Title: Perception as a relationship
Abstract: Perception is harder than it looks. To perceive is to enter into relationships with the things we see. Indeed, for reasons that I will try to articulate, it is to enter into something like a loving relationship with them. The love-like character of perceiving has been been by-and-large ignored by philosophers and cognitive scientists, but acknowledging it allows for new insight into some of the hardest problems about perception that there are. In this talk I will focus on one class of these having to do with perceptual indeterminacy. This talk, which is work in progress, is part of a larger project to explore the ways in which “ordinary” perception is ethically and aesthetically demanding. I draw on ideas from earlier work on perception (e.g. Action in Perception, MIT, 2004 and Varieties of Presence, HUP, 2012), as well as on my newest book The Entanglement (published this past summer by Princeton). I hope this talk will be of interest to students and colleagues working in a wide array of different philosophical areas as well as to scholars in different fields.