Varieties of Presence

Varieties of Presence

Alva Noë

Language: English

Pages: 188

ISBN: 0674062140

Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub


The world shows up for us―it is present in our thought and perception. But, as Alva Noë contends in his latest exploration of the problem of consciousness, it doesn’t show up for free. The world is not simply available; it is achieved rather than given. As with a painting in a gallery, the world has no meaning―no presence to be experienced―apart from our able engagement with it. We must show up, too, and bring along what knowledge and skills we’ve cultivated. This means that education, skills acquisition, and technology can expand the world’s availability to us and transform our consciousness.

Although deeply philosophical, Varieties of Presence is nurtured by collaboration with scientists and artists. Cognitive science, dance, and performance art as well as Kant and Wittgenstein inform this literary and personal work of scholarship intended no less for artists and art theorists, psychologists, cognitive scientists, and anthropologists than for philosophers.

Noë rejects the traditional representational theory of mind and its companion internalism, dismissing outright the notion that conceptual knowledge is radically distinct from other forms of practical ability or know-how. For him, perceptual presence and thought presence are species of the same genus. Both are varieties of exploration through which we achieve contact with the world. Forceful reflections on the nature of understanding, as well as substantial examination of the perceptual experience of pictures and what they depict or model are included in this far-ranging discussion.

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would seem to have the embarrassing consequence that we are perceptually conscious of everything. After all, your relation to any existing spatio-temporally located thing is such that were you to make appropriate movements, you would bring it into view and were it to make appropriate movements, it would perturb your standing dynamic relation to it. This unwanted consequence is easily avoided, however. Notice that movement- and object-dependence are conditions whose satisfaction can be measured.

That’s what it feels like. It certainly doesn’t feel as if you can see the back of the tomato, or that you merely think it is there. It feels as if you can almost see it, as if it is there to be seen, as if you know how to bring it into view. These are all things you can be wrong about, of course. But fallibility is not what’s at issue. What’s at issue is the character of the perceptual presence of the partially hidden parts of the things you see. The phenomenology of the would-be

what they see. Anti-empiricism of the kind I defend here asserts that the problem of understanding and that of experience are, in effect, the same problem. In presenting this anti-empiricism, I take myself to be extending ideas of Kant, Strawson and McDowell. 118 Varieties of Presence Wittgenstein’s (1953) discussion in Philosophical Investigations, especially the discussions of rule-following, elucidates the idea that understanding is like a practical skill. In particular, as I read

consult the rule in thought (even in unconscious thought). But that doesn’t mean that the behavior is no longer rule-governed. The expert’s skill allows for fluency and automaticity, but the zone of fluency is not one where the rules lose their force and relevance. The master acts in accord with the rules without thinking of them deliberately precisely because he or she has mastered them. We see this in the chess grand master whose play is a free and spontaneous expression of understanding.

every perceptual object or quality whether we think of it as categorical or dispositional. Second, the contrast between categorical and dispositional properties collapses. Among the things I can learn from what I see are how things are with respect to shape and size, but I can also find out about how things look. Indeed, it belongs to our perceptual predicament that in visual perception I must learn about how things are by looking and so by making sense of how things look. The empiricist

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