Review of Alva Noë, Action in Perception

1 Ned Block NYU This is a charming and engaging book that combines careful attention to the phenomenology of experience with an appreciation of the psychology and neuroscience of perception. In some of its aims—for example, to show problems with a rigid version of a view of visual perception as an " inverse optics " process of constructing a static 3-D representation from static 2-D information on the retina-it succeeds admirably. As Noë points out, vision is a process that depends on interactions between the perceiver and the environment and involves contributions from sensory systems other than the eye. He is at pains to note that vision is not passive. His analogy with touch is to the point: touch involves skillful probing and movement, and so does vision, although less obviously and in my view less centrally so. This much is certainly widely accepted among vision scientists—although mainstream vision scientists (represented, for example, by Stephen Palmer's excellent textbook 2) view these points as best seen within a version of the inverse optics view that takes inputs as non-static and as including motor instructions (for example, involving eye movements and head movements). 3 The kind of point that Noë raises is viewed as important at the margins, but as not disturbing the main lines of the picture of vision that descends—with many changes—from the pioneering work of David Marr in the 1980s (and before him, from Helmholtz). But Noë shows little interest in mainstream vision science, focusing on non-mainstream ideas in the science of perception, specifically ideas from the anti-representational psychologist J.J. Gibson, and also drawing on Wittgenstein and the phenomenology tradition. There is a sense throughout the book of revolution, of upsetting the applecart. This is a review from the point of view of the applecart. My comments are in two parts, one mainly a priori, the other largely empirical: first, I will consider Noë's version of externalism in the light of the distinction between causation and constitution. Second, I will argue that on the most obvious reading of Noë's view, one that identifies perceptual experience with the skilled bodily exercise of " sensorimotor knowledge " (I will leave off the scare quotes in what follows) that includes visually guided action, there are empirical results that suggest that such knowledge does not reflect the phenomenology of conscious vision. 3 See for example, Palmer's treatment of position constancy (objects do not …