Dretske, Master of Distinctions

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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Perception without Awareness?

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.

A Test for Perception?

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.

Operationalising Visual Awareness (I)

‘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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Operationalising Visual Awareness (II)

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.

Dretske’s Beautiful Theory

'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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Conclusion on Awareness

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.

A Process Dissociation Approach to Perception without Awareness

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.

Mental States

When you say ‘Steve desires that Clark fly, you are attributing a mental state to me. We can think of mental states as having three basic components: the subject (you or me, say), the attitude (belief or desire, say) and the content (that Clark fly, or that Superman carry Ayesha).

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Sense and Reference: The Question

Introduces the question around which the sense and reference theme is organised.

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Sense: Frege’s Story

‘An object can be determined in different ways, and every one of these ways of determining it can give rise to a special name, and these different names have different senses’ (Frege, 1892 [1993] p. 44).

Reading (optional):

• Frege, G. (1892 [1993]). On sense and reference. In Moore, A. W., editor, Meaning and Reference, pages 23–42. Oxford University Press, Oxford.
• Section 3.1.1 and the first paragraph of Section 3.2 of Zalta, Edward N., "Gottlob Frege", The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Edward N. Zalta (ed.)

What Are Senses?

Sense is whatever it is that explains why the proposition Charly is Samantha can differ in informativeness from the proposition Charly is Charly.

Reading (optional):

• Evans, G. (1981 [1985]). Understanding demonstratives. In McDowell, J., editor, Collected Papers, page 411. Clarendon Press, Oxford.
• Campbell, J. (2011). Visual Attention and the Epistemic Role of Consciousness. In Mole, C., Smithies, D., and Wu, W., editors, Attention: Philosophical and Psychological Essays, page 323. Oxford University Press.

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Sense: Interim Conclusion

If you want to understand another’s point of view, it is not enough to know which things they are perceiving or thinking about; you also have to know how they are perceiving or thinking about those things. This is Frege’s brilliant insight. Following him, we are using the term ‘sense’ for a way of perceiving or thinking about a thing.

Recording of Whole-Class Live Question Session

The whole-class live online question session in is based on questions on the topic of this weeks’ lectures posed in advance in the teams channel.