Concepts and Their Role in Knowledge: Reflections on Objectivist Epistemology

Perceptual Awareness as Presentational

85 Perceptual Awareness as Presentational Onkar Ghate L et me begin by describing a brief episode of perception. I enter my apartment from the outside. I can feel the smooth key as I take it from my pocket and the slight resistance of the lock as I use the key to turn the bolt. I open the door and feel its handle slide away from me and watch the door as it swings open. I enter, and as I do I feel how the surface underneath my feet has changed, from a hard concrete to a more yielding carpet. Before me lies a spread of entities. In the entrance of the apartment are shelves on which rest numerous pairs of shoes; atop the shelves are some keys on a key ring, a pad of paper and a pen. As I walk through the entrance into the living room, I see shelves that contain innumerable CDs and a leather couch the surface of which is catching the light in different ways. I see fish swimming in an aquarium in the corner of the room and hear the trickle of the water as the filter pumps. I see the spider plant hanging over the aquarium, its leaves, shades of green and white, moving in the breeze. I can smell the scent of meat cooking; I walk to the screen of the balcony, and down below by the pool I can see a person grilling hamburgers, smoke rising from the barbecue. All this, and indeed much, much more am I aware of in a relatively short span of perceptual awareness. 86 ■ Onkar Ghate Pre-philosophically, one takes one’s perception to be a relation between oneself (one’s faculty of consciousness) and existents in the (external ) world; in an episode of perceptual awareness like the one described above, external existents (the aquarium, the spider plant) are components of the conscious experience. Parts of the (external) world are present, given to one, in perception. But in philosophy, at least since the arguments of the ancient skeptics and especially since the publication of Descartes ’s Meditations on First Philosophy, this pre-philosophical view is all too often rejected. Modern philosophical accounts of perception usually describe perception in terms of one or both of the following general elements: (1) a sensory impression (or a sensation, a sensory qualia, an objectless way of sensing characterized in adverbial terms, etc.) and (2) a representational mental experience (being aware of a mental image, of an idea, of a sensedatum , etc., or having a type of propositional attitude, a type of mental state with satisfaction conditions, a type of mental state with propositional content, a belief, a tendency to believe, a judgment, etc.). Typically, sensory impressions are thought of as aspects or properties of the perceiver, produced by his causal interaction with the world, as a small stone dropped from an overpass will leave an impression on the hood of the car passing underneath. Some accounts of perception maintain that if an impression has an appropriate causal genesis, that is sufficient for the perceiver to be aware of, to be cognizing, the world. But most will not. No matter how it is caused, these accounts maintain, a sensory impression is not cognition, anymore than the impression left by the stone is the car’s awareness or cognition of the stone. Like all cognition, perceptual awareness, these accounts maintain, requires representation: the perceiver must be undergoing an experience that represents the world as being a certain way. A necessary condition of (successful) perceptual cognition will be that the world is as the perceiver ’s mental experience represents it to be. (A particular causal genesis of the representational mental experience or of the sensory impression may also be a necessary condition.) In some theories of perceptual cognition of the (external) world,1 one and the same thing can be both a sensory impression and an essential part of a representational experience. For instance, an image or idea or 1. I leave aside phenomenalist or idealist accounts of perception, which discard the idea of perceptual cognition of the external world. Perceptual Awareness as Presentational ■ 87 sense-datum can be characterized as the product of a perceiver’s causal interaction with the world; from this perspective, it is an impression. But the perceiver can also attain an (inner) awareness of this image or idea or sense-datum, and from this perspective the...