Objects, Places, and Perception

In [Clark, 2000], Austen Clark argues convincingly that a widespread view of perception as a complicated kind of feature-extraction is incomplete. He argues that perception has another crucial representational ingredient: it must also involve the representation of “sensory individuals” that exemplify sensorily extracted features. Moreover, he contends, the best way of understanding sensory individuals takes them to be places in space surrounding the perceiver. In this paper, I’ll agree with Clark’s case for sensory individuals (§1). However, I shall argue against his view of sensory individuals as places (§2). Instead, I’ll propose and defend an alternative account of sensory individuals that construes the latter as (visual) objects (§§3–5). On one venerable view, perception amounts to something like a kind of feature extraction. According to this view, perception extracts and represents distal features of the world so that the organism can think and act in environmentally appropriate ways. For example, this view has it that perception registers the presence of redness in the environment on some occasions, and the presence of triangularity in the environment on others, and then passes this information to other systems so that the perceiving organism does what is appropriate for the current environment — sticking around to eat the things it should eat or fleeing from the things that would eat it, as the case may be. In [Clark, 2000], Austen Clark argues convincingly that this view of perception as a complicated feature-extractor is incomplete. He argues that perception has another crucial representational ingredient: it must also involve the attribution of the extracted sensory features to individuals — in effect, that perception must have a kind of subject-predicate structure so that it can represent that sensory features hold of certain individuals. This conclusion, which I shall call the thesis of sensory individuals, or SI, seems to me an extremely deep point about perception, and one that deserves substantial attention. In addition, Clark has a related proposal about just how we should understand the sensory individuals the need for which he has urged. Namely, he ∗Department of Philosophy, University of California, San Diego, 9500 Gilman Drive, La Jolla, CA 92093-0119, [email protected]