Thought and World: The Hidden Necessities

5 Perception and Abstraction

chap ter 5 Perception and Abstraction What is perceived is what is so, though not formally identical with it, just as the magnified text for a person wearing glasses is really the same as the unmagnified text on its own. They are not strictly identical, for the text can exist without being magnified while the text thus-being-magnified and read can’t exist without the unmagnified text. Moreover, both the text as the particular marks and as an intelligible message are in exactly the same place and accessed by way of the same sensory processes. That should lead us, upon reflection to follow, to realize that what is known really is what is so. First, I describe some aspects of human perception with its coincident abstraction (focused by conceptions) that grounds true (and false) judgment in reality.1 Then I describe how that native activity, abstraction , makes spatiotemporally and causally and historically remote particulars and universal situations present in judgment—for example,that ice cracks, that the Milky Way is billions of stars, that Rome fell, and that lead is unmagnetizable. By contrast, a fundamental weakness of opposed views of knowledge, as will become clear, is that they cannot explain how those can be the very things we know. Abstraction, which is a constant natural—indeed, native—condition of human awareness, has to be focused by conceptions (operative concepts) to present repeatable structures that are, otherwise, entirely  — —  Thought and World saturated in individuals things,saturated the way the function N x N = N2 is saturated in  x  =  and also in  x  =  (really there, but accessible only to one who thinks a certain way). Without constant conceptions focusing abstraction,we can’t explain our nonperceptual knowledge of remote realities like“Caesar was assassinated ,”2 “the United States is usually at war,”or“the French Revolution happened after the English one,” and “zinc is a metal,” because we can’t otherwise explain how such situations are made what is known. Such knowing is not just knowledge about sentences or representations or reports (though sometimes it is). Rather, it is quite typically a grasp of realities .That requires the remote or universal situation to be intentionally present even when its presence is wraithlike, like a childhood excursion remembered, or wrapped in anachronistic or made-up images like one’s knowledge of Marco Polo’s travels. We need to explain that. The abstractions involved, as we will see, cannot be merely images, sensations, or sentences at all, or be reduced to them. Abstraction is, instead, a constant activity of ours that transforms the particular. It is not a making up, but more like an x-ray. Sometimes I compare focused abstraction to fluoroscopy and sometimes to magnification, but not to mirroring or to sonograms that are intermediates. Abstraction is not representation, but departicularization. That requires a focus, like a lens adjustment, to determine what is disclosed. I am not proposing to explain reductively how we do that, but instead why we have to be able continuously to do that in order to do what we know we do, like read this very sentence. 1. About Perception The perceived is directly presented; let’s premise that. It is not by an intermediate and intervening experience of something subjective and made by us3 that I see the print on the page, even though the enabling conception has to be acquired and the reality, the print, is a physically realized social construct. The same holds for all the senses. I see by the look of things, hear by the sound, but usually do not distinguish the look or sound from the things, or experience the look or sound in- termediately. I don’t have intervening experiences of impressions4 even though the organ-cerebral systems respond distinctively to physical signals from diverse and distant sources.5 Auditory, visual, olfactory, gustatory , tactile, and proprioceptive awareness is the medium in-which and with-which higher animals perceive. Conception with judgmental understanding makes otherwise animal cognition specifically human.6 The perceived is not a subjective appearance like a dream or like the “look” of a stick mistaken for a snake. The “look” can, of course, be attended to, even perceived instead, but is not perceived right when the stick is misperceived to be a snake.For the stick is misconstrued by being misconceived. The look and sound and smell of...