The Ecological Approach to Perception: The Place of Perceptual Content

Abstract

The kind of perceptual systems that human beings possess enables each of us to respond in highly adaptive deliberate ways that take into account the suitability of particular behaviors to what we are aware of ourself as experiencing perceptually here and now. In deciding what to do next under the perceived circumstances, content is the dimension of perceptual experience that we consult. For perceptual content is how whatever the perceiver is now having perceptual experience of is given in or taken by the respective perceptual experience. Perceptual content includes presentational content, which is all the ways that what you are perceptually experiencing may be appearing to you, and intentional content, which is all the ways that your stream of perceptual experience may take to be that of which you have perceptual awareness in the environment or self. Therefore, perceptual content must be distinguished from the intentional object of perceptual awareness, which is that property, event, or entity of which you have perceptual awareness. Gibson proposed that there is no perceptual content independent of the particular intentional objects that one perceptually apprehends, which are always part of the ecological environment. This externalization of perceptual content was due, no doubt, to Gibson's conception of perceptually apprehending anything at all as not mediated by awareness of anything else, such as something immanent in perceptual experience itself. However, perceptual content need not be, theoretically, a replacement for what the perceiver has perceptual awareness of. During straightforward perceiving, the perceiver does not have awareness of perceptual content but of parts of the ecological environment including the perceiver. Perceptual content is how the external intentional object perspectivally appears from moment to moment and how it is perceptually taken to be, veridically or not. Perceptual taking of an ecological property is always in one or another of the latter's instantiations, and perceptual taking of an ecological entity or event is always with properties. The perceptual intentional object's appearing in a particular manner is distinct from perceptually taking the intentional object. For example, an ecological property may be taken quite veridically yet through a flow of varying appearance. And even when the property appears in a constant way, perceptual awareness may take it differently from one moment to the next. For example, a perceiver may have visual awareness of a surface without noticing the surface's color-texture, though the color-texture may appear to the perceiver throughout looking at the surface, before and after he or she stops noticing the color-texture.(ABSTRACT TRUNCATED AT 400 WORDS)