M. Jimena Clavel Vázquez
Affiliation: Tilburg University
Category: Philosophy
Keywords: perceptual agency, perceptual expertise, sensorimotor agency, active perception, action-oriented perception
Date: Thursday 4th of September
Time: 18:00
Location: Room 154 (154)
View the full session: The Senses
Is there such thing as perceptual agency? Typically, perception has been deemed passive and, thus, not the domain of agency. Ernest Sosa (2013) might be among the most moderate pessimists about the prospects of perceptual agency. He claims that a loose notion of agency might be applicable to perceptual performances, but that proper agency is not exercised here. He distinguishes between three different kids of events: reflexes or sufferings, functionings, and endeavors. Functionings—to which perception belongs—might not allow for the intentionality and freedom that is characteristic of agential endeavors, but they allow some form of rational control. This is because functionings can derive from some sort of choice or judgment. Brian O’Shaughnessy (2000) briefly advances similar considerations. If perception was agential, it would follow that we could talk of rationally perceiving and list reasons for perceiving (O'Shaughnessy 2000, 389). In the context of enactivism, in turn, one can find more optimistic answers to the question about perceptual agency. For instance, the sensorimotor view of perception defended by Alva Noë & Kevin O’Regan (2001) (see also Noë (2004), O’Regan (2011)) is committed to the idea that perception is active, that it is something perceivers do. This view draws on James Gibson (2014) who takes perception as a process that occurs over time and that involves some form of active interaction with the environment. The precise way in which perception constitutes an action, though, remains contested. It has often been interpreted as the idea that perception is kinetic, i.e. that it necessarily involves movement. This claim is, unfortunately, implausible: we can at least imagine some cases in which we, for instance, see something without there being any movement on our part or the seen object. The claim that perception is something perceivers do has also been articulated as the claim that perceivers are skillful agents. Erik Myin (2016), for example, has argued that perception is akin to other doings pursued by a person or an organism such as eating or walking. In this case, perception is among the ways in which an organism or a person engages with her surroundings. Notice that in this case, it does not seem like there is such thing as perceptual agency. Instead, just as in walking and eating, a person or organism exercises agency, without perception constituting a special form of agency. Other approaches, however, within enactivism do defend the view that there is perceptual agency. Ezequiel Di Paolo and colleagues call this sensorimotor agency. This agency is manifested in the patterns of habits of sensorimotor engagement: i.e., “historically structured networks of schemes and activities” (2018, 48). Put differently, these habits manifest behaviors and capacities that have historically shaped the sensorimotor interactions of an organism. Moreover, insofar as these are activities that have been historically pursued by the organism, they manifest its perspective towards its own environment. However, agency is understood minimally in this context: it is the regulated control of the structural coupling between the organism and the environment. As can be seen, optimists and pessimists mobilize different conceptions of agency when discussing the prospects of perceptual agency. This has led to the stalling of the debate. The goal of this paper is to contribute to this debate by defending an optimistic position, but that draws on a notion of agency that would be accepted by the pessimists. I will thus argue that there is such thing as perceptual agency. More specifically, I defend that, at least some exercises of perception, can be characterized as being up to the perceiver in a non-trivial way such that the perceiver can be credited or discredited for these exercises. In other words, the aim is to show that there is some form of governance or control over the perceptual process exercised in line with some rational considerations. In that sense, some exercises of perception are the result of goal-driven interventions on a perceptual faculty that result in better performances. I show that this is such in cases of perceptual expertise. Perceptual expertise refers to the ability to recognize and categorize objects that is the result of extensive or intensive training and specialization (Ransom 2020, 6). Perceptual expertise might occur naturally, as in the case of face recognition, or it might be the result of training and specialization in a specific domain, such as the case of bird-watchers. Additionally, perceptual expertise can be generalized to new contexts and tasks within the same domain (Tanaka, Curran, and Sheinberg 2005, 150). Dustin Stokes (2021a, 2021b) has argued that perceptual expertise is a perceptual and cognitive phenomenon in that training often requires participants to be able to deploy conceptual knowledge. In that sense, the epistemic enhancement that characterizes perceptual expertise can be attributed to perceivers’ own doing: in perceptual expertise, perceivers play a role qua agents (Stokes 2021b, 179). Drawing on Stoke’s characterization of perceptual expertise, I will argue that cases of perceptual expertise meet some conditions of agency. Firstly, in these cases, perceivers exercise some form of control by establishing a normative framework for the operation of a process by constraining how an action, behavior, or process occurs. Secondly, we can characterize at least some of these cases as cases in which control is exercised for some reason. More often than not perceptual experts can give reason for the cultivation of the faculty and the intervention in the perceptual process. This is a deliberate intervention over the perceptual process.