Harman, 'The Intrinsic Quality of Experience', in Philosophical Perspectives 4, ed. J. Tomberlin (Arascadero: Ridgeview Publishing Co., 1990); S. Shoemaker, 'Self-Knowledge and "Inner Sense"', Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 64, (1994), 249-314. 177
M. G. F. Martin Furthermore, those who insist on the intentionality or representational nature of experience have tended to emphasize its worlddirectedness: that the presented elements of our experiences are trees, tables and chairs which are there whether we experience them or not. But that aspect of experience is not sufficient to show that experience has intentional phenomenal properties rather than naive ones. Likewise, arguments for the existence of subjective phenomenal properties which attempt to show that there is more to what experience is like than how the external world is presented to be cannot show by that that there are subjective phenomenal properties rather than that there are either subjective or dependent ones. One moral to draw from this discussion is that the debate in the literature has been drawn in terms which are too narrow.16 This gives us yet further evidence that the supposed obviousness of the terms of debate about subjective experience and qualia is nothing of the sort. We cannot hope to make proper progress on the debates about consciousness and the metaphysics of the mind until we have a better understanding of the issues surrounding perceptual experience and appearances. The problem with which we started was that of finding some common ground between parties disputing what is supposedly just obvious to us. When that debate is framed simply in terms of the existence of qualia, or purely subjective qualities of experience, the problem is liable to seem intractable. But, I argued, such difficulties arise from the confusion inherent in the debate about qualia, with its almost unavoidable equivocation in the term. This we traced back to the adverbialist response to sense-data. The idea of experience merely as a mode of being affected by the world arises from the desire to avoid the metaphysical extravagances of sense-data, but it achieves metaphysical austerity only at the cost of leaving out of its conception of experience what seems to be essential to any account of what experience is like, that experience has a subject-matter. Once we reject this misconception, we are then better placed to find the common ground between different views: they all do wish to hold onto a common conception that what experience is like is a matter of what is present to 16 Note that the possession of any one phenomenal property does not exclude the possibility of having any of the others: so this generates fifteen possible accounts of perception. The discussion in the literature tends to focus solely on two or three of these: those which appeal purely to intentional phenomenal properties, cf. Harman, 'The Intrinsic Quality of Experience', and those who think that there must be a mixture of phenomenal and subjective properties, cf. Peacocke, Sense and Content, chapters 1 and 2; there are a few defenders of purely subjective accounts of experience, for example, F. Jackson, Perception: A Representative Theory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977). 178
Setting Things before the Mind the mind. The differences between sense-datum theories of experience and intentional accounts of perception are disagreements about what can be set before the mind, and how it can be so set. These matters take us well beyond that which is simply obvious to one from reflection on one's own visual or auditory experiences. The question that remains is how we are to settle these disputes. 179
Perceptual Intentionality, Attention and Consciousness NAOMI EILAN A representative expression of current thinking on the 'problem of consciousness' runs as follows. There is one, impenetrably hard problem; and a host of soluble, and in this sense easy problems. The hard problem is: how could a physical system yield subjective states? How could there be something it is like to be a physical system? This problem corresponds to a concept of consciousness invariably labelled 'phenomenal consciousness'. It is here, with respect to phenomenal consciousness, that we encounter an 'explanatory gap', where it is this gap that makes the problem so hard. Nothing we can say about the workings of a physical system could begin to explain the existence and nature of subjective, phenomenal feel. But, the story goes, we also have another cluster of concepts of consciousness, the explanation of which give rise to easy, that is, soluble problems. One such easily explicable concept is that of 'consciousness of, an account of which is exhausted by a theory of mental representation, or intentionality. The other easy concepts all bring in the idea that conscious states are accessible, in some sense, to the subject. Accounting for 'access-consciousness' is a matter of distinguishing in functionalist terms among different kinds of access-conferring relations among mental representations. These problems are all easy in the sense that we have a relatively clear picture of what it would be for a physical system to have states that represent the world and stand in such functional relations to each other.1 I have been greatly helped by discussions with Bill Brewer, John Campbell, Mike Martin, Tony Marcel and Mark Price of issues raised in this paper, and by Mike Martin's and Colin Sparrow's criticisms of an earlier draft. I am also grateful to the audience at the Royal Institute of Philosophy, and to audiences at Stirling, Edinburgh and St Andrews, who heard a distant ancestor of the paper. 1 The labels 'easy' and 'hard' are David Chalmers' in D. Chalmers, The Conscious Mind (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996). See, for example, p. xiii. They reflect a generally accepted bifurcation among problems of consciousness, a bifurcation very clearly described by Martin Davies in the introduction to Consciousness, ed. M. Davies and G. Humphreys (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1993). 181
Naomi Eilan 1 4 1.1 While this bifurcation between easy and hard problems of consciousness is of some polemical value, it is fundamentally misguided, in my view, if it is treated as a resting place. Neither intentionality ('consciousness of) nor access-consciousness are easy concepts in the sense suggested, and phenomenal consciousness is not impenetrably hard in the sense suggested. In what follows I will be focusing exclusively on the so-called easy problems of access-consciousness and 'consciousness of in the case of perception. A fundamental assumption in treating them as easy is that we can give an account of intentionality and accessibility wholly independently of an account of phenomenal aspects of experience. In the first section I will be suggesting that insisting on such independence prevents us from formulating properly, let alone addressing, the problem of perceptual intentionality. The rest of the paper will be devoted to spelling out some basic ingredients that have to go into an account of how phenomenal aspects of experience and intentionality are interwoven with each other in perceptual intentionality. I will be suggesting that addressing such problems generates a problem of consciousness which is, if anything, harder than the so called hard problem of phenomenal consciousness, though in a different sense. The distinction between phenomenal and access-consciousness that I want to have before us is Ned Block's.2 I begin with a brief summary of the distinction as he presents it, and then go on to raise questions about whether it can account for the way in which conscious perceptions make the world available to the subject. On Block's account, phenomenal consciousness (P-consciousness) is experiential consciousness; it is consciousness of the kind that yields a 'something it is like' to be in the state that has such consciousness. It is the kind of consciousness we ascribe primarily though not exclusively to perceptual experiences. Access-consciousness (A-consciousness), in contrast, is the kind of consciousness a state has in virtue of being (1) 'inferentially promiscuous', that is, poised for use as a premise in reasoning, (2) poised for rational control of action and (3) poised for the rational control of speech. On Block's account access-consciousness is a 'cluster' concept in which (3) bears the least weight though it is often the practical guide to the existence of access-consciousness. Natural candidates for such consciousness are beliefs such as the belief that two and two is four, or that it might rain today. 2 N. Block, 'On a Confusion about a Function of Consciousness', Behavioural and Brain Sciences (1995), 18, 227-87. 182
Perceptual Intentionality, Attention and Consciousness Block's example of P-consciousness without A-consciousness, which will not be our central concern in what follows, is this. You may be engaged in deep conversation and suddenly at noon realize that right outside your window there is and has been a deafening pneumatic drill digging up the street. There is a way you were aware or conscious of it all along, and a way that you now become conscious of it which was previously lacking. According to Block 'you were P-conscious of the noise all along, but at noon you were both P-conscious and A-conscious of it'.3 Block's example of A-consciousness without P-consciousness, which will be our chief concern in what follows, is a counterfactual development of blindsight. Blind sighted patients report more or less complete absence of experience in the functionally blind area of their visual field. But when induced to guess what is there they can do so for quite a wide range of properties. Superblindseers are subjects who suffer from blindsight but learn how to induce themselves to issue guesses unprompted, so that they find themselves issuing perceptual judgements somewhat in the manner in which a solution to a problem may suddenly spring to mind. The judgements are described by them as not being based on any experience, in contrast to their normal perceptual judgements. The first question I want to raise is this. Do we have here a description of a case of access-consciousness without phenomenal consciousness, on Block's own account of access-consciousness? Access-consciousness is a relational property, and the relation, on Block's own account of it, is essentially rational. So a state is accessconscious if it provides reasons for judgements, actions, speech etc. Blindsighted subjects' perceptual inputs do not provide reasons for actions or judgement (they have to issue guesses) so they are not access-conscious. The case of superblindsight should be one in which the subject's perceptual states do provide reasons for the judgement. But as described by Block himself they do not. The superblindseer finds himself accosted with thoughts out of the blue, in the way a solution may suddenly spring to mind. The perception on which the judgement is in some sense based is not his reason for issuing the judgement. That is, unlike the normal case, the superblindseer does not appeal to the fact of perception or to the content of his perception as his justification for the content of his judgement. The perception is not therefore accessible to the subject, on Block's own account of access-consciousness. One way out of the problem would be to drop the emphasis on rationality when explaining the consciousness-conferring access relation, a route followed for example by Chalmers, who requires 3 Ibid., 234. 183
Naomi Eilan only a non-rational causal link between the perceptual state and the judgement.4 But this is to miss the point. As we have just seen, when the perceptual state cannot be cited as the subject's own reason for her judgement, the perceptual state is not, intuitively, accessible to the subject in a consciousness-conferring way. If the state is not a reason for the subject, from her perspective, it is not conscious. Block got this right in his definition of access-consciousness, but in his example he probably reverted to thinking of the access-conferring link in non-rational causal terms. For what the superblindseer manages is the establishment of some kind of non-rational causal connection between the occurrence of perceptual input and the issuing of a judgement. In the normal case perceptions present the world to the subject as being such and such and it is this presentation of the world to the subject, or its appearance as such and such to the subject, which gives the perception its evidential status.5 More specifically: in the normal case, the way our perceptions make us conscious of the environment (by making it present to us, or by yielding appearances of it) suffices for giving the perception its evidential status. This is what is lacking in both blindsight and superblindsight. Explaining how perceptual directedness onto the world has this dual property is the problem of explaining perceptual intentionality. The question now is: can we explain the requisite notion of presence, appearance or 'consciousness of on a theory that draws a sharp distinction between phenomenal and access-consciousness? A central assumption in the way Block and others have drawn the distinction is this. Phenomenal consciousness is a function of wowrepresentational properties of the experience; and, correlatively, representational properties which yield 'consciousness of can be explained in complete independence of appeal to phenomenal feel. Now the notion of presence or appearance to the subject is a phenomenological notion, so on the kind of theory we are considering representational properties could not account for it. We must turn, then, to an account of the non-representational properties to do the job of infusing the perception with this phenomenological property of presence of the world to the subject. Recall, a central constraint is that the notion of presence we come up with will be such that its possession by a perception suffices for explaining what gives the perception its evidential status relative to judgements based on it. 4 On this difference between his own account of 'awareness' and Block's account of access-consciousness see Chalmers, The Conscious Mind, p. 228. 5 B. Brewer, 'Experience and Reason in Perception' in this volume. My approach to the relation between experience and knowledge owes much to Brewer's work in this area. 184
Perceptual Intentionality, Attention and Consciousness So we must appeal to the non-representational properties of an experience to provide the perception with phenomenology and, simultaneously, with evidential status. There are two ways they might be said to do so. Either by means of givdng rise to the judgement: such and such sensations are in the normal course of events accompanied or caused by a perceptual state with such and such representational properties, so I must have perceptions with such contents and they are my reason for judging that such and such is the case in the world. Or, more directly and familiarly: such and such sensations are normally caused by such and such a state of the world and that is my reason for judging such and such to be the case. As Bill Brewer argues in his paper in this volume, it is dubious whether such indirect reflective judgements could actually provide an alternative justification to the kind of direct, non-reflective justification our perceptions normally provide us with.6 For our immediate purposes the central point is that, intuitively, neither of these reflective routes makes the perceptual representation accessible to the subject in the way in which we think conscious states are accessible. Intuitively, the subject could issue such judgements while the representational properties of the perceptual state remain wholly non-conscious. So the requisite notion of presence cannot be explained by appeal to the notion of non-representational properties of experience. And this is not surprising. What we need in accounting for perceptual intentionality is an explanation of how the representational properties of an experience make the world phenomenally present to the subject. This in turn requires an account of how representational and phenomenal aspects of experience are interwoven with each other in such a way as to yield such presence of the world to the subject. What is preventing us from giving such an account is the requirement that we explain the way perceptions represent the environment wholly independently of any appeal to the phenomenal aspects of experience. So we must drop the leading assumption underpinning the distinction between phenomenal and access-consciousness if we are to so much as formulate the problem of perceptual intentionality properly, let alone make progress with addressing it. And, if this is how we should see the problem of explaining the nature of perceptual intentionality, then neither 'consciousness of nor access-consciousness is an easy concept, in the case of perception at least, if what makes a concept easy is the possibility of accounting for it independently of appealing to phenomenal aspects of perceptual consciousness. The rest of the paper 6 Ibid. 185
Naomi Eilan will be concerned with two suggestions about how the problem of accounting for perceptual intentionality should be addressed, and with raising one kind of hard problem generated by the attempt to get this right. II In very broad terms the suggestion I want to pursue, which is hardly original, is that getting perceptual intentionality right is a matter of getting right the peculiar mixture of activity and passivity distinctive of perceptual experience. I begin with a very brief summary of a widely held philosophical approach to the issue, and use some problems in this approach to introduce the issues I will be concerned with. It is common practice in both philosophy and psychology to castigate the empiricist picture of perception, on which pure perception delivers uninterpreted sensations, on the grounds that it conceives of perception as wholly passive. The philosophical corrective to this picture normally involves some kind of endorsement of Kant's dictum that 'intuitions without concepts are blind'. Experiences are, in Strawson's terms, permeated with concepts,7 where conceptual content is the mark of representations governed by rationality constraints. The insistence on this infusion of experiences with concepts is supposed simultaneously to solve for the phenomenology (it is in virtue of the concepts that one is presented in perception with a world, rather than sensations) and for the epistemology. It is in virtue of possessing conceptual content that experiences 'occupy the space of reasons', in Sellars' phrase, and, hence, can be a source of rationally constrained knowledge about the world.8 But, as McDowell, for one, notes, leaving matters at that raises epistemological and phenomenological problems which the sensedata theory was expressly designed to deal with. First, sense-data were supposed to mark the impact of the external, mind-independent world upon the subject; mere insistence on the essential infusion of experience by reason leaves us with the threat of a purely coherentist account of the way in which experiences serve as a source of knowledge about the external world. Secondly, insisting on the possession of conceptual content seems to leave with us without any means of distinguishing the phenomenology of experiences 7 P. F. Strawson, 'Perception and Its Objects', in Perception and Identity: Essays in Honour of A. jf. Ayer, ed. G. Macdonald (London: Macmillan, 1979), p. 45. 8 On this, see J. McDowell, Mind and World (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1994), Lecture 1, and Brewer, 'Experience and Reason'. 186
Perceptual Intentionality, Attention and Consciousness from that of thought. Some way of meeting both the phenomenological and the epistemological points must be found, which simultaneously holds on to the requirements met by insisting on the conceptual content of experience. McDowell's own solution is to say that we should do this by allowing a passive ingredient in perception, where the way to do justice to it is by noting that in experience 'conceptual capacities are drawn on in receptivity'.9 The mark of this way of using concepts is that it involves an essential passivity in one's relation to the content of the representation. 'In experience one finds oneself saddled with content.'10 A noteworthy feature of this way of approaching the problem of the mixture of passivity and activity in perception is that it has nothing at all to say about the psychological process whereby rationality or concepts get involved in perception. It has nothing to say about how in perception one finds oneself saddled with rationally constrained content. One position here is that the appeal to rational activity in characterizing the phenomenology and epistemology of perception has no bearings on, and is wholly independent of, whatever the correct theory of the mechanisms of perception is. On the personal level there is no mechanism story to be told. In appealing to activity we are making purely phenomenological and epistemological points, accurately summarized in the claim that experiences have conceptual contents. When we speculate about mechanisms we are bound to get led into the kinds of traps the sense-data theorists, and Kant himself, in a more subtle way, were led into. Any accounts of the mechanisms of perception should restrict themselves to a description of subpersonal computations. I want to suggest that this cannot work. We cannot get right the mixture of activity and passivity distinctive of perceptual intentionality without addressing the question of how concepts become integrated into the process of perception. The correct account of such integration is one essential ingredient in the account we should give of the mixture of activity and passivity to be found in perceptual experience. I will first illustrate what I mean by considering some everyday examples of remembering about which it is also appropriate to say that the subject, in remembering, is 'saddled with content'. In the next section I return to perception. Consider the following kinds of questions one might ask oneself in the course of a normal working hour. Where did I put my keys? What did Mary ask me to get from the shop? What is that student's name? What was I about to say? Why did I come into this room anyway? And so forth. Sometimes the answer comes, as we say, imme9 McDowell, Mind and World, p. 9. 10 Ibid., p. 10. 187
Naomi Eilan diately, sometimes with irritating delay and sometimes not at all. Much of what passes for mental activity consists in asking oneself such questions and waiting for longer or shorter periods for the answer. Now, in all such cases we may speak of the answer 'coming' to us, though this is especially vivid when there is some delay. And in all cases of the answer coming to us it is appropriate to speak of the thinker being 'saddled with content'. A first stab at describing the mixture of activity and passivity in these cases is to say that the answer coming is the passive bit, and the asking of the question the active bit. But this cannot be right. On the one hand, answering the question is something we do (certainly this is so when someone else asks the question). And, on the other hand, when we ponder how it can be that asking oneself a question yields a response we are bound to conceive of the asking bit involving some non-conscious ingredient which is from our perspective passive and which is responsible in some way for getting the answering going. I recently heard a six-year-old complain that she kept on asking her brain where her crayons were, and he wouldn't answer so she went out to play and then while she was on the swing he suddenly told her they were under her bed. This was said partly in exasperation that he should be so slow, but also in appreciation and some wonder that, as she put it, he should go on thinking about it when she herself had stopped. This story of communication with a reluctant but ultimately quite helpful brain contains within it a metaphorical rendering of the mixture of passivity and activity in our pre-theoretical concept of remembering that any philosophical and psychological theory must aim to do justice to. And many do not. One way of failing is to give an account of remembering exclusively in terms of relations between subpersonal information-processing systems. The subject, active and passive, drops out altogether. Another, more subtle way is to insist that our everyday 'personal level' concept is wholly independent of any reference to the mechanisms that make remembering possible. But this kind of claim, unlike the child's story, fails to do justice to the passivity involved in asking oneself questions, for the passivity here is partly a function of the fact that in doing what one is doing (asking and answering the question) there is something going on that makes this possible, that one does not have access to. The way to do non-metaphorical justice to this passivity while holding on to the active subject is to treat information-processing theories of the mechanisms involved in remembering as descriptions of non-conscious ingredients in what the subject actively does when asking and answering her own questions. The fact that there 188
Perceptual Intentionality, Attention and Consciousness is this non-conscious cognitive ingredient just is what introduces the passivity. So reference to such mechanisms is not an optional extra relative to our everyday conception of remembering, but, rather, an extension of them. My first suggestion is that this last point applies equally to the mixture of activity and passivity in perception. Or, more precisely, I suggest that one important strand in getting right the mixture of activity and passivity in perception will involve moves exactly analogous to those made above about remembering. In the next section I will be concerned to draw out these analogies, focusing especially on the epistemology of perceptual intentionality. In the last section, I will focus mainly on phenomenology and introduce one important disanalogy between perceiving and propositional memory, and, relative to that, an extra level of activity and passivity distinctive specifically of perceptual experience. Finally, I will suggest that trying to combine these two layers of activity and passivity generates a problem of consciousness which is in some sense harder than the 'hard' problem of phenomenal consciousness. Ill Let us return to one of the examples of a memory question: where did I leave my keys? I might ask this simply because I like to keep a check on where everything is, but more probably, at least in my case, because I need them, immediately, as I am already late for something. Suppose I am lucky and the answer comes, that they are on the kitchen table. Guided by this memory I will take myself off to the table. If I am lucky I will find them there; and here too, there might be delays, which I will afterwards describe as the keys staring me in the face all the while I was looking for them, until something clicked. On this happening I will pick them up and rush out to the car. As described, such a sequence involves one kind of mixture of activity and passivity which I think any theory would hold is necessary if perception is to count as a source of knowledge, and to which I will not, therefore, devote much space. In very general terms: for perceptions to serve as a basis for knowledge it must be possible for the subject to use her perceptions to answer questions about the environment and to incorporate the deliverances of her perceptions into further rational deliberation and action. Reason is in there from the start in that the subject who can use her perceptions in this way is rationally involved in the acquisition of information from the environment. And the correct account of the kind of active reason189
Naomi Eilan ing required for perception to be used in this way of itself introduces a level of passivity, if one likes, of a kind lacking in memory. For, as the above example demonstrates, in using my perceptions to answer a question I have to exploit my grip on what Gareth Evans has called a 'primitive theory of perception'.11 I exploit my grip on the idea that if I am to perceive what I want to perceive various causal conditions must be met, including being in the right location. I only get the answer to my question if I put myself in the right position to acquire it. This in turn gives me (the beginning of) a grip on the idea of an objective world out there which is such that getting information about it requires that these further conditions are met. The role of the theory in perceptual answering of questions, as distinct from memory, introduces one extra level (of several) of passivity in perception. In memory, as we say, one asks oneself what is or was the case. In perception one asks the world. For such interrogation of the environment12 to occur one has to put oneself in a position to receive information from the world, be receptive to the world as it is at the time of questioning. It is true that in order to think of an autobiographical memory as such I must think of myself as having been in the past in a position to acquire information from the world. But I don't depend on the world as it is at the time of questioning; all that is needed is me and my memories. In perception I need the world. Now, put in these very general terms there is nothing the sensedata theorist, for example, need object to. True, such theorists tended to emphasize the role of reason in the interpretation of data already acquired, rather than in the actual acquisition of it; but there is nothing here, yet, that their conception of perception cannot accommodate. So, if perception is only active in this sense, appeal to such activity cannot ground rejection of the idea that all that perceptions deliver is a bundle of uninterpreted sensations. What we need is a sense in which perception is active which does have this result, in particular which yields an account of the deliverances of perception which is such that concepts and thoughts are integral to them. And we need a corresponding sense in which per11 G. Evans, 'Things Without the Mind', in Collected Papers (Oxford: Oxford Universith Press, 1985), pp. 249-90. On the role of such a theory in providing for our grip on the idea of an objective world see John Campbell, 'The Role of Physical Objects in Spatial Thinking', in Spatial Representation: Problems in Philosophy and Psychology ed. N. Eilan, R. McCarthy and B. Brewer (Oxford: Blackwell, 1993), pp. 88-93. 12 I borrow the phrase 'interrogation of the environment' from unpublished work by Rowland Stout, in which he employs it to describe the relation between attention and perception. The link with attention will be taken up shortly. 190
Perceptual Intentionality, Attention and Consciousness ceptions are passive which is such that concepts and thought are not integral to the deliverances of perception thus conceived. What is important here is the account we give of what it is that the subject does when, as we say, she scans or searches the environment, looking for an answer to her question. For a very wide range of theories what the subject does is physically manipulate her sense organs in such a way as to make them receptive to information. The subject's active contribution ends here. Thereafter the process of perception takes over. The process is passive in that sense; the subject's rational activity has no part to play in the process of perception itself. This is certainly true for theories that hold that perceptions deliver sensations. But it is equally true, for example, for most of the Gestaltists. They rejected atomism: perception delivers organized wholes, but it does so without the subject's intervention, without the intervention of thought. And it is true for all theories that say that the process of perception is to be explained exhaustively in terms of subpersonal information-processing mechanisms. It is the passivity of the perceptual process in this sense that Gibson, for example, rejected. In its stead he proposed a picture on which perception is an activity of picking up information, by looking, smelling, touching etc., where these in turn are conceived of as modes of attending to the environment.13 What has made this aspect of his account attractive to many is, I think, a sense that there is no other way of solving a problem inherent in all theories that treat perception as passive in the sense just outlined. This is the problem of giving an epistemologically, phenomenologically and psychologically plausible account of how concepts and rational thought get linked to experience. The sense-dataist's account is familiarly off-key. The same problem besets many Gestalt theories, which held that the immediate objects of thought and attention, once perception has done its job, are not entities in the physical world but the phenomenal wholes delivered by perception.14 And in the case of wholly subpersonal information-processing accounts of the process of perception, we seem to be faced with the options of either installing various systems of communication between the subject and its subpersonal mechanisms, or giving a wholly reductive account, purely in subpersonal terms, both of the subject's activities and of her perceptions. 13 See, for example, J. J. Gibson, 'The Perceptual Systems', in The Senses Considered as Perceptual Systems (London: George Allen and Unwin Ltd., 1968), pp. 47-58. 14 This is made explicit in Koffka's Principles of Gestalt Psychology (New York: Harcourt Brace and World, 1935). See also G. Kanizsa, Organization in Vision (New York: Praeger Publishers, 1979), 'Seeing and Thinking', pp. 14-24. 191
Naomi Eilan Suppose it is this kind of background reason which makes the Gibsonian conception of perception as an activity of attending to the environment attractive. Leaving aside, for a moment, the question of how exactly such activity is conceived of, one immediate problem, highlighted by McDowell, is that it seems to miss out on an essentially passive ingredient in our concept of perceptual experience. This is McDowell's stated motivation for introducing the claim that in perception, as opposed to thought, concepts are 'drawn on in a mode of receptivity', and the accompanying metaphor of 'being saddled with content' in perception. Now, McDowell does not say what it is about the Gibsonian story that is responsible for the absence of passivity, or what is needed to correct it. I want to suggest that part of what is wrong with the Gibsonian account is the insistence that perception is to be exhaustively explained by appeal to the metaphor of 'direct pickup' of information and the accompanying refusal to allow the need for any information-processing accounts of what goes on when we actively engage via perception with the environment. Correlatively, I suggest that one thing needed for getting the mix of activity and passivity right here is getting right the relation between what the subject does when extracting answers to her questions from the environment, and the information-processing involved in her so doing. More specifically: the correction to the picture of perception as passive that is needed is one on which rational activity is said to have an influence on the processing of information in perception; it is this which all accounts of perception as a purely passive process disallow. According to the psychologists Daniel Kahneman and Avishai Henik the 'enduring fascination with the problem of attention can perhaps be traced to the Jamesian account of the nature of selective attention as a pure act of will which controls experience.'15 The concept of attention they employ, which has its origins in William James, and is in widespread use in current information-processing approaches to attention, is one on which attention is the selection of information for further processing. John Campbell has recently suggested that we should treat the various information-processing accounts of the mechanisms involved in such selection and further processing as the non-conscious cognitive components of what the subject does when attending;16 or, in the terms of the above quotation, non-conscious ingredients in attention conceived of as a pos15 D. Kahneman and A. Henik, 'Perceptual Organization and Attention' in Perceptual Organisation ed. M. Kobovy and J. Pomerantz (Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 1981), p. 201. 16 John Campbell, 'Wittgenstein on Attention', submitted. 192
Perceptual Intentionality, Attention and Consciousness sible expression of will. This seems to me to be the correct general line to take about one very central way attention and perception are related. From our perspective, its importance is that it captures one essential ingredient in the mixture of passivity and activity that we find in perception. Let us return to scanning the table for one's keys. It is simply not true that all the subject does here is manipulate her head and eyes. Such manipulation is neither necessary nor sufficient, as shown by experiments on so called 'covert attention'. Subjects are asked to fixate some point ahead of them and then told they will be asked questions about an area distinct from the area of fixation, say to its left. Their task is to answer the questions about that area on the left of fixation without moving their eyes. Subjects can do this (so moving the eyes is not necessary); and, when they do this, by switching their attention to the left of fixation, they become correspondingly bad at answering questions about the area they are fixating (fixating an area is not sufficient). So we need a different account of what it is that subjects do when they answer the question. What they do is attend to a portion of the world. So we need an account of what attention is. Attention is what we use to answer the question. But how do we do it? What do we do? Part of the bafflement here is analogous to the one we find in memory. What we are doing is making something happen, such that the answer will come to us through perception. The child's metaphor of communicating in a more or less successful way with the brain who does the work for her is as natural here as it is in memory. And the way to do non-metaphorical justice to it here too is by introducing a passive cognitive loop in the process of asking and answering questions. Campbell's proposal captures exactly what is needed in accounting for the kinds of cases we have been considering. In all these cases the correct account of what we do when we attend, the correct response to the kind of bafflement noted earlier, is, precisely, to say that what is happening is that the subject is actively selecting information to be processed. Most of the steps in the processing are the passive, because non-conscious, cognitive component in the activity of asking and answering questions about the environment. IV The suggestion I have been pursuing is that getting perceptual intentionality right is a matter of getting right the mixture of activity and passivity distinctive of perceptual experience. To generalize from the specific cases I have been considering, the drift of the 193
Naomi Eilan remarks so far made can be sharpened up somewhat by means of the following three claims: 1. Perceptual experiences have conceptual content only when there has been rational influence on the process of perception. More specifically, experiences are imbued with conceptual content only when it is correct to think of them as answers to theoretical questions that the subject directs at the environment. 2. Attention is, among other things, the means by which we answer such questions about the environment. The conceptualized contents of experiences are those that are the deliverances of attention used in this way. 3. When attention is used in this way it should be conceived of as the selection by the subject of information for further processing. I realise that these claims, in particular (1), raise a host of immediate, largely phenomenological objections. First, there are specific cases for which it doesn't seem right to say that the experience is an answer to a question. For example, when the pneumatic drill surfaces, as we say, in conceptualized consciousness, it does not seem right to describe this surfacing as a response to a question one has asked. Then, there is the general objection that it does not seem right to say that one is incessantly interrogating the environment, and only has experiences as a consequence of such non-stop interrogation. Surely one just soaks up what is going on in a more relaxed way. I cannot hope to deal adequately with all such objections; and it may well be that a comprehensive treatment of them would lead to some modifications of the three claims I have made. Nonetheless, I think the claims are along the right lines, and perhaps a quick response to the two objections I mentioned will do something to make them less immediately counterintuitive. First, the pneumatic drill: the interesting question here is not why and how it becomes accessible to reason, but, given that it is described as deafening, why it remained inaccessible for the period it did. Some kind of suppression mechanism must have been working (on one account of attention, one of its roles is to suppress processing, rather than to encourage it). But once this is recognized, it seems, I think, natural to say that what has been suppressed are various questions that come flooding back, once the operation of the suppressing mechanisms has been suspended, for whatever reason. I suspect something along these lines is true for a wide range of cases we want to describe in terms of something suddenly surfacing, unbidden, in consciousness. As to the idea that in general one isn't constantly throwing questions at the world: one point worth making is that I am talking, here, only about the conceptualized contents of experience, the contents that can serve as inputs to theoretical knowledge. In a moment I will 194
Perceptual Intentionality, Attention and Consciousness be touching on the problem of how we should account for the ongoing non-theoretical awareness we have of the environment. Suppose, then, we do focus only on conceptual contents. Consider cases we describe as 'throwing a well-practised eye' over a social gathering, say, or as 'casing the joint'. One of Gibson's central contentions was that perceiving is something we learn to do. I suggest that much of what this involves is the acquisition of routines of specific questions which become automatic or habitual extensions of the general question: what is going on here? (somewhat in the manner in which components of a physical skill become automatic). And, once this is recognized, one can allow experiences to be the outcome of what from the subject's conscious perspective are very loose, general questions. The claim that experiences have conceptual content in virtue of being answers to theoretical questions the subject directs at the environment need not and should not be understood as implying the constant firing of batteries of conscious detailed questions at the world. I hope I have done something to make the three claims seem phenomenologically more acceptable, though I realize there is more work to be done here. I now turn to their implications for the account we should give of what is wrong with the blindseer's and superblindseer's perceptual input. With respect to Hindsight: the three claims, as they stand, would suffice to rule out the blindseer's perceptions from having the kind of content our experiences have. The subject does not and apparently cannot direct questions at the area in his visual field in which he is functionally blind; and whatever perceptual input he has cannot therefore be conceived of as answers to such questions. It does not have conceptual content. But nothing so far said would appear to engage with the problem of explaining what is wrong with the superblindseer's perceptual input. The argument pressed in the first section of the paper was that the superblindseer's perceptions are not, contra Block, accessible in the way required for consciousness because they do not provide the subject with his reason for judgement. The claim then was that they do not do so because they do not present a world to the subject; and that any account of perceptual intentionality must show how phenomenal and conceptual aspects of experience are interwoven with each other in such a way as to yield such presence. The problem for the account of perceptual intentionality so far given is that it does not seem to account for such presence; and it is for this reason that nothing has been said to rule out the superblindseer's perception from having the kind of intentionality distinctive of conscious experiences. Imagine the superblindseer prompting himself to issue guesses 195
Naomi Eilan about the functionally blind area in his visual field. Such issuing of guesses can be represented as the answering of questions about objects and their properties in that area. Compare such asking of questions and answering them by means of guesses with the asking and answering of questions about areas of the visual field represented by means of conscious experiences. Intuitively, the main difference is that in conscious experience the questions he directs at the environment are guided and constrained by a presence of the envi- \ ronment, of some kind, to the subject. It is such presence which is | lacking in the functionally blind field, and intuitively, it is because I of its lack that the answers that he gets strike him as bolts from the blue. I want to suggest that an additional element in getting right the mixture of activity and passivity in perceptual experience, additional to the one so far discussed, is a matter of getting right the relation between such 'guiding presence of the environment' and attention. At the end of the paper I will come back to the question of how these two mixtures of activity and passivity are related to each other. I begin with illustrations of two distinct ways in which the environment might be said to be present to us in a way that guides and constrains attention. 1. Consider, first, Heidegger's famous example of engaged or wholly immersed intentionality, using a hammer to perform some task. This is contrasted by him with theoretical (thematic) intentionality. Dreyfus explains the distinction by the following appeal to attention. In the case of immersed intentionality, as in the hammer example, one is not attending to the hammer but, rather, one's attention is absorbed by the task at hand. Such absorption in the task can of course be suspended, and one's attention might be diverted, voluntarily or otherwise, to the hammer itself, for example when the head feels loose. It is when one's attention is diverted to the hammer itself that we have a thought about it, an instance of theoretical intentionality.17 A visual example of such switches of attention from task to perceived objects might be the switch of attention onto some feature of one's surroundings that may occur when one is wholly absorbed in driving and suddenly wonders where on earth one is, or someone suddenly darts across the road. There are three features of these kinds of switches that are worth emphasizing. First, intuitively, there is no thought about the hammer or my surroundings in driving until I have switched attention to them. Secondly, the hammer and various objects and features in my surroundings are nonetheless present to me prior to such 17 H. Dreyfus, Being in the World (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1991),