Aleksander Teodor Kałuski
University of Warsaw
Direct perception is an ambiguous term, prone to misinterpretation. In contemporary philosophy of mind, a range of mutually exclusive interpretations of the concept can be found, alongside competing theses about what it means for perception to be “direct”—even the systems for classifying these theses are diverse and highly sophisticated (Dretske 1969; Sowdon 2009).
The debate over the directness of perception is not merely a search for an answer to the question: Is perception direct? A more fundamental question is: What does it mean to say that perception is direct? Advocates of the ontological interpretation (Travis 2013) argue that the issue is really about the content of perceptual experience. The epistemic approach (Sowdon 2009), on the other hand, emphasizes the justification of perceptual judgments. Meanwhile, ecological psychology (Gibson 1979) highlights the direct character of perception in contrast to process-based or constructivist theories. Following Austin’s (1962), one might offer a pessimistic diagnosis: the term has been used too many times in too many senses, becoming metaphorically obscure or even entirely meaningless.
I conducted a corpus-based study on eight million academic articles from the open-source peS2o corpus, which explores how the term ‘direct perception’ is used by scientists and philosophers working within the embodied cognition (4E) paradigm. I then developed a Python program to automate the selection of key paragraphs for close reading by computing their vector representation using artificial neural networks (word2vec).
In this talk, I present key issues in the debate, including ontological and epistemological aspects, the limitations of existing classification systems, and implications for the conceptual coherence of the 4E movement.
Keywords: 4E, embodied cognition, naive realism, philosophy of perception, representationalism
Bibliography:
Travis, C. (2013). Perception: Essays after Frege. Oxford University Press.
Snowdon, P. (1992). How to interpret ‘direct perception’. In T. Crane (Ed.), The contents of experience: Essays on perception (pp. 48–78). Cambridge University Press.
Gibson, J. J. (1979). The ecological approach to visual perception: Classic edition. Houghton Mifflin.
Dretske, F. I. (1969). Seeing and knowing. University of Chicago Press.
Austin, J. L. (1962). Sense and sensibilia. Oxford University Press.
Soldaini, L., & Lo, K. (2023). peS2o (Pretraining Efficiently on S2ORC) Dataset. Allen Institute for AI. https://github.com/allenai/pes2o
Chair: Luuk Brouns
Time: 04 September, 10:40 – 11:10
Location: SR 1.007
SOPhiA 2026 