Perception in Action

This dissertation examines the intersection of two notoriously ambiguous concepts—perception and consciousness—in explanations of action. Consciousness is often conceived as epiphenomenal or redundant in the explanation of intentional action. Perception is similarly removed from the determination of action, furnishing only minimal content to action, in contrast to thought. As an alternative to the competing agendas that underwrite the substance of these concepts, I articulate a picture of perceptual consciousness and its role in explaining action from a consistent, phenomenological perspective. From such a standpoint, a central role of perceptual consciousness is to convey information concerning far more than the properties that are directly sensible from a fixed perspective. Drawing on theories of perception developed in the phenomenological and Gestalt traditions, I characterize perceptual consciousness as presenting objects imbued with behavioral implications for the perceiver. This picture of the contents of perceptual consciousness is distinct from various models of implicit knowledge and unconscious reasoning about types of objects and their characteristic properties. By contrast, the target contents are available as normative input to an intentional subject who makes use of them to guide unreflective action. In appealing to non-cognitive yet intelligent intentional systems, my account joins recent proponents of ‘sensorimotor’ models of perceptual content in rejecting a traditional ‘input-output’ conception of the relation between perception, cognition, and action. But contrary to these views, I contend that the relevant perceptual contents are conscious experiences capable of entering into the subject\u27s own explanation of her behavior. This characterization of perceptual consciousness therefore describes a coherent intentional system that is explanatorily independent of what I distinguish as the personal and subpersonal levels of intentionality. I accordingly develop an account of perceptual content as comprising networks of anticipations articulated in subjective structures that resemble the experiences that fulfill them. These action-guiding perceptual contents fill out a distinct intentional system, whose independence from other kinds of mental intentionality provides a robust target for programs relating the mind to nature