Abstract
The paper aims to show, first, that O’Regan’s and Noë’s Sensorimotor Theory of Vision and Visual Experiences suffers from circularity, and that evidence from empirical research within perception psychology unequivocally invalidates their theory. Secondly, to show that the circularity in O’Regan’s and Noë’s theory of vision and in other general causal and functional theories of perception (i.e. Gibson’s and Marr’s theories of perception) is the inevitable consequence of mutually conflicting assumption of Cartesian dualism underlying these theories. The paper concludes by outlining the consequences of this conflict of assumptions for psychological theories of perception.
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Notes
Unless otherwise indicated, page numbers refer to O’Regan & Noë 2001.
I.e. states of the brain organising visual information into representations, or activating cortical maps.
These sensorimotor contingences are special for vision and differentiate visual sensations from others, such as auditory, tactile or haptic. Since in their paper O’Regan and Noë mainly, if not exclusively, deal with sensorimotor contingencies associated with vision, the presentation and discussion in this paper will only include those contingencies.
Strangely, in view of the fact that according to O’Regan’s and Noë’s theory it is a basic requirement that the perceiver is visually aware of what he looks at in order to see it at all, their theory does not attempt to explain – in other than this suspiciously tautological way – how visual awareness comes about. To say that visual awareness of, say an object, comes about due to the fact that the appropriate sensorimotor contingencies for that object is being activated when looked at will not do, since these contingencies would not be activated unless the perceiver is already attending to it – and hence, presumably, is visually aware of what he is looking at and attending to.
To further confuse this issue, O’Regan and Noë also think that the knowledge on the part of the perceiver when exercising his mastery of the structure of rules of sensorimotor contingencies is not of an explicit kind, indeed, the perceiver does not possess any propositional knowledge about most of the sensorimotor contingencies being activated during perception. For example, a perceiver will not be able to describe all the changes and distortions that a convex surface should suffer when he moves himself or his eyes relative to it or when it is moved relative to him, nor the invariance pertaining to the structure of these changes. Such changes are obviously not accessible to the perceiver. However, say O’Regan and Noë, our brains have registered and extracted such laws – and therefore, presumably, it is our brains that know that the laws associated with normal seeing of the surface in question are being obeyed (cf. p. 944).
This point of how space, objects and their attributes may be inferred from sensorimotor “dependencies” is attempted further developed by O’Regan’s and co-workers in Philipona. O’Regan and Nadal (2003).
Thus, he writes: “That a plate has a given P-shape is a fact about the plate’s shape, one determined by the plate’s relation to the location of a perceiver and to the ambient light”, (ibid. p.176).
For further clarification of this point, cf. note 9.
Fodor and Pylyshyn’s paper (1981) have similarly pointed out that, what according to Gibson is “picked up directly,” is not how things are in the environment, but rather information of invariant features in the light emitted from the environment, which specifies features of things in the environment. Now, in order to recover perception of the layout in the environment from what it picked up in the light requires complex cognitive processes of inferences. However, as Fodor and Pylyshyn also point out, the subject’s epistemic relation to the structure of the light is causally dependent on his epistemic relation to the layout of the environment – and hence inferences from “light” to “layout” presuppose knowledge about the environment. For further arguments on this point, cf. also Praetorius (1978, 2000).
Curiously, Marr does not make a secret of this fact, on the contrary. He writes: “As we have seen, in each case the surface structure is strictly underdetermined from the information in images alone, and the secret of formulating the processes accurately lies in discovering precisely what additional information can safely be assumed about the world that provides powerful enough constrains for the process to run.” (Marr 1982, p. 265, italics added).
i.e. in the sense, without referring to or indeed without identifying objects in the world as those things, which we may perceive or cognise “out there” at particular places, having these and those perceptible and cognisable features.
Elsewhere (Praetorius 2000), I argued that this is an assumption which must be taken for granted as a matter of principle. Thus, it is not difficult to show that it applies to this principle, as it does to principles and axioms within logic and mathematics, that any attempt to explain, prove or justify this principle – as indeed would be any attempts to deny or doubt it – would have to presuppose the principle, and hence would be either circular or contradictory. For thorough arguments to this effect, I refer the reader to Praetorius (2000).
Furthermore, it is precisely if we maintain that perceiving things in the world amounts to merely having mental representations or percepts of them that a distinction is not possible between perceiving a thing and the actual thing being perceived, and hence that it is not possible to distinguish between a perception or representation of a thing and the thing. Nor would we be able to determine whether any particular perceptual experience of the world concerns or represents, indeed is true or false, veridical or non-veridical of the world “out there.” For, obviously, so to determine would require that we knew of that of which our perception is a representation, and hence would require that we do (also) have perceptual access to the independently existing world itself.
The terms “logical” and “logical relation” are used here in the same way as Ryle did in his analysis of what he called the “logical geography” of propositions and concepts about the mind (Ryle 1949).
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Praetorius, N. The problems of consciousness and content in theories of perception. Phenom Cogn Sci 6, 349–367 (2007). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11097-006-9040-0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11097-006-9040-0