Commentary on Action in Perception

Abstract

Action in Perception commendably sets out to make sense of the nature of sense experience in the light of empirical research. Alva Noe is sensitive to developments in neuroscience and he sets out to explain the character of our sense experience in a way that makes sense of what we know from psychophysics up about perception. He is critical of various models of perceptual cognition and attracted in the enactive approach to an account which can both be true to the phenomenology of perception and make sense of the place of perceiving subjects within a physical world. Even if its author is diffident of offering a theory of consciousness as such, still the account is one of how we are able to visually perceive objects and the world around us. According to Noe, we should think of perceivers as actively engaged in perception, as exploring the world around them. In particular, in the case of vision, they come to see the world around them through exercising their sensorimotor understanding of the visual appearance of objects through active exploration. The book is very rich in its themes and arguments. I want to focus on just one strand of this central theme: the ways in which appearances or looks might be basic in perception. In some ways Noe's approach echoes elements of older sensedatum theories. The sensorimotor skill, understanding, or knowledge that Noe emphasises as part of our coming to be perceptually aware of the world around us parallels the sense-datum theorists' talk of perceptual acceptance, pseudo-intuitive consciousness, and pre-judicial mental act. Where Moore or Price talk of sense-data, Noe talks of elements which are present 'strictly speaking' in experience. Neither side denies that perceptual consciousness involves more than this;