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Action in Perception
Perception is not something that happens to us, or in us, writes Alva Noë. It is something we do. In Action in Perception, Noë argues that perception and perceptual consciousness depend on capacities for action and thought--that perception is a kind of thoughtful activity. Touch, not vision, should be our model for perception. Perception is not a process in the brain, but a kind of skillful activity of the body as a whole. We enact our perceptual experience. To perceive, according to this enactive approach to perception, is not merely to have sensations; it is to have sensations that we understand. In Action in Perception, Noë investigates the forms this understanding can take. He begins by arguing, on both phenomenological and empirical grounds, that the content of perception is not like the content of a picture; the world is not given to consciousness all at once but is gained gradually by active inquiry and exploration. Noë then argues that perceptual experience acquires content thanks to our possession and exercise of practical bodily knowledge, and examines, among other topics, the problems posed by spatial content and the experience of color. He considers the perspectival aspect of the representational content of experience and assesses the place of thought and understanding in experience. Finally, he explores the implications of the enactive approach for our understanding of the neuroscience of perception.
290 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 2005
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783 people want to read
About the author
Alva Noë
18 books117 followersAlva Noë (born 1964) is Professor of Philosophy at the University of California, Berkeley. The focus of his work is the theory of perception and consciousness. In addition to these problems in cognitive science and the philosophy of mind, he is interested in phenomenology, the theory of art, Wittgenstein, and the origins of analytic philosophy.
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Displaying 1 - 17 of 17 reviews
May 28, 2012
Noë's book had been out for a while when I picked it up. As a student of philosophy of mind, I knew this was going to be a subject area that I already had strong feelings about, and that I was part of the target audience for the book. The book is clearly written for an audience that has a working familiarity with the contemporary discussion in philosophy of mind, and some of the contemporary cognitive science. Having a working knowledge of the referent material is necessary for reading the book.
That said, it is a phenomenal read for those who are interested in philosophy of mind. Noë's ideas are inventive and on the cutting edge. They're controversial, and he adequately represents and addresses the elements that are controversial, often through the voices of his colleagues at Berkeley. He's a good writer, providing the examples with conceptual clarity and precision; he's a good philosopher, with interesting and important ideas.
I strongly recommend Noë to anyone interested in the subject. The "enactive account", as Noë calls it, is something that is very useful for a lot of applied cognitive science and for grounding and exploring a lot of good research; I don't know that I buy all of the stuff that Noë writes in the book, especially the section on color perception, but given how static and stale a lot of those conversations can get, the account that Noë offers does serve often enough as a very important change of perspective, with useful insights.
Action and Perception is an appropriate blend of contemporary cognitive science and analytic and continental philosophy of mind. Perhaps its strongest suit is that it moves so deftly between writers who identify as analytic and those who do not. Noë's familiarity and comfort with the phenomenological tradition, like Merleau-Ponty, is fairly apparent, but he does address a discourse that seems to be very heavily analytic, especially when directly addressing the content of the cognitive science. His ability to engage both sides of the coin, addressing a range from Putnam and Dennett to Searle to Dreyfus, makes for a good articulation of his view of mind in lieu of a diverse field of views.
That said, it is a phenomenal read for those who are interested in philosophy of mind. Noë's ideas are inventive and on the cutting edge. They're controversial, and he adequately represents and addresses the elements that are controversial, often through the voices of his colleagues at Berkeley. He's a good writer, providing the examples with conceptual clarity and precision; he's a good philosopher, with interesting and important ideas.
I strongly recommend Noë to anyone interested in the subject. The "enactive account", as Noë calls it, is something that is very useful for a lot of applied cognitive science and for grounding and exploring a lot of good research; I don't know that I buy all of the stuff that Noë writes in the book, especially the section on color perception, but given how static and stale a lot of those conversations can get, the account that Noë offers does serve often enough as a very important change of perspective, with useful insights.
Action and Perception is an appropriate blend of contemporary cognitive science and analytic and continental philosophy of mind. Perhaps its strongest suit is that it moves so deftly between writers who identify as analytic and those who do not. Noë's familiarity and comfort with the phenomenological tradition, like Merleau-Ponty, is fairly apparent, but he does address a discourse that seems to be very heavily analytic, especially when directly addressing the content of the cognitive science. His ability to engage both sides of the coin, addressing a range from Putnam and Dennett to Searle to Dreyfus, makes for a good articulation of his view of mind in lieu of a diverse field of views.
March 4, 2019
Some of this went a little over my head, but I have no background in this field so it's to Noe's credit that I understood it at all. My favorite parts were descriptions of experiments that debunk common myths about perception. I really like the idea that perception is "virtual" - I don't need to maintain a perfect model of objects in my environment to be aware of them. I can always look directly at them if I need more information. It's analogous to being able to find information on the Internet as long as you have a good enough framework to know what to search for.
May 24, 2017
Really more of a 4.5 stars—it drags in chapters 5 and 6, especially with its dedication to exhaustively countering arguments that might have been better addressed in an endnote. However, the meat of the work is substantial and, to my knowledge, largely original. Readers of James Gibson will recognize his theory of ecological perception at points, but Noë's work goes beyond it at several points.
June 23, 2013
Probably the best book I've read this year.
August 20, 2019
It was... interesting. And confusing. But mostly interesting.
November 14, 2019
A bit more tedious and academically philosophical than I had realized it was going to be, but definitely some interesting things to think about when it comes to perception and consciousness.
July 15, 2020
This was a great book when I read it over ten years ago
October 14, 2013
Embodiment is making through the philosophy of mind, and this book is a great example of how phenomenology can be wisely used to gain important insights concerning the role of action in perception, experience, thought and ultimately conscience itself.
The underlying theme of the book is the idea that experience just does not come to us--we are not passive receivers collecting flows of pre-elaborated information and simply storing it in neural correlates, memories and the likes. Experience, Noe purports, is thoughtful activity. She claims that a fundamental part of the way we make sense of the vast palette of sensorial data--of the world outside, that is--is the knowledge of the sensorimotor profile associated with objects, colors and in general sensations posited in the world as we perceive it through our ways. That is, our ideas comes from experience and are formed through an enactive approach, whereby our knowledge of objects is built on the intuitive knowledge of how the objects (better, the sensorial stimulation produced by them, how they affect us) change in relation to how they move or we move in space. Our knowledge of the objects is never full upon first exposure to them, nor is it passive as a unidirectional flow from the outside to the inside of us. The knowledge we have is evidently interwoven with the skillful knowledge of how perspectives and appearances change as function of motion, lightning and other context changes. This skillful knowledge is acquired by action and is an inextricable components of knowledge of facts and, by abstraction, ideas. It is through the enacted sensorimotor profile that we can access the full knowledge of the objects. This has deep consequences: knowledge needs a body, we cannot have the knowledge we have without the body we have; with a different body we would have a different knowledge. Also, perception is for a part virtual, in the sense that is not (or does not need to be) stored internally but can be continuously accessed as it is already outside--here is a big difference with a central tenet of classical AI, where full internal representation is assumed in order to plan action. And that's the way we do, we only sample from time to time the sensorium, we do not have a complete master of the situation at all times (if ever). Noe supports her claims with clear if sometime elaborated arguments, and arrives to final exports to the mind-over-body and consciousness-related issues which favors a more externalist approach compared to common (Descartes-inherited) internalist ones.
The underlying theme of the book is the idea that experience just does not come to us--we are not passive receivers collecting flows of pre-elaborated information and simply storing it in neural correlates, memories and the likes. Experience, Noe purports, is thoughtful activity. She claims that a fundamental part of the way we make sense of the vast palette of sensorial data--of the world outside, that is--is the knowledge of the sensorimotor profile associated with objects, colors and in general sensations posited in the world as we perceive it through our ways. That is, our ideas comes from experience and are formed through an enactive approach, whereby our knowledge of objects is built on the intuitive knowledge of how the objects (better, the sensorial stimulation produced by them, how they affect us) change in relation to how they move or we move in space. Our knowledge of the objects is never full upon first exposure to them, nor is it passive as a unidirectional flow from the outside to the inside of us. The knowledge we have is evidently interwoven with the skillful knowledge of how perspectives and appearances change as function of motion, lightning and other context changes. This skillful knowledge is acquired by action and is an inextricable components of knowledge of facts and, by abstraction, ideas. It is through the enacted sensorimotor profile that we can access the full knowledge of the objects. This has deep consequences: knowledge needs a body, we cannot have the knowledge we have without the body we have; with a different body we would have a different knowledge. Also, perception is for a part virtual, in the sense that is not (or does not need to be) stored internally but can be continuously accessed as it is already outside--here is a big difference with a central tenet of classical AI, where full internal representation is assumed in order to plan action. And that's the way we do, we only sample from time to time the sensorium, we do not have a complete master of the situation at all times (if ever). Noe supports her claims with clear if sometime elaborated arguments, and arrives to final exports to the mind-over-body and consciousness-related issues which favors a more externalist approach compared to common (Descartes-inherited) internalist ones.
November 25, 2020
A hugely important book for me. It gave me a new understanding of the perceptions, and from there of the way we make sense of the world around us. It was almost too eye-opening, made me feel almost claustrophobic, but it was necessary. The only reproach is about length and structure - I felt that there were quite a few repetitions and loops, which makes reading less straightforward (when you have an engineer's brain).
February 2, 2012
Written by someone working out their ideas and I appreciate the honesty but I found the justification of the science tiring. Maybe, that gets scientists going but I just got tired thinking about things that I wasn't interested in.
December 2, 2016
I think this is by far the best written by Alva. Taking a bit from non-analytic philosophical tradition (mainly phenomenology).
Very good book for anyone interested in the philosophy of mind/philosophy of perception, cognitive science, or neuroscience!
Great book!
Very good book for anyone interested in the philosophy of mind/philosophy of perception, cognitive science, or neuroscience!
Great book!
February 7, 2010
Phenomenal phenomenology.
(sorry)
(sorry)
Want to read
April 6, 2010proponent of the idea that consciousness does not reside in the brain; recommended by John Kowalko
Want to read
October 10, 2012 Touch, not vision, should be our model for perception. Perception is not a process in the brain, but a kind of skillful activity of the body as a whole.
December 20, 2012
Hill and Cris gave me this for Christmas, 2008. I knew of Noë from his association with the Francisco Varela/Evan Thompson way of thinking about embodied cognition.
I'll rate it when I read it!
I'll rate it when I read it!
January 29, 2013
My rating is a HIGH 4 stars. I just finished this with the book cover still smokin'. Review will come shortly.
April 14, 2017
Most people, even scientists and philosophers who should know better, believe that visually perceiving a scene is like taking a photograph. All the information in the scene is presented to the eyes then to the brain and mind. A similar information path would be followed in a camera, from world, to lens, through the box, to the film or other light sensors.
That is a completely wrong analogy, as James Gibson argued and documented (Gibson, 1966, 1979), and as he tirelessly taught in his Thursday afternoon seminars at Cornell. Animals (including us) perceive by active exploration of an environment, he said. Perception is active.
And what is perceived? Not a snapshot of a scene, not a retinal image. Unlike a photograph, a retinal image is never seen by anyone. We don’t see our retinas. We do not see scenes.
Features of a situation are perceived, like edges, corners, surfaces, objects, other people; not static pictures. The features we perceive do not change as we explore them. They are “invariant” features, or as Gibson called them in his last book, “affordances:” those features of the environment that offer, or afford, species-appropriate behavior to the animal. A hole in a tree affords a hiding place for a bird but not for a giraffe, and probably not for a person either.
Alva Noë wears Gibson’s mantle. In this book he argues with evidence and careful reasoning that how things are seen depends on more than optical processes. Visual perception depends crucially on the perceiver’s perspective, which changes constantly as the perceiver actively explores its environment.
It is a common everyday experience to not notice when something changes. You can be waiting at a traffic light, staring right at the signal, but thinking about something else, and not notice when the light changes to green. The visual stimulus reaches your eyes, stimulates your retinas, and presumably sends optical signals to your brain but when the car behind you honks impatiently, you say to yourself, “I didn’t see it.” That demonstrates that seeing is an active process of exploring that involves paying attention.
Noë’s contribution is to lay out the evidence and the arguments so clearly that only the most dogmatic or inattentional reader can fail to accept it. Even so, I don’t think this book will change any minds. The idea that perception is passive recording of events has been around for thousands of years. It was wrong then, it is still wrong now.
There are some weaknesses in the book. One is the presumption of a Kantian world view in which one must distinguish how things look versus how they really are. All we know is how things look. How would we ever know how things really are except by inference from how they look? This is a common but perplexing logical absurdity that Noë perpetuates.
Right at the end, Noë forgets what his book was about and gets flustered trying to answer the question, does the active view of perception presuppose the existence of consciousness? Well of course it does, but trying to account for consciousness is out of scope for this book, or should have been. But Noë proceeds to do some hand waving about biology, evolution, panpsychism, and the need for more research, none of it convincing and none of it necessary.
Despite these shortcomings, the book is a solid presentation of a simple idea that many experts stubbornly refuse to accept: perception is active, intentional exploration, not passive reception of stimuli.
That is a completely wrong analogy, as James Gibson argued and documented (Gibson, 1966, 1979), and as he tirelessly taught in his Thursday afternoon seminars at Cornell. Animals (including us) perceive by active exploration of an environment, he said. Perception is active.
And what is perceived? Not a snapshot of a scene, not a retinal image. Unlike a photograph, a retinal image is never seen by anyone. We don’t see our retinas. We do not see scenes.
Features of a situation are perceived, like edges, corners, surfaces, objects, other people; not static pictures. The features we perceive do not change as we explore them. They are “invariant” features, or as Gibson called them in his last book, “affordances:” those features of the environment that offer, or afford, species-appropriate behavior to the animal. A hole in a tree affords a hiding place for a bird but not for a giraffe, and probably not for a person either.
Alva Noë wears Gibson’s mantle. In this book he argues with evidence and careful reasoning that how things are seen depends on more than optical processes. Visual perception depends crucially on the perceiver’s perspective, which changes constantly as the perceiver actively explores its environment.
It is a common everyday experience to not notice when something changes. You can be waiting at a traffic light, staring right at the signal, but thinking about something else, and not notice when the light changes to green. The visual stimulus reaches your eyes, stimulates your retinas, and presumably sends optical signals to your brain but when the car behind you honks impatiently, you say to yourself, “I didn’t see it.” That demonstrates that seeing is an active process of exploring that involves paying attention.
Noë’s contribution is to lay out the evidence and the arguments so clearly that only the most dogmatic or inattentional reader can fail to accept it. Even so, I don’t think this book will change any minds. The idea that perception is passive recording of events has been around for thousands of years. It was wrong then, it is still wrong now.
There are some weaknesses in the book. One is the presumption of a Kantian world view in which one must distinguish how things look versus how they really are. All we know is how things look. How would we ever know how things really are except by inference from how they look? This is a common but perplexing logical absurdity that Noë perpetuates.
Right at the end, Noë forgets what his book was about and gets flustered trying to answer the question, does the active view of perception presuppose the existence of consciousness? Well of course it does, but trying to account for consciousness is out of scope for this book, or should have been. But Noë proceeds to do some hand waving about biology, evolution, panpsychism, and the need for more research, none of it convincing and none of it necessary.
Despite these shortcomings, the book is a solid presentation of a simple idea that many experts stubbornly refuse to accept: perception is active, intentional exploration, not passive reception of stimuli.
Displaying 1 - 17 of 17 reviews