Introduction to Perception

Hello. My name is Laura Go. And I'm a lecturer at the University of Liverpool.

Um, in this series of lectures, we're going to be talking about direct realism,

which is a view of perception.

Okay, so in the first lecture, we're going to just do an introduction to perception,

and we'll start off by thinking about a very simple question.

And that question is, why is perception so important to us?

I think there are two main answers to this question.

So the first is the epistemological role that perception plays in our lives.

And that just means we think of perception as a source of knowledge about the world.

Our five senses seeing, hearing, touching,

smelling and tasting allow us to learn about the world.

And they also enable us to navigate around our local environment successfully

and since all of our interactions with other people also depend upon perception.

So all the all the knowledge we get from other people

is also going to rely heavily on perception as well.

So when you get information about the world from your friends, your parents,

your teachers, news reporters, scientists,

all of this is going to be based on you being able to

see or hear or touch or understand and what they're saying to you.

So think for a moment about what you would be able

to know if you didn't have any of your senses.

So if you weren't having any perceptual experiences.

So an 11th century philosopher called Messina asks us to imagine a floating person,

a person who

exists and is conscious but isn't having any perceptual experiences at all.

And if we imagine ourselves in this situation,

it's quite hard to work out whether we'll be able to know anything at all.

So

Deckert famously thought that we would be able to know some

things even if we didn't have any sense experience at all.

So he thought that we'd be able to know that we exist

just because we're thinking and that's enough to know that we exist,

so we wouldn't know something, but we wouldn't know very much at all,

particularly about the world outside us, we wouldn't know.

It seems we wouldn't know anything about the world

at all if we didn't have any perceptual experiences

of the world.

So whatever we think about,

you know whether we could know something or whether we would know nothing at all.

I think we can all agree that are the amount of knowledge would have

would be significantly reduced if we didn't

have any perceptual experiences at all.

Okay,

so that's one reason why Perception's so important

for its epistemological role in giving us knowledge.

The other reason is

it comes about through are being conscious, experiencing beings.

So we're always having experiences while we're conscious,

and the majority of these seem to be perceptual experiences.

And I think it's probably true that whenever we're conscious

and awake, we are having one perceptual experience or another.

So we're seeing or hearing or touching or smelling or

tasting whenever we're having a conscious experience at all.

So because perceptual experiences dominate so much of our conscious lives, uh,

it's another reason why they're so why they're so important to us

again.

If you could try and imagine for a moment what it

would be like to be conscious but not having any experiences,

I don't know.

It's quite difficult to imagine what our experience would

be would be like in this in this situation.

Okay,

so so perception is important for two main reasons the epistemological role that it

plays and the fact that it is so important to our experiential lives.

So when we're assessing different theories of perceptual experience,

we can consider how well our theories of

perception allow us to explain these two features.

That perception has so how well, our theories of perception allow us to explain

the epistemological roll the perception plays

and how well they allow us to explain our experiences

and what our experiences are like for us now.

Historically, there are two main theories of perception.

Direct realism and indirect realism.

And

as I mentioned at the beginning,

this lecture series is going to focus on direct realism.

But I think it will be helpful before we start looking at that for you in more detail,

to just outline the similarities and

differences between direct and indirect realism.

So that's what we'll do now.

So first,

the important thing to note is that both direct realism

and indirect realism have realism as part of their name.

And if you're realist about something,

this just means that you believe that that thing exists so direct realists and

indirect realists both believe that there is a mind independent world out there.

So they're both realists about the existence of the mind independent world,

and they also both both views believe that we can.

We can perceive the mind independent world and that we can

have knowledge about the mind independent

world through our perceptual experiences.

So there the similarities between

these two views they both think that there's a

world out there of trees and cars and goldfish.

And they both think that we can know about

the world through our through our perceptual experiences.

So the two views agree on quite a lot, in fact,

and the areas that they disagree on relate to how they think perception works.

So what processes are involved and what they think

is required for us to have a perceptual experience.

So very simply,

direct realists think that perceptual experience just

involves you perceiving the world directly,

so your your experiences aren't mediated by anything.

You're sort of taken straight to the world via your perceptual experiences.

Indirect realists.

They think, as I've said that we do perceive the world the mind independent world,

but we perceive it only indirectly.

So what were directly aware of in perception is

something else It's not the mind independent world now,

indirect realists typically think that the

thing we're directly aware of in perception

is a mental object of some description.

So the philosopher John Locke thought that these mental

intermediaries that were directly aware of he called them ideas

and in contemporary philosophy of perception.

Um, it's more common to think of these.

These things are sense,

data so indirect realists think we perceive that the mind independent world,

but only indirectly and what were directly aware

of are these mental objects or sense data.

Here's an analogy that might be helpful.

So imagine you're watching a football match

on television and you're seeing the players.

You're seeing the pitch and you're seeing the goals being scored

and you're hearing the crowd cheering. Um, now

it seems that you're seeing these things by

seeing the images on your television screen.

Now indirect realists think that all perception works a bit like that.

So they think that all perception involves

you being directly aware of an intermediary.

But they think that you have a mental object playing the role of the television.

So all perceptual experiences involve, um,

you being directly aware of this mental object and only

indirectly aware of the aware of the external world,

you might think to yourself, Why on earth would anyone hold such a view?

Why would anyone be an indirect realists and think that you're experiencing

these mental objects and not ordinary physical objects like tables and chairs?

And I think that, uh, that's a good question.

And by carrying on with this lecture series and looking at direct realism,

we're going to see that direct realism faces quite a few challenges.

And some of these challenges are the very reasons

why some people have turned to indirect realism.

So even though we're not going to focus on indirect realism in what follows,

understanding the challenges that direct realism faces will allow us to

sort of understand the motivations for that view as well.