Fifteen Eighty Four

I am now sitting in front of my laptop and staring at a text on the screen. In other words, I have a perception of it. My perception is from a particular perspective. However, I can easily switch from one perspective to another. Thus, at one moment, I am zooming in on single words and letters. At the next moment, I zoom out and take in my desk and the wall behind it. I then turn my head slightly and look out of the window – at the landscape or the clouds in the sky.

That our perceptions are amenable to such zooming in and out, and to perspectival variation beyond that, is a fact that we are thoroughly familiar with from everyday life. Perceptions are packed with information about spatial scenes, physical things, and sense qualities. And they are open to perspectival shifts – be it just minimally, from a single location, as in this case, or much more extensively, in so far as the perceiver moves from one location to another.

This shows the power of perception at work. There are no concepts that similarly mirror the layout of the surroundings. Nor do sortal and attributive concepts fully specify the indefinitely complex manifolds that I am thereby presented with. And demonstrative concepts, like ‘this shape’ or ‘that shade,’ can only latch onto anything at all thanks to perception. To be sure, mere perceptions that are untouched by thinking are not open to inspection as such. There are also no observational reports about what is merely perceived but not thought about. Still, the cognitive roles of perceptions can be sharply distinguished from those of concepts, or so I claim. This is so because perceptions have special features that concepts lack. Perception in humans has this in common with perception in non-human animals who are also perceivers.

In my view, Immanuel Kant saw this clearly, for he made use of a method of isolation to separate the epistemic contributions of “intuitions” – which include sensory perceptions – from those of concepts. It might seem anachronistic to turn to an 18^th century German philosopher for answers in current debates on sensory perception. However, Kant took “intuition” to be essential in providing proper regimentation both for metaphysics, for epistemology, and within the philosophy of science. He could neither make sense of things, nor bring out the scope and limits of human knowledge, nor clarify the foundations for the rational sciences without it. He thereby developed his own “transcendental philosophy” that drew upon a fundamental distinction between two faculties of the human mind – “sensibility” and “understanding.”

In doing so, he also made a number of acute observations on what is distinctive of sensory perception as such – independently of his transcendental turn. These observations are central in my book Kant and the Power of Perception. In my view, Kant’s writings provide us with resources for handling issues pertaining to the nature and status of perception in penetrating ways. Notably, though, in addition to the power of perception Kant also saw the power of imagination very clearly. It is an important task in my book to identify not only the complementary roles of perceptions and concepts but also the roles of imagination, and to account for the imagination’s complex interplay with perceiving as well as with thinking in perceivers who are also thinkers.