient who is highly anxious because he thinks that the world is about to end and finds the arrangement of chess pieces on the chessboard to be ominous.

In these cases, the beliefs that the chess pieces are ominous and that the balcony is very high rationalize the background anxiety or fear in something like the way that the fluffy-bed experience and the contentful sub-experiences in our other examples rationalize afforded mandates. The contentful states in all cases, whether they are beliefs or experiences, give us a way to describe this phenomenon in which subjects (or their subpersonal processes) bring their psychological states into a type of cognitive harmony. To the extent that contentful states figure in these processes, they are not explanatorily idle.

Let us now consider contentful sub-experiences that are not systematically related to the afforded mandates that they accompany. A potential example comes from Dreyfus, who discusses a chessmaster playing lightning chess, in which there is barely time to look at the board before the next move rearranges the pieces on it. How does the chessboard look to such a player? Dreyfus suggests that at the very least the master sees patterns of pieces on the board, even if their expertise leaves them with no need to reason explicitly from those patterns:

After responding to an estimated million specific chess positions in the process of becoming a chess master, the master confronted with a new position, spontaneously does something similar to what has previously worked, and lo and behold, it usually works. In general, instead of relying on rules and standards to decide on or to justify her actions, the expert immediately responds to the current concrete situation….When the Grandmaster is playing lightning chess, as far as he can tell, he is simply responding to the patterns on the board. At this speed he must depend entirely on perception and not at all on analysis and comparison of alternatives. 24

23 Stefanucci and Proffitt (2009) provide some evidence that something like this phenomenon actually occurs. Using a variety of measures, both acrophobics and non-acrophobics tend to overestimate the height of balconies they are standing on, acrophobics exaggerate the height substantially more than non-acrophobics. 24 Dreyfus 2005, p.8 of web version.

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The chessmaster example seems best categorized as an afforded mandate in which the experience does not represent any rationalizing properties. The chessboard looks to have some properties - presumably pieces positioned in a certain way. Perhaps only the relevant pieces appear any way to the chessmaster, and the pieces she knows to be irrelevant to that stage of the game are attentionally suppressed.25 Different parts of the board are presumably salient to the chessmaster than would be salient to the novice in those extremely brief periods between chess moves. The chessmaster’s expertise might reduce the level of attentiveness to the overall state of the board, without going so far as to extinguish the experience of the board altogether. If so, the afforded mandate would structure the perceiver’s attention, but wouldn’t be systematically related to the accompanying contents of experience. Call such contents ‘non-rationalizing contents’.

By hypothesis, subjects of afforded mandates experience themselves as being pushed forward from one moment to the next by the situation they’re in. One might think this makes non-rationalizing contents of experience dispensable in guiding action. But that thought seems mistaken. Even if the mandates afforded to the chessmasters, for example, have no systematic impact on the contents of their experience, it is implausible to suppose that a chessmaster could play lightning chess without experiencing the board at all. By Dreyfus’s own description, the chessmaster “depends entirely on perception” in playing the game. Their experiences of the board seem indispensable in their action, even if those actions are not rationalized in any way that we or they could reconstruct from the contents of the experience. So Position 3 seems false, when applied to experiences that involve afforded mandates and have non-rationalizing contents.

Overall, Position 3 is a coherent proposal about how affordances could be

experienced without being represented, even while the experience subsuming the afforded mandate has contents. But the part of the proposal that says that the contentful sub-experiences would be sidelined is false. Whether those sub-experiences “rationalize” the afforded mandate or not, they play important roles in the perceiver’s cognitive life.

ConclusionDreyfus, Cussins and other writers who describe afforded mandates call attention

to an important fact about perception: sometimes our perceptual experiences are pervasively structured by our role as agents responding to social situations. In other situations, our dominant mode is not that of an agent, but a spectator – for instance when we are freed from immediate pressures of spatial negotiation, simply taking in our surroundings. Dreyfus and Cussins are right to emphasize that phenomenologically, perception feels quite different depending on whether it is dominantly structured by our

25 On attentional suppression see van Rullen and Koch (2003).

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roles as agents or not. And that raises a question: to what extent are our experiences structured by afforded mandates, to what extent aren’t they? An upshot of the discussion here is that even if the extent is great, the role of the spectator never disappears completely, even when we’re in the throes of action.

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References

Bengson, J. (ms) “Practical Perception”

Cussins, A. (2003/1990) “Content, Conceptual Content, and Nonconceptual Content”. In Y. Gunther ed. Essays in Nonconceptual Content. Cambridge: MIT Press.

Dreyfus, H. (2005) “Overcoming the Myth of the Mental: How philosophers can profit from the phenomenology of everyday expertise”, Proceedings and Addresses of the American Philosophical Association, 79(2), pp. 47–65.Reprinted as “Overcoming the Myth of the Mental,” Topoi, Vol. 25, No. 1-2:43-49 (2006).

Dreyfus, H. (2002) “Intelligence without Representation – Merleau-Ponty’s critique of mental representation,” Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences, Vol 1, No. 4, Special Issue: Hubert Dreyfus and the Problem of Representation, Anne Jaap Jacobson, Ed., (Kluwer Academic Publishers).

Dreyfus, H. “A Phenomenology of Skill Acquisition as the basis for a Merleau-Pontian Non-representationalist Cognitive Science” ??

Gibson, J. (1977) “The Theory of Affordances” Reprinted in Perceiving, Acting, and Knowing, Eds. Robert Shaw and John Bransford, 1986, New Jersey: Laurence Erlbaum, pp. 127-1XX Kelly, S. (2005) “Seeing things in Merleau-Ponty”

Lessard, D. A., Linkenauger, S. A., & Proffitt, D. R. (2009). Look before you leap: Jumping ability affects distance perception. Perception, 38(12), 1863-1866.

Linkenauger, S. a, Witt, J. K., Stefanucci, J. K., Bakdash, J. Z., & Proffitt, D. R. (2009). The effects of handedness and reachability on perceived distance. Journal of experimental psychology. Human perception and performance, 35(6), 1649-60.

Milner and Goodale (1995) The Visual Brain in Action. Oxford University Press.

Nanay, B. (2011) “Do We See Apples as Edible”? Pacific Philosophical Quarterly 92 (3):305-322.

Nanay, B. (2010) “Attention and Perceptual Content” Analysis70 (2): 263-70.

Nickel, B. (2006) “Against Intentionalism” Philosophical Studies 136(3): 279-304.

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Seuss Geisel, T. (1961) “The Zax”, in The Sneetches and Other Stories. New York: Random House.

Siegel, S. (2010) The Contents of Visual Experience. New York: Oxford University Press.

Stefanucci, J. K., & Proffitt, D. R. (2009). The roles of altitude and fear in the perception of height. Journal of experimental psychology. Human perception and performance, 35(2), 424-38.

Watzl, S. 2010 The Significance of Attention. PhD Dissertation, Columbia University.

Witt and Proffitt (2008) Action-specific influences on distance perception: a role for motor simulation. Journal of experimental psychology. Human perception and performance, 34(6), 1479-92.

van Rullen, R. and Koch, C. “Competition and selection during visual processing of natural scenes and objects” Journal of Vision (2003) 3, 75-85.

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