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In an apparently original and radical departure from mainstream ideas, Alva Noë argues that perception does not involve inner representations but needs to be regarded a kind of active engagement with the environment. According to Noë’s enactive view, visual perception requires “sensorimotor knowhow”: the perceiver needs to have certain perceptual skills and expectations. In his influential book Action in Perception, Noë develops the enactive view as solution to the “problem of perceptual presence,” the problem of how to conceive of “the presence of that which, strictly speaking, I do not perceive” (Noë 2004, p. 60). According to Noë, the problem arises in various cases, e.g., the unattended parts of the perceptual scene, as well as objects’ back sides. Noë argues that it can be solved by appeal to the idea of sensorimotor knowhow. In a challenge to Noë, I argue for the thesis that his enactive view, as he states it in Action in Perception, does not succeed in solving or even adequately motivating the problem of perceptual presence, unless a Husserlian strand in his view is complemented by further Husserlian notions, especially fulfillment. For example, Noë has difficulty establishing that there even is a problem concerning the presence of the object’s back side. The prevalent view is that the object’s back sides are not perceptually present, i.e., they are not, in any sense, seen by the perceivers, and Noë has offered no argument to the contrary. Noë’s problem of perceptual presence is, in fact, ambiguous: there are two quite different problems and it takes quite different resources to solve them. First, there is the problem that the unattended parts of the perceptual scene may not be genuinely present to us: Noë presents us with empirical data which suggest that what seems to be plainly in view can be, “strictly speaking,” not seen by us. We may be subject to an illusion when we regard ourselves as having experience of the entire detailed scene. But Noë argues that the entire scene is genuinely present in the sense that it is readily accessible, by shifting one’s attention or making eye movements. Second, in cases like the object’s back side we are dealing with a different problem altogether. Noë concedes that the back side is not, “strictly speaking,” seen by the perceiver. Nevertheless, he argues, it is perceptually present, giving rise to the problem of how to account for its perceptual presence. Noë’s solution is that it is present by virtue of our having perceptual expectations about it. Notice that we cannot appeal to possible access to solve this problem: it may be impossible for the perceiver, say, to go round a house, to take a look. Husserl is centrally concerned with the latter problem, and the view Noë develops to solve it is rightly interpreted as a sketch of Husserl’s view, but it needs to be complemented with the crucial idea of fulfillment. When I look at an object, I experience the front side differently from the back side. This phenomenal difference can be captured by calling the experience of the front side “intuitive” and the experience of the back side “empty.” When I turn the object around, there is fulfillment, i.e., what was experienced emptily comes to be experienced intuitively. The back side can be regarded as perceptually present in the sense that we can have fulfillments (or disappointments) with regard to it. Husserl investigates perceptual content as determining fulfillment conditions, and not as determining accuracy conditions, as in the mainstream views. He engages in a kind of conceptual analysis, e.g., of the concept of shape or color, by investigating the fulfillment conditions pertinent to shape or color. Noë’s perceptual expectations are part of the Husserlian framework: they function to set the fulfillment conditions. Noë has given us parts and aspects of a comprehensive Husserlian framework. I aim to contribute to our understanding of it, and thereby of Noë’s enactive view.

Perceptual experience seems to relate us not only to non-temporal features of objects such as colors and shapes, but also to certain temporal properties such as succession and duration, as well as to the sensible properties of temporally extended events such as movements and other kinds of change. But can such properties really be represented in experience itself, and if so, what does this tell us about the nature of experience? Different theories of time consciousness answer this question in different ways. Atomists deny that experience represents temporal properties and maintain instead that in experience we only represent non-temporal properties, "snapshots" of the world. Retentionalists maintain that, while experiences may be instantaneous mental states, they simultaneously represent temporally extended periods of time, while extensionalists claim that experiences themselves extend in time, either only for very short periods or over whole streams of consciousness. I articulate and defend a version of the latter view, which I call 'simple extensionalism', lay out its ontological foundations, and argue that it accounts for the temporal phenomena of perceptual experience better than its rivals. / text

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Thesis (Ph.D.)--Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, 2008. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 56-62). Also available in electronic version.

Thesis (M. Soc. Sc.)--University of Hong Kong, 2008. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 32-40).

Thesis (M. LA)--Unitec New Zealand, 2008. / Dissertation statement from P. 6. Includes bibliographical references (p. [131-133]).

Color ontology is the philosophical study of the nature of color. Synesthesia is a neurological condition in which the stimulation of one sensory modality or cognitive pathway leads involuntarily to experiences in a second modality or cognitive pathway. Synesthetic colors are thus colors reliably induced by non-visual stimuli. Currently, there is no philosophical theory of color that explicitly addresses synesthetic color. This omission raises three questions which underlie this thesis. How would the main theories in color ontology interpret synesthetic colors? Which, if any, of these theories would be able to treat synesthetic color as being more than misperception? What would be the costs of adopting such a theory? In Part I, I introduce and discuss four prominent theories of color: physicalism (chapter 1), eliminativism (chapter 2), role functionalism (chapter 3), and sensory classificationism (chapter 4). In Part II, I introduce perceptual pragmatism as an alternative to these views. Perceptual pragmatism consists in the defence of two main theses: (i) that colors are properties of interactions between a color perceiver and an external stimulus that induces color experience, and (ii) that perceptual states are correct insofar as they are useful to the perceiving organism. In chapter 5, I defend the first thesis. In chapter 6, I defend the second thesis. In chapter 7, I assess each theory’s ability to account for synesthetic color. In chapter 8, I address the common sense objection that colors do not look like properties of events. In conclusion, I find perceptual pragmatism to be the only theory capable of offering a satisfactory account of synesthetic color. However, it is also the theory most at odds with common sense. I conclude that if we want a theory that can account for the uncommon colors of synesthesia, we must reject the common sense view of color. / Thesis / Master of Arts (MA) / Color ontology is the philosophical study of the nature of color. Synesthesia is a neurological condition in which the stimulation of one sensory modality or cognitive pathway leads involuntarily to experiences in a second modality or cognitive pathway. Synesthetic colors are thus colors reliably induced by non-visual stimuli. As it stands, there is no philosophical theory of color that explicitly addresses synesthetic color. Of the current theories in color ontology I argue that only one—perceptual pragmatism—is able to offer a satisfactory account of synesthetic color. However, perceptual pragmatism is also the theory most at odds with common sense. I conclude that if we want a theory that can account for the uncommon colors of synesthesia, we must be willing to reject the common sense view of color.

Mémoire (M.E.L.)-- Université du Québec à Chicoutimi, 1994. / Document électronique également accessible en format PDF. CaQCU

Thesis (Ph.D.) - Carleton University, 2007. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 186-199). Also available in electronic format on the Internet.