Reply to Campbell, Martin, and Kelly

Abstract

Seeing is a way of learning about the word by exploring how things look. But looks, on the view developed Action Perception, are not mental intermediaries. They are, rather, aspects of the things we see. Our problem is not that of getting from in here to out there, but rather that of learning how things are from a place. Perceptual experience is always an encounter with objects but it is also always an encounter with objects that is shaped by one's situation or perspective. The challenge of the theory of perception is to appreciate how perception can be, this way, an encounter with how things are, when the nature of things necessarily exceeds what can be taken a glance. But this challenge cannot even be brought into focus until one appreciates what I will call the two-dimensionality, or duality, of perceptual content. Sean Kelly rejects the duality of perceptual experience; he says my phenomenology is bad and my proposal otiose. He insists that an important adjunct to Noe's dual content view, for example, is adherence to a certain kind of primacy claim: not only do we represent both the apparent and the real properties of objects, on this view, but the apparent property is some sense the primary one. And he adds: This puts Noe league with a certain kind of sense-datum theorist, and indeed he admits that his view leaves unscathed what is really the sense-datum theory's core idea (Action Peception, p. 81).