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Perceptual Consciousness
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 08 January 2010
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In his contribution to Human Senses and Perception, R. J. Hirst has made a number of important suggestions about perceptual consciousness, (i) He has emphasised the need to describe ‘what the percipient is or may be conscious of’ from the percipient's own point of view (p. 294). This mode of description is contrasted with stimulus or neurological description. Perceptual consciousness of one object is distinguished from perceptual consciousness of another object ‘only by or on the evidence of, the person concerned’ (p. 295). The method of obtaining descriptions of perceptual consciousness is either to question a percipient or to reflect on our own experience, (ii) The second important point stressed by Hirst is that the end product of perceiving is ‘the conscious experience of external objects’ (p. 303). Such an obvious point is often lost sight of in behavioural, dispositional, or neurophysiological analyses, (iii) The third and final suggestion made by Hirst to which I want to call attention is the usefulness of a genetic hypothesis to explain and account for perceptual consciousness. Hirst feels that perceptual consciousness is ‘unanalysable at the conscious level’, meaning (a) that it is ‘a unitary awareness of objects or scenes’ and (b) that the ‘various interacting unconscious activities’ which coexist with awareness ‘cannot be brought forward into consciousness’ (p. 305). The various analytical theories of perception (e.g. the traditional empiricist, the sense-datum) have been designed to break perceptual consciousness into its components. This has resulted in their being false to perceptual consciousness. A genetic explanation of awareness has several advantages, prime among them being its ability to explain the complexity and development of awareness.
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- Royal Institute of Philosophy Supplements , Volume 3: Knowledge and Necessity , March 1969 , pp. 34 - 50
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- Copyright © The Royal Institute of Philosophy and the contributors 1969
References
page 34 note 1 By Wyburn, G. M., Pickford, R. W., and Hirst, R. J. (Edinburgh and London, 1964).Google Scholar
page 35 note 1 I have examined these and other psychologically oriented accounts of perception in Thinking and Perceiving (La Salle, Ill., 1962).Google Scholar
page 36 note 1 Professor Hirst has been helpful in discussion with me in clarifying his views. It is clear that I would like to turn his recognition of the first-person perspective and of the mental features of awareness against the identity theory, while he has attempted to assimilate them to that theory. Quite apart from the question of how we interpret the three propositions in Hirst's account which I have cited, Hirst's work (both in Human Senses and in The Problems of Perception) should be warmly praised for its close association with and use of psychological data. In that way, he has made important contributions to the philosophy of perception.
page 38 note 1 For a fruitful discussion of this level of awareness in Merleau-Ponty's analysis of perception, see Taylor, Charles and Kullman, Michael, ‘The Pre-Objective World’, in Essays In Phenomenology, ed. Natanson, Maurice (The Hague, 1966) pp. 116–37.Google Scholar
page 38 note 2 See my ‘The Form and Structure of Experience’, in Acta Psychologica (1963).Google Scholar
page 40 note 1 Psychologie de la Sensibility (Paris, 1954).Google Scholar Translations from Burloud are my own.
page 40 note 1 De la psychologie à la philosophie (Paris, 1950).Google Scholar I would urge philosophers to examine the work of Burloud. It is rich in psychological information and sensitive to philosophical issues. I would even say that the two books I have referred to here are more important for phiJosophers of perception and knowledge than the work of Piaget.
page 41 note 1 Man's Picture of his World (London, 1961) pp. 83, 84.Google Scholar
page 41 note 2 I should point out that my brief borrowings, in what follows, from psychoanalysis come from Melanie Klein and her followers. I am far from being an expert or even an informed reader in the Kleinian theory. The work and theory of this group is, however, especially relevant to perceptual consciousness because it offers us a very interesting analysis of the early stages in the child's development of awareness. I am not particularly wedded to the Kleinian analysis of the preconscious, but it is an interesting charting of the preconscious areas as mental and psychic. For those who find the Kleinian theory too fantastic (as many do), I would offer Burloud's analysis as more reasoned and more easily acceptable. In any event, I cite the Kleinian account as illustrative only, as one way to characterise the earliest years of infant awareness in psychic terms.
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page 42 note 3 Ibid., p. 99.
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page 43 note 1 ‘The Nature and Function of Phantasy’, p. 84.Google Scholar
page 43 note 2 Ibid., p. 87.
page 43 note 3 Ibid., p. 90.
page 43 note 4 Ibid., p. 97.
page 43 note 5 Ibid.
page 43 note 6 Ibid., p. 109.
page 44 note 1 Psychologie de la sensibilité, p. 165.Google Scholar