1 (To appear in Philosophical Psychology) Evolution in action in perception A review of Alva Noë’s Action in perception

When I started on Alva Noë's Action in perception, I expected to be pleased with the book and to cheer him along. The reason for this expectation came primarily from his paper with Kevin O'Regan: "A sensorimotor account of vision and visual consciousness", and also from his paper with Susan Hurley: "Neural plasticity and consciousness". Both papers, in my view at least, made wonderful contributions to articulating the importance of sensorimotor relations for understanding cognition and consciousness. Action in perception, I thought, would be a more in-depth and general treatment of the issues in those (and some other) papers. Somehow, it only partially worked out that way. In Action in perception, Noë provides a so-called enactive approach to visual perception, which he differentiates from Varela, Thompson and Rosch’s original use of this term, and uses as another name for what he and O'Regan called a sensorimotor contingency account (p.233). The key idea of the book is that perceiving is a way of acting. He starts out with the image of a blind person tapping his cane in a cluttered space, "perceiving that space by touch, not all at once, but through time, by skillful probing and movement. " (p.1). Noë argues in this book that all perception, specifically vision, is touch-like in this way: What w