Perception vs. inner sense: A probeem about direct awareness

Philosophical Studies

Volumn 101, Issue 2-3, 2000, Pages 143-160

  Rosenberg, Jay F ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF NORTH CAROLINA   (United States)

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[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 0000773312     PISSN: 00318116     EISSN: 15730883     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1023/a:1026441012315     Document Type: Article

References (15)

1. "Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind", reprinted as Ch. 5, pp. 127-196 of Science, Perception and Reality, (Ridgeview Publishing Co.; Atascadero, CA: 1963, 1991). Cited here as "EPM".
2. Published as Ch. 3, pp. 60-105, of Science, Perception and Reality. Cited here as "P".
3. Lecture I, pp. 3-36, of "Foundations for a Metaphysics of Pure Process", The Monist, 64, 1981, pp. 3-90. Cited here as "FMPP".
4. Reprinted as Ch. 8, pp. 157-189 of Philosophical Perspectives: Metaphysics and Epistetnology, (Ridgeview Publishing Co.; Atascadero, CA: 1959, 1967). Cited here as "SRII".
5. In Science and Metaphysics: Variations on Kantian Themes, (Routledge and Kegan Paul; London: 1967), henceforth "SM". Sellars formulates the relevant thesis as the claim that "sense impressions [are] properly described by a special use of a minimal physical vocabulary". (SM, 15)
6. Given the earlier account of such episodes as having both a prepositional and a descriptive content, this can't be quite right. Only the prepositional content of such an episode, i.e., the perceptual judgment, can be introspectible in consequence of Jones' first theoretico-pedagogical initiative. As the discussion to follow will show, the terminological slippage here is potentially significant.
7. For example, earlier in EPM we find: [To] say that a certain experience is a seeing that something is the case, is to do more than describe the experience. It is to characterize it as, so to speak, making an assertion or claim, . . . I realize that by speaking of experiences as containing prepositional claims, I may seem to be knocking at closed doors . . . [but] the justification of this way of talking is one of my major aims (EPM, 144).
8. Published in Categories: A Colloquium, ed. Henry W. Johnston, Jr., (Pennsylvanian State University; College Park, PA: 1978), pp. 231-245. Cited henceforth as "IKTE".
9. Citations in this form are to Kant's Critique of Pure Reason, tr. Norman Kemp Smith, (Macmillan & Co., Ltd. & St. Martin's Press; New York: 1929 & 1965). In the interest of exegetical accuracy, I shall occasionally depart from Kemp Smith's translation.
10. Sellars appropriately cites in this connection Kant's treatment of the imagination at B151 ff. He evidently overlooks, however, the explicit echo of A78 = B105 at B162, fn. b: "It is one and the same spontaneity, which in the one case, under the title of imagination, and in the other case, under the title of understanding, brings combination into the manifold of intuition."
11. As Sellars of course recognizes (cf. IKTE, #31-45), the story of such images and their perspectival character is part of the larger Kantian story regarding what he calls the schematism of the pure concepts of understanding (A137-147 = B176-187). I explore these connections in "Kantian Schemata and the Unity of Perception", in Language and Thought, Alex Burri, ed., (Walter de Gruyter Verlag; Berlin and New York: 1997), pp. 179-87.
12. The diagram tidily represents two aspects of Kant's "threefold synthesis": the synthesis of apprehension in an intuition, which issues in the image-model, and the synthesis of recognition in a concept, which issues in the perceptual taking, i.e., the indexical subject term of the perceptual judgment. The remaining aspect, the synthesis of reproduction in imagination, specifically concerns perception across time. It is implicit in all of these diagrams which, so to speak, represent instantaneous cross-sections of temporally extended processes and activities.
13. A consideration of ambiguous figures, e.g., Jastrow's duck-rabbit or the familiar reversible cube, leads to the same conclusion. On the face of it, the intrinsic qualities and structural relationship of elements of the manifold of sense remain constant during a "Gestalt switch" from seeing one aspect of such a figure to seeing the other, but the image changes dramatically.
14. Pain also comes in degrees, from mild to excruciating, and, of course, the temporal structure of pain experience also enters significantly into our descriptions. Thus pains can be characterized as momentary, continuous, or intermittent; transient or recurring. Here, however, we will continue to bracket diachronic aspects of awareness.
15. The alternative reporting idiom exemplified by "My left foot hurts" suggests the possibility of a hybrid position according to which one is intuitively (deictically) aware of a region of one's sensible body as, for instance, "throbbing painfully", the form of the correlative judgment, in other words, would be something like "This painfully throbbing left-foot-region-of-my-body makes it difficult to concentrate". The suggestion is certainly ingenious, but I am convinced that, unfortunately, it does not reflect the actual phenomenology of pain experience.