Perceptual Experience

by Tamar Szabó Gendler (Editor), John Hawthorne (Editor)

In the last few years there has been an explosion of philosophical interest in perception; after decades of neglect, it is now one of the most fertile areas for new work. Perceptual Experience presents new work by fifteen of the world's leading philosophers. All papers are written specially for this volume, and they cover a broad range of topics dealing with sensation and representation, consciousness and awareness, and the connections between perception and knowledge and between perception and action. This will be the book on the philosophy of perception, a fascinating resource for philosophers and psychologists.
Contributors include John Campbell, David J. Chalmers, Tim Crane, Fred Dretske, Tamar Szabo Gendler, Anil Gupta, John Hawthorne, Susan Hurley, Mark Johnston, Geoffrey Lee, Eric Lormand, M. G. F. Martin, Alva Noë, Jesse J. Prinz, Sydney Shoemaker, Susanna Siegel, and Michael Tye.

Genres: Philosophy

560 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2006

Reviews

[Ugh]

If this book had been the product of one author, I'd be filing it under 'I give up', instead of 'read'. In fact, I did give up on the introduction, and on chapters 1, 2 and 3, and on some of the later chapters too. This is not a book for laymen. This is not even a book for someone with a middling grasp of perception and cognition. I'm not entirely sure who this book is for, in fact - even that judgement is beyond me, so completely did much of it go over my head. Suffice it to say that most of the chapters - including the introduction - do the non-expert-but-interested reader no favours whatsoever. Terms that I'd never come across before, or that have a different meaning in psychology/philosophy than they do in general use, are thrown around with abandon, often sentence after sentence right from the start of the chapter, such that by the end of the first few pages of most chapters I usually had bugger all idea what was being talked about. Some kind of general glossary would have been most welcome. I don't want to point the finger at particular authors - because, as the book undoubtedly was not intended to be read by the lay reader, they were under no obligation to make the effort to be easily understood - but I was especially disappointed not to be able to persevere with Syndney Shoemaker's contribution, and I think the quote below does a pretty decent job of illustrating why I couldn't, as well as giving a good general demonstration of what it's like trying to read this book:

"But if way W is the property of looking way W, then the property will be the property of looking to have a certain property, namely itself! And, what might seem worse, the property W will be identical with the property LOOKS W, which will be identical with the property LOOKS TO LOOK W, which will be identical with the property LOOKS TO LOOK TO LOOK W, and so on ad infinitum."

It's because I understood so little of the chapters like this that I'm not giving the book a rating - I'm in no position to judge it! However, some of the chapters thankfully were much more accessible:

Fred Dretske's chapter 4 was the first I managed to finish, and provides some very interesting discussion of awareness; Alva Noe's was a delight of clarity, although I didn't agree with his position; and Eric Lormond's was another highlight. The standout for me though was Jesse J Prinz's chapter on the content of perception and sensation, which was refreshingly clear, interesting, informative and thought-provoking throughout (I'd also recommend you check out his homepage, if only for the hundreds of drawings he's posted of heads adorned with octopi, repairmen, spaghetti, etc. Seriously.) Of all the writers collected here, Prinz is the only one I'm tempted to seek more from, although if I stumbled across something by Dretske or Lormond I'd probably pick it up too.

To summarize: read something else - or, if you can get this from a library, read Prinz, Dretske, Lormond and Noe, and then try the introduction and see if you think it's really worth bothering with any of the others.