Episode 138: John Searle on Perception (Part Two: Discussion)

Summary: Mark, Wes, and Dylan discuss the interview with John in <a href="http://partiallyexaminedlife.com/2016/04/25/ep138-1-john-searle/" target="_blank">part one</a> on Seeing Things as They Are: A Theory of Perception (2015) and try to sketch out the view and its potential problems in a little more detail.<br> The two main issues are first, Searle claims that his theory is much better than historical alternatives because this "presentation" of the world is not an intermediary: we are directly perceving the world via such a presentation. Well, what is this "via?" If it meant "through" then the presentation would be an intermediary, like the rose-colored glasses sometimes (erroneously) described as Kant's take on perception.<br> Second, Searle is not an atomist about perception: he admits that we don't take in sense data and then construct it into something. We perceive gestalt wholes filled with meaning from the human world. At the same time, there has to be some base layer that we for sure perceive that grounds these higher-level attributions, which are the ones that I'm wrong about. So I may not see MY car, but I did see a car with a similar color and other things such that I can explain the mistake. Such syntheses have to be potentially conscious: something that takes place as part of the background, but which we could focus on to figure out the mistake (since Searle does not believe that processing that is not in principle potentially conscious can be called "thought"). So we don't "infer" the existence of objects based on sense data, yet we must be synthesizing/constructing objects out of basic perceptual features (which nonetheless are actually in the world!).<br> Get the <a href="http://partiallyexaminedlife.com/2016/04/24/ep138-john-searle-citizen/">Citizen edition</a> to hear the whole thing including our previous interview ad-free. <a href="http://partiallyexaminedlife.com/donate/" target="_blank">Please support PEL</a>!<br> End song: "Flesh and Blood" from The MayTricks' Happy Songs Will Bring You Down (1994). <a href="http://marklint.com/HappySongsAlbum.html" target="_blank">Download the whole album for free</a>.<br>