Self-Location and Agency

1. The problem of perceptual self-location We perceive things in the external world as spatially located both with respect to each other and to ourselves, such that they are in principle accessible from where we seem to be. I hear the door bang behind me; I feel the pen on the desk over to my right; and I see you walking beneath the line of pictures, from left to right in front of me. By displaying these spatial relations between its objects and us, the perceivers, perception places us in the perceived world: our world and the world we perceive are one. Clearly this is not achieved by our continually perceiving ourselves along with the things around us, and thus recovering our position with respect to them. Indeed I shall argue that there are serious difficulties with the suggestion that this might be the basic mechanism for perceptual self-location. Furthermore, I shall argue that our existence as an element of the objective order cannot be inferred from the raw given in sense perception. Hence it cannot even be on the right lines as an answer to the question 'What is it for perception to represent its objects as environmental to the subject?', that it should present these objects, along with the perceiving subject himself, or along with something from which his existence in the perceived world could be deduced, in the very same frame so to speak. Nevertheless it yields him an awareness of himself as there in the wings of that scene, genuinely located with respect to the action, yet somehow not normally quite getting onto the stage. And I shall argue here, that perceptual contents succeed in being self-locating in this way in virtue of their immediate role in the control and coordination of spatial behavior. What we need, is an account of what it is in virtue of which the perceived world is represented as containing the perceiving subject himself. What is it in virtue of which perceptual contents are thus self-locating? Well perception places the perceiver in the world of its objects by representing their spatial relations with respect to him. So our problem is to give an account of what it is in virtue of which perceptual experience carries such egocentric spatial content. What is it in virtue of which perception represents things as standing in various spatial relations with the perceiver? 1 There are …