Perception, action and the world.

Alva Noe

Is perception a mode of contact with the world itself? Or is perception an encounter, in the first instance, with the content of
mental representations? This is a problem for the theory of consciousness and it has occupied philosophers, phenomenologists and
cognintive scientists. The aim of the workshop is to approach the problem from the standpoint of a theory of perceptual consciousness
developed by the presenter in ACTION IN PERCEPTION (MIT Press, 2004). (See also O'Regan and Noë 2001.) On this "enactive" approach to perceiving, perceiving is an activity of skillful exploration of the world. The problem of direct perception can be approached anew from this standpoint.

A further aim of the workshop: to suggest that not only is the case that perceiving is a genuinely world-involving relation, but that
thought is too.

The workshop will not presuppose prior familiarity with this debate.


Cited reading

Alva Noë, ACTION IN PERCEPTION, The MIT Press, 2004.

J. Kevin O'Regan and Alva Noë, A sensorimotor account of vision and
visual consciousness. BEHAVIORAL AND BRAIN SCIENCES, 24/5: 883-975:
2001.


Alva Noë is a philosopher at the University of California, Berkeley, working on consciousness, intentionality, perception, art, and phenomenology. He is the author of Action In Perception (MIT Press, 2004). He is a co-editor of Vision and Mind: Selected Readings in the Philosophy of Perception (MIT Press, 2002), and the editor of Is the Visual World a Grand Illusion? (Academic Press, 2002). Noë is a member of the UC Berkeley Institute for Cognitive and Brain Sciences and he serves as a faculty member for the UC Berkeley's Program in Cognitive Science and also the Center for New Media. More information about his research
activities are available on his web site http://socrates.berkeley.edu/~noe