Philosophy Concordance - online philosophical quotations

Thus perception is structured by the sheer physical impact of the objects perceived and by the physiology of the perceptual apparatus.

Another resource that we have is that the actual structure of our conscious, perceptual experiences makes objects with their features salient.

We could imagine such a language, but such a language, if it exists, runs counter to our perceptual phenomenology.

Our existing perceptual apparatus is constructed so that we naturally treat spatiotemporally discrete entities as single units, and these are represented by typical noun John R. Searle WhatisLanguageforLandauFNLSavas Page 15 6 November, 2006 phrases of our language.

Here is the basic idea: The animal has perceptual and belief contents that lack syntactic structure: It can see, and therefore believe, something that we can report (but the animal cannot report) as “It is coming toward me”.

But such a language would not reflect the object salience of our perceptual phenomenology.

All intentionality, conscious or unconscious, perceptual or nonperceptual, comes to us propositionally in the trivial sense that each discriminable intentional state has conditions of satisfaction and a condition is always that such and such is the case.

If we now look at the phenomenological structure of our experiences, particularly conscious, perceptual experience, we will see that objects and their features are salient.

It is not surprising that some animals can do so, or even that their perceptual boundaries resemble those of humans, since auditory analyzers suited for nonspeech distinctions might suffice to discriminate among speech sounds, even if the analyzers humans use are different (Trout, 2001, 2003b).

Let’s grant that not all perceptual information is earmarked by some psychophysical cue that can be used to shunt it to the most relevant reasoning system.