Our current question is, Can you perceive something without being perceptually aware of it? To avoid trivialising this question, we need to distinguish two ways of understanding the phrase ‘perception without awareness’. On one way of understanding the phrase, our question is trivial; on the other, it’s a deep and controverisal question.

Reading (optional): Dretske, F. (2006). Perception without awareness. In Gendler, T. S. and Hawthorne, J. O., editors, Perceptual Experience, pages 147–180. OUP, Oxford.

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We have already seen two cases for the claim that there is perception without awareness, one due to Sidis (1898) and one due to Weiszkranz et al (1995). But are these convincing? How can we evaluate them?

Reading (optional):

• Weiskrantz, L., Barbur, J. L., and Sahraie, A. (1995). Parameters affecting conscious versus unconscious visual discrimination with damage to the visual cortex (V1). Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 92(13):6122–6126.
• Sidis, B. (1898). The psychology of suggestion. Appleton, New York.

What does it take to perceive something? By what test could we measure whether someone has perceived a particular object? According to Dretske, it would be enough to show that they had received information about the object which is ‘available for the control and guidance of action’ and ‘extracted ... by accredited receptor systems’ (Dretske, 2006 p. 150).

Reading (optional): Dretske, F. (2006). Perception without awareness. In Gendler, T. S. and Hawthorne, J. O., editors, Perceptual Experience, pages 147–180. OUP, Oxford.

‘If psychologists can really identify something that deserves to be called perception without awareness, they must have an operational grasp on not only perceive what it takes to perceive something but on conscious what it takes to be conscious of it’ (Dretske, 2006 p. 148).

Reading (optional):

• Dretske, F. (2006). Perception without awareness. In Gendler, T. S. and Hawthorne, J. O., editors, Perceptual Experience, pages 147–180. OUP, Oxford.
• Sidis, B. (1898). The psychology of suggestion. Appleton, New York.

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Do blindsight experiments rely on verbal reports to establish awareness in such a way that they cannot provide evidence for perception without awareness? Phillips (2006) could be interpreted as suggesting that they do, but his argument rests on misunderstanding some of the experiments.

Reading (optional):

• Phillips, I. B. and Block, N. (2017). Debate on unconscious perception. In Nanay, B., editor, Current Controversies in Philosophy of Perception, chapter 11, pages 163–192. Routledge, London.
• Phillips, I. B. (2016). Consciousness and Criterion: On Block’s Case for Unconscious Seeing. Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, 93(2):419–451.

'The challenge of measuring awareness based on behavioral measures, despite the substantial progress achieved over the years, remains essentially intact' (Timmermans & Cleeremans, 2015 p. 40)

Reading (optional):

• Dretske, F. (2006). Perception without awareness. In Gendler, T. S. and Hawthorne, J. O., editors, Perceptual Experience, pages 147–180. OUP, Oxford.
• Timmermans, B. and Cleeremans, A. (2015). How can we measure awareness? An overview of current methods. In Behavioral Methods in Consciousness Research, pages 21–46. Elsever, Amsterdam.

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We have been asking two questions. [q1] ]Can you perceive something without being perceptually aware of it? If Dretske is right about how to operationalise perceptual awareness, blindsight probably provides evidence that you can. [q2] What are the functions of perceptual awareness? Perceptual awareness enables you to act for reasons.

We noted a problem earlier: research on blindsight appears not to operationalise perceptual awareness in the way Dretske’s argument (about the functions of perceptual awareness) requires. This motivates considering a further strand of research on perception without awareness.

Reading (optional):

• Debner, J. A. and Jacoby, L. L. (1994). Unconscious perception: Attention, awareness, and control. Journal of Experimental Psychology. Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 20(2):304– 317.
• Sandberg, K., Del Pin, S. H., Bibby, B. M., and Overgaard, M. (2014). Evidence of weak conscious experiences in the exclusion task. Frontiers in Psychology, 5.