Table Of Content(cid:2)
ision
and Mind
Selected Readings in the Philosophy of Perception
edited by Alva Noë and Evan Thompson
Vision and Mind
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Vision and Mind
Selected Readings in the Philosophy of Perception
edited by
Alva Noë and Evan Thompson
A Bradford Book
The MIT Press
Cambridge, Massachusetts
London, England
© 2002 Massachusetts Institute of Technology
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form by any electronic
or mechanical means (including photocopying, recording, or information storage and
retrieval) without permission in writing from the publisher.
This book was set in Sabon by SNP Best-set Typesetter Ltd., Hong Kong.
Printed and bound in the United States of America.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Vision and mind : selected readings in the philosophy of perception / edited by Alva Noë
and Evan Thompson.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 0-262-14078-0 (alk. paper)—ISBN 0-262-64047-3 (pbk. : alk. paper)
1. Perception (Philosophy) I. Noë, Alva. II. Thompson, Evan.
B828.45 .V565 2002
121¢.34—dc21 2002023533
Contents
Preface vii
Sources ix
1 Introduction 1
Alva Noë and Evan Thompson
2 Selections from Phenomenology of Perception 15
Maurice Merleau-Ponty
3 Some Remarks about the Senses 35
H. P. Grice
4 The Intentionality of Sensation: A Grammatical Feature 55
G. E. M. Anscombe
5 A Theory of Direct Visual Perception 77
James J. Gibson
6 Perception and Its Objects 91
P. F. Strawson
7 Perceptions as Hypotheses 111
Richard L. Gregory
8 Veridical Hallucination and Prosthetic Vision 135
David Lewis
9 Perception, Vision and Causation 151
Paul Snowdon
10 How Direct Is Visual Perception?: Some Reflections on Gibson’s
“Ecological Approach” 167
Jerry A. Fodor and Zenon W. Pylshyn
vi Contents
11 Selections from Vision 229
David Marr
12 Sensation and the Content of Experience: A Distinction 267
Christopher Peacocke
13 Linking Propositions 289
Davida Y. Teller
14 Molyneux’s Question 319
Gareth Evans
15 Ways of Coloring: Comparative Color Vision as a Case Study
for Cognitive Science 351
Evan Thompson, Adrian Palacios, and Francisco J. Varela
16 Conscious Experience 419
Fred Dretske
17 The Content of Perceptual Experience 443
John McDowell
18 On the Function of Visual Representation 459
Dana H. Ballard
19 Seeing Is Believing—Or Is It? 481
Daniel C. Dennett
20 Sensory Substitution and Qualia 497
Paul Bach-y-Rita
21 The Visual Brain in Action 515
A. David Milner and Melvyn A. Goodale
22 What Is a Neural Correlate of Consciousness? 531
David J. Chalmers
23 On the Brain-Basis of Visual Consciousness: A Sensorimotor Account 567
Alva Noë and J. Kevin O’Regan
Index 599
Preface
The writings in this volume investigate the nature of visual perception. Our goal
has been to produce a collection that can serve as a starting point for the philo-
sophy of perception. These writings provide, we believe, a clear statement of the
central issues confronting the philosophical study of perception today. It is our hope
that this volume will make a contribution to their ongoing study.
All the works collected here, except for one, have been previously published.
Many are classics; most have been important for philosophical discussion of per-
ception; all serve, we hope, to indicate clearly an important family of problems. In
order to make the book as useful as possible, we have resisted (in all but a few
instances) reprinting materials that are easily available elsewhere or that are
excerpted from larger works.
Vision and Mind has been long in the making. Through several incarnations, it
has grown leaner and more focused. We are grateful to many people for advice,
criticism, and encouragement. We would like to express our thanks to Ned Block,
Justin Broakes, Alex Byrne, Dave Chalmers, Dan Dennett, Sean Kelly, Erik Myin,
Luiz Pessoa, Susanna Siegel, and Francisco Varela. We are grateful to the authors
and to their original publishers for granting us permission to include their works
here. We offer special thanks to Carolyn Gray Anderson and to her predecessor at
The MIT Press, Amy Yeager, for their strong support of this project. We also wish
to thank Diane Zorn for her help in preparing the manuscript. Finally, A. N. grate-
fully acknowledges the support of faculty research funds from the Humanities Divi-
sion of the University of California, Santa Cruz.
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Sources
Maurice Merleau-Ponty. Selections from Phenomenology of Perception. Trans. Colin Smith.
London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, [1945] 1962. Reprinted by permission of the publisher.
“The ‘sensation’ as a unit of experience.” (pp. 3–12)
“Experience and objective thought: The problem of the body.” (pp. 67–72)
“The theory of the body is already a theory of perception.” (pp. 203–206)
H. P. Grice. “Some remarks about the senses.” In R. J. Butler, ed., Analytic Philosophy,
15–153. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1962. Reprinted by permission of the publisher.
G. E. M. Anscombe. “The intentionality of sensation: A grammatical feature.” In Metaphysics
and the Philosophy of Mind: Collected Philosophical Papers, Vol. III, 3–20. Oxford:
Blackwell, 1965. Reprinted by permission of the publisher.
James J. Gibson. “A theory of direct visual perception.” In J. R. Royce and W. W.
Rozeboom, eds., The Psychology of Knowing, 215–240. New York: Gordon & Breach,
1972. Reprinted by permission of the publisher.
P. F. Strawson. “Perception and its objects.” In G. F. Macdonald, ed., Perception and Iden-
tity: Essays Presented to A. J. Ayer with His Replies, 41–60. London: Macmillan, 1979.
Reprinted by permission of the author and the publisher.
Richard L. Gregory. “Perceptions as hypotheses.” Philosophical Transactions of the Royal
SocietyB 290 (1980): 181–197. Reprinted by permission of the author and the Royal Society.
David Lewis. “Veridical hallucination and prosthetic perception.” In Australasian Journal
of Philosophy 58 (1980): 239–249. Reprinted by permission of the author and
the Australasion Journal of Philosophy. D. Lewis, “Postscript.” In Philosophical Papers
Volume 2, 287–290. Reprinted by permission of the author. Oxford: Oxford University Press,
1986.
Paul Snowdon. “Perception, vision and causation.” Aristotelian Society Proceedings New
Series 81 (1980–1981): 175–192. Reprinted by courtesy of the Editor of the Aristotelian
Society: © [1981] and by permission of the author.
Jerry A. Fodor and Zenon W. Pylyshyn. “How direct is visual perception?: Some reflections
on Gibson’s ‘Ecological Approach.’” Cognition 9 (1981): 139–196. Reprinted with permis-
sion from Elsevier Science.
