Ad Smith Perception Belief

International Phenomenological Society
Perception and Belief

Author(s): A. D. Smith
Source: Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, Vol. 62, No. 2 (Mar., 2001), pp. 283-309
Published by: International Phenomenological Society
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Philosophy and Phenomenological Research
Vol. LXII, No. 2, March 2001
Perception and Belief

A. D. SMITH
University of Essex
An attempt is made to pinpoint the way in which perception is related to belief.

Although, for familiar reasons, it is not true to say that we necessarily believe in the
existence of the objects we perceive, nor that they actually have their ostensible
characteristics,it is argued that the relation between perception and belief is more than
merely contingent
There are two main issues to address. The first is that 'collateral' beliefs may
impede perceptualbelief. It is argued that this still assigns an essential role to belief in
perception, though the belief may be of an attenuated form. The second is Fred
Dretske's claim that even attenuatedbelief may be entirely absent from perception. It is
argued that (a) 'non-epistemic' perception can be understood only by employing the
concept of 'epistemic' perception; (b) that the former can occur only partially-i.e.,
within perceptionsthat are otherwise epistemic; and (c) that by switching attentionfrom
the perception of objects to the Phenomenological tradition's concern with the percep-
tion of world, we can see that perception must be entirely permeated with 'doxastic'
force.
The question whether perception essentially involves belief-specifically,

belief in the object of perception-is, to go by the recent literature, still
wholly unresolved. On the one hand we find philosophers explicitly present-
ing what we may term a 'belief analysis' of perception. This may take two
forms. One is a reductive analysis of the kind perhaps most famously associ-
ated with David Armstrong, according to which perceptual experience is
simply equated with (a certain kind of) believing. No reference is made in
such an analysis to perceptual sensations, 'qualia', 'sense-impressions', or
any such supposedly sensuous and yet non-'epistemic' items. If the sensuous
character of perceptual consciousness is mentioned at all on such an approach,
it is regarded as being but the conscious character of the act of believing
itself. The other, non-reductive form of belief analysis recognizes such items,
though as forming only one part or aspect of perceptual experience-the rest
being constituted by a distinctively cognitive act of the mind which takes the
form of a belief. Perhaps the clearest traditional exponent of such a non-reduc-
tive belief analysis was Thomas Reid, who described perceptual experience as
involving sensation together with a 'conception' of some external object and
PERCEPTION AND BELIEF 283

a 'belief of its present existence'.' In our own time, Wilfrid Sellars' extended
defence of such a non-reductive account has been highly influential: 'What I
have so far referred to as the explication of the perceptual taking of a red
triangle, namely its construal as a believing in a red triangle, is but one
aspect of a more complex state that also includes a sensing of a red trian-
gle...'2 The difference between the reductive and the non-reductive forms of
belief analyses will not be of concern to us here. I am interested in investigat-
ing what they both equally affirm: that believing plays an essential part in
perceptual experience.
On the other hand one can find authors giving all of the above suggestions
a brusque dismissal. Gareth Evans, for example, characterizes perception in
terms of the operation of an informational system, and makes 'belief-indepen-
dence' a hallmark of the operation of such a system.3 More recently we find
Jose Luis Bermudez writing as follows: 'In the normal course of things,
perceivers tend to believe that the world is the way they perceive it to be. But
there are times when belief and perception come apart. Optical illusions are a
case in point. Knowing that one is witnessing an optical illusion does not
make the illusion go away.'4 When, however, we return from such an appar-
ently obvious point to the proponents of belief analyses themselves, what we
find is that they are generally happy to accept it, and try to accommodate it
within their theory. This may perhaps indicate that some sort of rapproche-
ment is possible in this area. That, at any rate, is what I shall be attempting
in this paper. I shall suggest that although it is certainly not true to say that
one believes in the existence of any and every object one perceives, nor that
one necessarily believes such objects actually to be the way they appear,
belief cannot be simply omitted from an acceptable philosophical account of
perception.
Essays on the Intellectual Powers of Man, ed. Baruch Brody (MIT Press: Cambridge,
Massachusetts, 1969), pp. 111-12 (sect. II.5). Although Reid 'defines' perception solely
in terms of conception and belief, and affirms that we might have been so designed that
we should perceive without experiencing any perceptual sensations, human perceptual
experience as we know it certainly involves sensation: 'The external senses have a
double province; to make us feel, and to make us perceive. They furnishus with a variety
of sensations..; at the same time they give us a conception, and an invincible belief of the
existence of external objects': ibid., p. 265 (sect. II.17).
2 'Berkeley and Descartes: Reflection on the Theory of Ideas', in Studies in Perception,
eds. Peter K. Machamer& Robert G. Turnbull(Ohio State University Press: Columbus,
1978), p. 288. Although Sellars, on occasion, can contrastperceptual 'taking' with belief
(e.g., 'CarusLectures', Monist 64 (1981), p. 89, n. 11), he can also talk of such takings as
,occurrentbeliefs', differing from ordinarybeliefs only in that they lack explicit subject-
predicateform, so that they are a matterof believing in ratherthan believing that: 'Sensa
or Sensings: Reflections on the Ontology of Perception',Philosophical Studies 41 (1982),
pp. 84-87.
3 The Varietiesof Reference (Oxford University Press: Oxford, 1982), p. 123.
4 'Nonconceptual Content: From Perceptual Experience to Subpersonal Computational
States', Mind & Language 10 (1995), p. 335.
284 A. D. SMITH

I
Let us start with the least refined form of belief analysis: the claim that
'belief of its present existence' is essential to any perception of any object.
Armstrong himself raises one problem for such an idea as follows: 'Belief is
a dispositional state of mind which endures for a greater or lesser length of
time, and that may or may not manifest itself (either in consciousness or in
behaviour) during that time. But perceptions are definite events that take place
at definite instants and are then over. How, then, can perceptions be beliefs?
The answer is that perceptions are not beliefs, and so not dispositional states,
because they are acquirings of belief.'" This may seem straightforward
enough, but a minor problem does lurk here. This is because talk of
'acquiring' a belief implies that the belief was not held prior to its acquisi-
tion, whereas one can begin to perceive an object which one fully believed,
indeed knew, to be present before this particular perception: we can perceive
objects with which we are wholly familiar. Armstrong has suggested two
ways round this problem. In the earlier of his two principal contributions to
the philosophy of perception he pointed out that perceptual beliefs are much
more rich, detailed and determinate in their content than non-perceptual
beliefs, and, moreover, are beliefs about how the object is at this very
moment. Perception is, as he puts it, 'characterised by a flood of up-to-date
information about our environment'.6 So although I may indeed all along
know that there is a white wall behind my back, when I turn and look at it, I
now come to believe that it is of just this shade of white, with just these
little marks and discolorations; moreover, all this is about the wall as it is
now. Since all this outstrips any beliefs I may already have about the object
on the basis of mere familiarity, I may be said to acquire such information in
perceiving.
This is not satisfactory for a number of reasons.7 First, although percep-
tual beliefs are, indeed, typically much more detailed than non-perceptual
beliefs, this does not seem to be a necessary, or even a universal, truth. For,
on the one hand, a particularly developed form of 'eidetic memory' concerning
an object that is known not to have changed would be incompatible with my
now acquiring beliefs about it through perception. On the other hand, some
perceptual beliefs are vague and indeterminate in content: consider glimpses
of objects seen out of the corner of one's eye in murky conditions, or muffled
noises behind one's back. Again, if I stare at a fairly simple object, after a
A Materialist Theory of Mind (Routledge & Kegan Paul: London, 1968), p. 214. Arm-
strong, of course, makes this point in defence of his reductive belief analysis. A similar
move needs, however, to be made even on behalf of non-reductive accounts, since belief
is there seen to be consequent upon the occurrence of sensation.
6 Perception and the Physical World (Routledge & Kegan Paul: London, 1961), p. 114.
Armstrong himself expresses reservations about this approach in his earlier work, and
does not mention it in his later one.

while I shall not be acquiring any beliefs about it. Armstrong speaks here of
'new, even if monotonous, information'; but what is new at all here? Pre-
sumably the answer is that at each moment I believe that the object in
question continues now to be thus and so. This, however, will not be percep-
tually grounded news to me about any object I know, or believe, to be stable.
If, while facing the white wall, I close my eyes, I shall certainly believe that
the wall continues to be there and to be white: things such as walls just don't
shift around and change colour spontaneously. The only possible reply to this
is to suggest that I at least do not have the same degree of conviction
concerning the condition of the wall when my eyes are shut as I have when
actually seeing it.8 With my eyes closed, I have to admit that it is a possibil-
ity (although it is unlikely, and I do not believe it is happening) that some-
one is silently painting a broad red stripe across the wall; if I am still seeing
the wall, however, I am sure that this is not the case. However, not only is
this a significant change of position-what is essentially acquired is now not
a belief, but a degree of conviction in a belief we may already possess-it,
too, is not a necessary truth. This is most clearly seen in cases where what is
perceived of an object can be perceived by more than one sense. If I look at a
certain golf ball, I shall neither come to believe that it is round, nor come to
believe this with any greater assurance, nor come to believe anything more
determinate or detailed about its shape, if all the while I have been feeling its
size and shape in my hand. Finally, as George Pitcher has pointed out in his
development of Armstrong's account, even though, to return to our original
scenario, I already believe that the wall behind me is white, when I turn and
look at it this belief itself 'constitutes an integral part of my perceptual
consciousness; and full justice is not accorded to this status by saying merely
that the belief is a member of a new set of perceptual beliefs'.9 If belief is an
integral element in perception, it ought, one would think, to relate us believ-
ingly to all the perceived features of perception's objects equally and in the
same manner.
Armstrong's second thoughts on this matter are an improvement. He now
allows that no new information about the world may be acquired in a percep-
tion, but points out that even in such cases a certain counterfactual will be
true: perception is an 'event.. .that would have been the acquiring of belief if
belief had not already been acquired'."' In other words, perception involves
either the acquiring of beliefs or their reinforcement. Similarly, George
Pitcher, perhaps picking up on a metaphor used by Armstrong," says that
8 At one point Armstronghimself briefly mentions the acquisitionof 'a still more complete
assuranceof certain facts about our presentenvironment':ibid., p. 110.
9 A Theoryof Perception (PrincetonUniversity Press: Princeton, 1971), p. 72.
1( A MaterialistTheoryof Mind, p. 224.
At one point Armstrong speaks of perception without the acquisition of belief as being
'like a seal stamped on wax that already bears the impression of that seal. Nothing
286 A. D. SMITH

what happens in perception is that we are caused to have beliefs about our
environment. Because of the possibility of causal over-determination, this
avoids any implication that the beliefs that are essentially implicated in per-
ception were not held before.'2 As Pitcher writes, 'Even though I already have
the belief that there is a dogwood tree outside my window, nevertheless when
I now look at it again, the tree (once again) causes that (perceptual) belief. It
is a (present) cause of my belief, along with its other (past) causes."3
Even if something along these lines is accepted, it remains the case that
the unqualified claim that perceptual consciousness essentially involves belief
is false. Thomas Reid, despite the reference to belief in his 'definition' of
perception, despite saying, indeed, that the only way in which perception is
distinguished from conception or imagination is that the former involves 'a
full conviction','4 can yet allow that 'there may be a perception so faint and
indistinct, as to leave us in doubt whether we perceive the object or not.
Thus, when a star begins to twinkle as the light of the sun withdraws, one
may, for a short time, think he sees it, without being certain, until the
perception acquires some strength and steadiness'.'5 This is the only passage,
so far as I am aware, in which Reid in any way qualifies his original analysis
of perception; and it will be noted that the qualification is concerned with the
relatively sophisticated matter of the self-ascription of perception. Still, this
admission presents difficulties for a straightforward belief theory of percep-
tion. For it is, of course, compatible with my being unsure whether or not I
am genuinely perceiving something (indeed, with my being convinced that I
am not) that I in fact be so. Moreover, we do not need to turn to such explic-
itly reflective doubts to realize the general difficulty. Sometimes we just do
not 'believe our eyes' (or ears, etc.). To cite a by now standard example, a
seasoned traveller in the desert, who is mistakenly convinced that there is no
oasis ahead, may discount the actual appearance of one as a mirage. We also
do not invariably believe that the objects which we do take ourselves to be
perceiving have the character that our experience presents them as having.
Being familiar with the Muller-Lyer illusion, I do not believe its two princi-
pal lines to be unequal, though they certainly do look it. It may seem, there-
fore, that, strictly speaking, belief falls away from the analysis of perception,
and we are left merely with conception. To perceive is, cognitively, just to
think, to entertain propositions. This position has, indeed, been defended in
recent times. Joseph Runzo, for example, has explicitly opted for a non-
furtheris done, because the seal simply fits into an imprintalready made. Informationis
duplicated':ibid., p. 224.
12 Although Pitcher standardlyspeaks of 'causally-receiving' beliefs, he stresses that this is
a technical expression: 'receive' should not be taken to imply, as it standardly does,
receiving something not previously possessed.
13 Op. cit., p. 73.
14 Op. cit., p. 8 (sect. 1.1).
15 Ibid., p. 113 (sect. II.5).

doxastic 'propositional' analysis of perception: 'To perceive an object or state
of affairs, X, is, and is no more than, to be episodically aware of a set of
propositions about X... This awareness of (sets of) propositions during
perceiving is akin to entertaining propositions... '. Runzo goes on explicitly
to distinguish his position from doxastic analyses such as Armstrong's.
Perhaps, however, the claim that belief is essentially involved in perception
requires but qualification and not outright rejection. Such qualification should
not, of course, merely water down claims to essentiality. To be told that
perception often features belief, but sometimes doesn't, would hardly be
illuminating. The suggestion, rather, is that a certain kind of perhaps
qualified belief is essential to perception.
At this point it is worth turning again to Armstrong who has, perhaps
more than any other recent philosopher, attempted to do justice to the essen-
tial but qualified role of belief in perception. His original response to the fact
of perception in the absence of belief was to say that such cases are possible
only when belief is inhibited by background beliefs. Our man in the desert
sees what looks like an oasis, indeed what is an oasis, but fails to believe in
its existence only because he antecedently believes there to be no oasis in the
vicinity. 'In all cases of "perception without belief", therefore,' writes Arm-
strong, 'there would be belief that we are perceiving something, but for
independently acquired information."7 He can, therefore, continue to assert
that perception is 'essentially belief inducing': it is 'a thought that presses
towards being a belief. Such a thought I shall describe as an "inclination to
believe"'; elsewhere he calls it a 'presumptive thought'."S
Frank Jackson, among others, has questioned this. Discussing a case
where a white wall looks blue because blue-tinted glasses are worn, Jackson
writes: 'But suppose I had not known that I was wearing blue glasses, what
would I have believed then if I had not known the wall was white? Must it in
this case be true that I would have believed that the wall was blue? There is
no must about it. I might have noticed that my hand looked blue and so have
suspected...; or there might have been something about a friend's smile that
alerted me to the possibility that there was something strange about the
circumstances; and so on and so forth."'9 Even in such cases, however, the
suppression of the usual belief is dependent on collateral information: in this
particular case, that hands do not change colour, or are not blue, that certain
16 'The Propositional Structure of Perception', American Philosophical Quarterly 14 (1977),

pp. 214-15.
17
Perception and the Physical World, p. 86.
18 Ibid., pp. 86-87 and 106. A corollary of this would seem to be that, since the use of
collateral information is presumably a possibility only for relatively sophisticated, thinking
creatures, there should be no perception without belief in lower animals. This is far from
being implausible. Is there any sound reason to think that mere animals have any appre-
ciation of illusions, rather than simply being misled by them?
1 Perception (Cambridge University Press: Cambridge, 1977), p. 41.
288 A. D. SMITH

smiles suggest trickery, and so on and so forth. Another of Jackson's objec-
tions, however, raises a somewhat different issue. Discussing the Mfiller-Lyer
illusion, he writes: 'Even if I had not measured the lines, or otherwise deter-
mined that the lines were equal, I would not have believed that the top line
was longer than the bottom; I would, rather, have reserved judgement. This is
not because I am familiar with the Miiller-Lyer illusion, but is the result of
the fact that it is obvious that the "wings" at the end of the lines are going to
have a distorting effect. The first time I was presented with the illusion, and
before I had measured the lines, I noted that the top line looked longer, but
did not thereby believe that it was longer. And this is almost universally the
case."20 Almost universally the case, perhaps-for worldly-wise human
adults; not for children and animals. Armstrong's entailment is supposed to
hold only for the innocent observer. Cognitively motivated suspicion can
only arise because of some perceived or supposed anomaly in the perceptual
situation; but such anomalies are taken as pertinent only by a sophisticated
being who appreciates normality against the background of empirical regulari-
ties.2' In the absence of this, failure to believe that things are the way they
manifestly look is, as Armstrong holds, simply unintelligible. How can I
disbelieve my senses if I have nothing else to go on?22
However, even if we concur with Armstrong on this issue, there is still a
problem; for it is being accepted that there are perceptions that just do not
involve any actual belief. An inclination to believe is not, it may be said, a
kind of belief at all, any more than a potential leader is a kind of leader. If all
we are interested in is providing a 'belief analysis' of perception, then perhaps
the present proposal counts as one; but it is surely as unsatisfactory as the
analysis of the actual existence of physical objects in terms of counterfactual
experiences that is characteristic of phenomenalism. We still want to know
20 Ibid., pp. 40-41.

21 This applies also to an anecdote related by William Kneale. Sitting in his room 'with a
heavy cold and a feverish headache', he heard what turnedout to be the sound produced
by the gas-ring outside his door. When he first heard it, however, 'in my anxious and
depressed state I immediately jumped to the conclusion that the noise was, as we some-
times say, in my head': 'An Analysis of Perceiving in Terms of the Causationof Beliefs
II', in Perception A Philosophical Symposium,(Methuen:London, 1971), ed. F.N. Sibley,
pp. 69-70. Here, again, belief in the presence of an object in the environmentis inhibited
only because Kneale collaterally believed that he had a severe cold and that colds often
produce such inner noises. The fact that Kneale himself speaks here of a 'conclusion'
intimatesas much.
22 Moreover, if Armstrong were not correct here, experiments on whether non-linguistic
animals of various species are subject to specified illusions would be methodologically
undermined.Suppose that mice did not react to the top line of a Muller-Lyerdiagram as
being longer than the bottom. Would this show that they were not subject to the illusion-
that the two lines looked the same length to them? Perhapsfor the mice 'it is obvious to
them that the wings at the end of the lines are going to have a distorting effect'. This is
ludicrous only because what Jackson takes as 'obvious' is something that cannot be
appreciatedby a mouse; it is the productof considerablecollateral belief.

what a case of perception without belief actually consists in. Pitcher is sensi-
tive to this issue. He is influenced by Armstrong's later treatment of this
topic, and distinguishes three types of case.23 The first is perception that
involves full belief, which we may pass over. The second is where we 'half-
believe' our senses: we have a suspicion, but no more, about the veracity of
our experience. Pitcher and Armstrong both refer to such cases as its being a
matter of being inclined or having an inclination to believe. Pitcher says of
these cases that 'inclinations to (perceptual) beliefs that such-and-such will
serve our purposes here just as well as (perceptual) beliefs...' .24 Since such
states have, phenomenologically, a distinctive and positive doxastic character,
no doubt this is true; so we merely modify the belief theory so that it claims
that perception essentially involves at least an inclination to believe. The
third kind of case is where the subject 'resists and overcomes' such an inclina-
tion. Armstrong speaks here of a potential belief, and Pitcher of a suppressed
inclination to believe. Although Armstrong is happy to rest with but a
counterfactual specification of such a state-a potential belief is a 'state
which would be a belief-state but for the inhibiting effect of other, contrary,
beliefs'25-Pitcher offers a little more: 'I do not mean, of course, that the
inclination is totally suppressed, i.e. that it is suppressed, so to speak, out of
consciousness altogether. I mean only that it is partially, and perhaps even
mostly, suppressed.'26 Pitcher here suggests (I think) that we are residually
conscious of the perceptual state as being an inclination to believe, thereby
giving the state at least some phenomenological doxastic reality. This would
explain why he can also call it an 'attenuated inclination'. What we never
find, phenomenologically, in perception is anything resembling a merely idle
thought or, as Runzo suggests, a mere 'entertaining' of propositions. Percep-
tion always gives us, ostensibly, a way the world is: indeed, it gives us,
ostensibly, a part of that world as, in Husserl's phrase, bodily present.
Furthermore, perceptual experience, of its very nature, involves one's atten-
tion being drawn to things. We cannot simply ignore it. The most you can
do is, thanks to the offices of free thought, actively countermand its deliver-
ances. As Armstrong rightly says, perception intrinsically presses towards
belief.27
23
CompareA Materialist Theoryof Mind, pp. 221-23 and A Theoryof Perception, pp. 91-
93. Armstrongin fact allows afourth type of case: what he calls 'idle perceptions', which
involve 'informationthat is completely disregarded,but, incredibly, not because of any
other information that we already possess'. He adds, however, that such cases can only
be described 'by reference to the central cases where beliefs are acquired': op. cit.,
p. 225.
24 op. cit., p. 92.
25 A MaterialistTheoryof Mind,p. 223.
26 op. cit., p. 93n.
27 Even the sense-datum theorist H.H. Price can characterize perceptual awareness as
'soliciting' our belief: 'Appearingand Appearances',American Philosophical Quarterly
1 (1964), p. 13.
290 A. D. SMITH

I have been attempting to address the challenge that we speak of the actual
nature of perceptual experience as such, and not merely of how perception
would be if various conditions are fulfilled, along phenomenological lines;
but there is also a functional story to tell. For the objection that even a full
inclination to believe is not an actual belief, and so does not tell us about
actual perception, works with too neat a dichotomy: either something actu-
ally is a belief, or it actually isn't at all. In fact, however, there is an active
notion of potentiality which goes beyond examples like my earlier one of a
potential leader. There are, as we might put it, potent potentialities. Consider
a clockwork train that is not wound up. In a weak sense this is a potential
mover: if it is wound up, it will move. Contrast this with a similar train that
is wound up and operating, but which is being prevented from moving. Here
the train fails to be an actual mover only because it is impeded. The example
of a potential leader is like the former; but Armstrong's description of poten-
tial belief is to be understood along the lines of the latter. Perceptual experi-
ences are not just essentially, but intrinsically, belief-inducing, having, there-
fore, an intrinsic nature which can only be specified in relation to belief. It is
because of this that they are different in kind from any mere idle thought-
being, as Armstrong put it, presumptive. A perceptual state does not become
a belief by the addition of anything, but only by the elimination of what
impedes its intrinsic doxastic force. Because of this we can, as Pitcher
stresses, be phenomenologically aware of them as thus potent.
Indeed, it is easy to over-estimate the impeding effect that thought can
have on perceptual experience's doxastic force. Sitting in the perceptual
psychologist's laboratory it is easy to tell myself that the things I know I am
being induced to see are mere illusions or hallucinations; and doubtless, in
such a situation, I do disbelieve my senses. I should, for example, no doubt
be prepared to bet that the object in front of me is not really green-or, more
radically, that there is really nothing there at all of the kind I seem to see.
What if, however, the psychologist made it seem to me-really seem-that a
six-foot spider was making its way relentlessly toward me? I doubt that I
should remain in my seat. Or imagine someone who seems to see himself
surrounded by such spiders all the time; or to see everything dripping with
blood; or everyone's faces horribly distorted. Although such a person may
theoretically 'know' that such things are not objectively there, it seems too
weak simply to say that such a person just does not believe his senses. Such
things would drive a person insane.
One recent writer has said that in cases of perception without belief 'it
makes sense to distinguish between perception and (perceptual) belief...' .28
The parentheses here are significant. When it is made to look to me as
though there is a huge spider crawling over toward me, it is hardly a percep-
28 Bermidez, p. 335.

tual belief of mine that there is no such thing. Indeed, one is inclined to say
that my perceptual belief is that there is such a spider. If we follow this
inclination, we shall have to say that this perceptual belief can exist along-
side a contradictory theoretical belief. Although my linguistic and betting
behaviour fully entitles the attribution of non-belief to me, my aversive
behaviour as the spider seems to encroach calls for a quite different explana-
tion. Such behaviour surely need not be a mere reflex requiring no belief-
involving reason. I am not at all sure that we shouldn't follow this inclina-
tion, and say that I both perceptually believe that there is a spider there, and
theoretically believe that there is not. We are, indeed, enjoined so to attribute
beliefs as to render persons intelligible to us; but possession of such a pair of
contradictory beliefs is far from unintelligible. Doubtless a subject who has
both these beliefs is in an irrational state; but the senses are irrational. Be
this as it may, however, for all we have seen so far we may still say that
perception is originarily sense-certainty-something that can only be
modified by understanding, and that only in limited circumstances. Husserl
expresses this by saying that in relation to perception such simple certainty
is the Urdoxa: the primal and primary 'attitude', in relation to which all other
less committed modes of comportment are modifications-'motivated'
modifications.29 In what follows, therefore, the term 'doxastic' is to be under-
stood as covering all of the essentially belief-related states we have recently
examined: from straightforward belief at one extreme to a mere suppressed
inclination to believe at the other.
II
So far we have considered problems for a belief analysis of perception that
concern the fact that information about the world that is present in perception
may be overridden by collateral beliefs. We must now address a quite distinct
challenge: the claim that one can perceive something, even innocently, and
yet thereby causally receive no belief, nor even a suppressed inclination to
have a belief, about the object at all. Although this claim is supposed to have
general application to all the senses, because the foremost proponent of the
view in question is Fred Dretske, who introduced the term 'non-epistemic
seeing' in his book Seeing and Knowing, the possibility of wholly belief-
independent perception has been extensively discussed in recent literature in
connection with sight."' So, for the succeeding discussion, I shall focus on
29 See, for example, ideen zu einer reinen Phdinomenologie und phdinomenologischen
Philosophie, Erstes Buch (hereafter, 'ideas I'), ed. K. Schumann, Husserliana 111/1
(Martinus Nijhoff: The Hague, 1976) [English Translation: Ideas, tr. W.R. Boyce Gibson
(George Allen & Unwin: London, 1931)], ?104.
30 Reference is also commonly made to an earlier paper by G.J. Warnock entitled 'Seeing'
(Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 55 (1954-55), repr., with added postscript, in
Perceiving, Sensing, and Knowing, ed. Robert J. Swartz (University of California Press:
Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1965), pp. 49-67)-somewhat surprisingly, since Warnock
292 A. D. SMITH

the case of sight even more exclusively than is common in philosophical
discussions of perception. I shall, however, also freely speak, more generally,
of 'non-epistemic perception'.
The issue of non-epistemic seeing is not concerned with the issue of
whether a creature could see something and have no beliefs at all. Even
Dretske, who holds about the most extreme form of the theory available in
the literature, allows that this may not be a possibility: 'I have not said that
S (a sentient agent) can see something without any beliefs; I have only said
that no particular belief is essential to the seeing. He may have many beliefs,
and it may be essential (especially in the case of human agents) that he have
some beliefs in order to qualify for such "mentalistic" predicates as "sees so-
and-so". Nonetheless, of no one of these beliefs is it essential that he have
it.'3' It is clear from this passage what Dretske is not claiming; unfortunately
the positive claim is not well expressed-as Dretske himself has subse-
quently admitted. Referring to the previous passage he writes, 'What I should
have said is that no belief about the object being seen is necessary to the
seeing.'32 It is clear that by this Dretske means that it is possible to see
something and not have (or gain or 'causally receive') any belief about the
object at all-not even in a 'potential' or 'suppressed' form.33 It is admitted
on all hands that typically one will come by beliefs about one's environment
as a result of seeing; it may even be admitted that as a matter of fact this is
universally the case. The claim is simply that no such epistemic fact is of the
essence of seeing: neither any actual belief concerning the object, nor even a
mere inclination to believe, suppressed or otherwise, is necessary in order to
perceive an object.34 Dretske argues that non-epistemic seeing is our original
and fundamental manner of (visual) contact with the world; when we do
acquire beliefs about our environment through perception, this involves the
generation of such beliefs by a pre-epistemic and pre-conceptual episode. All
seeing, for him, is, therefore, at root, non-epistemic: there is a fundamental
level of non-epistemic perception operating within every state of epistemic
perception, in virtue of which the latter is at all perceptual.
does not in fact explicitly defend the strong thesis in question. ArthurW. Collins had also
earlier used the term 'epistemic' in connection with perception, and had denied that
perception was 'an epistemic concept': 'The Epistemological Status of the Concept of
Perception',Philosophical Review 76 (1967), pp. 436-59.
31 Seeing and Knowing(Routledge& Kegan Paul:London, 1969), p. 17 n. 2.
32 'Simple Seeing', in Body, Mind and Method,eds. D.F. Gustafson& B.L. Tapscott(Reidel:
Dordrecht, 1979), p. 14, n. 6.
33 As Dretske likes to put it, seeing a bug has as little implication for any belief concerning
the bug as stepping on a bug: see Seeing and Knowing,pp. 5-6 and 'Dretske's Replies', in
Dretske and his Critics, ed. BrianMcLaughlin(Basil Blackwell: Oxford, 1991), p. 181.
34 That Dretske is concerned to show that even suppressedbeliefs are inessential to seeing
is clear in a passage where he speaks of what a subject 'believes, or is inclined to
believe, or is preparedto cautiously put it forward...': Seeing and Knowing, p. 20.

The issues here are perhaps most swiftly presented by reference to a well-
known example of Dretske's own. He describes a man opening a drawer to
get a cufflink and failing to spot it, even though it was, as we say, in plain
view.35 Dretske glosses such a situation as follows: 'Why do we say to
people, as we sometimes do, "But you must have seen it"?.. Generally speak-
ing, we say such things in the face of a person's disbelief; we say it when we
are convinced that, despite what the person thought he saw, or whether he
thought he saw anything at all, the physical and physiological conditions
were such that the object must have looked some way to him. "You must
have seen the cufflink; you were staring right at it." Whatever response this
allegation may prompt, it is not refuted by an appeal to ignorance: "I did not
notice it," or "The drawer looked empty to me". He may have seen the cuff-
link without noticing it; he may have seen it without it looking to him as
though there was something in the drawer.'36
Let us first set aside two possible misunderstandings of Dretske's position
that may arise from this passage. One critic has fastened on the phrase
'physical and physiological conditions', supposed that Dretske was offering a
reductively physicalistic account of perception, and objected, reasonably
enough, that 'if seeing something non-epistemically is equivalent to having
an object before one's eyes in good light, having one's occipital lobe in
working order and so on, then the concept is devoid of philosophical inter-
est'.37 If it was not sufficiently obvious from Dretske's original book, his
subsequent writings have made it abundantly clear that he is offering no such
merely physiological account of perception. For one thing, Dretske's account
of perception now takes its place in his general information-theoretic
approach to the mind.38 For another, Dretske is far from eliminating, or even
playing down, conscious experience in perception.39 He is happy, indeed, to
35 One commentator has deemed it worthwhile to point out (on two separate occasions) that
Dretske does not specify that the man was looking for the cufflink. Dretske has himself
confirmed (in a personal communication) two things that I had myself assumed: (a) he
had imagined the man to have been looking for the cufflink; (b) it is immaterial to the
philosophical issue whether he was or not. Any case of someone overlooking something
in plain view will serve. Still, the scenario in which the man is indeed searching makes
the central issues particularlyvivid, since in returningfrom the drawer, he not merely
lacks a belief that a cufflink was there, he positively disbelieves that there was. The
commentatoris Daryl Close: 'What is Non-Epistemic Seeing?', Mind 85 (1976), p. 168
and 'More on Non-EpistemicSeeing', Mind 89 (1980), p. 99.
36 Seeing and Knowing,p. 18.
37 Close, 'What is Non-EpistemicSeeing?', p. 169.
38 See Knowledge and the Flow of Information (Basil Blackwell: Oxford, 1981) and the
papers of his on perceptionwhich post-datethis work.
39 As he says on one occasion, 'It is quite true...that I am committed to something called
sense experience. I should have thought that, as philosophical commitments go, this one
involved a tolerable level of risk': 'Dretske's Replies', p. 181. See also 'The Role of the
Perceptin Visual Cognition', Minnesota Studies in the Philosophy of Science: Perception
294 A. D. SMITH

speak, on occasion, of perceptual sensations.4" Conversely, it would also be
wrong to suppose that Dretske regards an object's thus featuring in one's
sensory field as equivalent to its being seen. This is because he requires that
an object, in order to be seen, be 'visually differentiated from its immediate
environment'.4' This does not, of course, mean that the subject actually
differentiates, or discriminates, the object, since this would be incompatible
with the radically non-epistemic character of simple seeing. It is, rather, that
the item is-if one can use this term of a person's visual field-'objectively'
different from its surroundings, so that, in principle, further scrutiny could
lead to its being noticed. This, and no more, is what Dretske means when he
lays it down as a condition for being seen that an object look some way to
the subject.42
One response to Dretske's claim that I believe we can discount immedi-
ately is due to John Heil. He claims that, in the sort of case in question, the
subject does have a belief about the relevant object; it is just that it is
unconscious.43 Without further argument such a suggestion would, of course,
be but an unmotivated move made merely to retain a theory. Heil, however,
adduces supposedly analogous circumstances where many are indeed inclined
to speak of unconscious beliefs. For example, driving along in a car while
wholly engrossed in thought or conversation, one can 'come to' and realize
that one has been on 'automatic pilot' for a while. The suggestion is that
during the period in question one was not consciously believing anything
about the road markings or the other cars on the road, and yet the fact that one
continued to drive successfully indicates that such surrounding items were
registered and taken account of in one's behaviour: in short, that one had
beliefs about them. In fact, however, although such activities on 'automatic
pilot' are commonly cited as examples of unconscious belief acquisition, they
illustrate no such thing-for one continues to have conscious visual experi-
ence of one's surroundings in such a situation. It is, after all, not subjectively
and Cognition, vol. 9, ed. W. Savage (Universityof MinnesotaPress: Minneapolis, 1978),

pp. 107-25.
40 He even goes so far as to deny that subjects suffering from 'blind-sight' can see (with
respect to the 'absent' part of their visual field) in any sense at all: 'If blind sighters do
not have conscious visual experience, they do not see the objects in front of them':
'Dretske's Replies', p. 184 (Blight-sight is the intriguingcapacity that some subjects have
to pronounce reliably upon certain features of objects that are projected on to a part of
their visual field where they are subjectively blind. For details see, for example,
Lawrence Weiskrantz's Consciousness Lost and Found: A Neuropsychological Explo-
ration (Oxford University Press: Oxford, 1997).)
42 As noted above, Dretske has since taken a more explicitly information-theoretic
approachto perception. It is perhapsworth mentioning, therefore, that Dretske, in retro-
spect, sees his earlier requirementon differentiation as ensuring that one's visual field
carry informationabout the object seen: see 'Simple Seeing', pp. 12-13.
43 'Seeing is Believing', AmericanPhilosophical Quarterly 19 (1982), esp. pp. 231-32.

immaterial, in such a situation, whether one is driving along with one's eyes
shut or not! Consciousness should not be equated with attention (as it was,
for example, by Descartes). Be that as it may, however, the most important
point in the present connection is that such scenarios are wholly disanalogous
to Dretske's cufflink case. For since Dretske's man walks away from the
drawer empty-handed, there is no behaviour which indicates that the presence
of the link was registered in any way at all; quite the contrary-especially as
it is natural to regard the man as actively searching for the cufflink, scanning
the drawer in order to try and find it. Heil's remarks, therefore, if anything
strengthen Dretske's claim about an absence of belief.
In fact, however, Dretske's scenario by itself lends no weight to the
suggestion that an object may be seen in a way that involves no beliefs about
that object at all. The protagonist's behaviour is perfectly explicable even if
he acquired rather detailed beliefs about the cufflink. For all that is required to
make sense of the situation is that, whatever beliefs about the object he may
have acquired, he did not acquire the belief that it was a cufflink. If he did not
recognize the cufflink as a cufflink, almost any amount of detailed belief
about the cufflink is compatible with his returning from the drawer empty-
handed and claiming not to have seen it. Perhaps he took the cufflink to be a
shadow, or a spot of discoloration on the bottom of the drawer, or a pill, or
just some irrelevant something-or-other not worth bothering about. Such,
however, is not the kind of situation that Dretske wishes you to envisage.
You are to suppose, rather, that the man in question did not notice the thing
that was in fact a cufflink at all: that he did not 'take' the cufflink to be
anything at all, even an irrelevant something-or-other. Nevertheless, he saw
it.
Although Dretske has sparked off considerable controversy with this
claim, the debate can easily become a merely linguistic one concerning the
propriety of using the term 'see' in specified circumstances." In fact, even on
this level Dretske has hardly had the better of the debate, the majority of the
contributors, as far as I can tell, following Daryl Close's lead in saying that
the cufflink, if not in any sense noticed, is not seen; or that the case is at best
moot.45 For what it is worth, I have found that the majority of people I have
questioned on the matter concur with this judgement. Perhaps, however,
4 Something that is hardly helped by Dretske himself subsequently allowing that the
relevant objects are 'seen' but not 'perceived': 'Simple Seeing, pp. 2-3. I shall not be
following this concessive use of 'perceive' in what follows.
5 '[T]he issue comes to a stalemate,' concludes Close: 'What is Non-Epistemic Seeing?',
p. 170. Many are even less concessive. Brian O'Shaughnessy, for example, can simply
write, without argument, and as if the view needed no defence, that 'perception is an
experience; of the kind of attentionor noticing...': 'The diversity and unity of action and
perception' in The Contents of Experience, ed. Tim Crane (CambridgeUniversity Press:
Cambridge, 1992), p. 222. Such a view has a long and distinguished ancestry: Aristotle,
you will recall, regardsperceiving as a species of discriminating(krinein).
296 A. D. SMITH

people's reactions to this scenario are influenced by the fact that they tend to
assume that the man was looking for the cufflink-for I have found that
another of Dretske's examples tends to elicit a contrary judgement. Look
briefly-for two seconds say-at Figure J.46 If the situation is normal, you
will surely have seen all the spots and patches in the two boxes. Is it,
however, at all reasonable, asks Dretske, to suppose that you acquired a sepa-
rate belief for each and every mark, or a belief that somehow manages to
embrace each one? What is meant to motivate a denial of any such claim is
the fact that there is an extra spot in the left-hand box. Most subjects are
wholly unaware of this fact. Typically, you simply do not notice that extra
spot; you do not see that the extra spot is there; perhaps we can say that you
overlooked it. Very few people, however, are willing to say that this spot
simply was not seen. If belief requires any sort of noticing, we seem here to
have perception without belief. You perceived that mark without any 'belief
of its present existence', even in a 'suppressed' form.
(0 (@4.
S.;**: *;*:*:
Figure I
Moreover, claiming that the cufflink is not seen in Dretske's original

example does not relieve the epistemic theorist of problems-at least not one
who, like Armstrong, Sellars or Reid, wishes to explicate the intentionality
of perceptual consciousness, in essential part, in terms of belief. For suppose
that Dretske is wrong and that in the scenario envisaged the protagonist did
not see the cufflink because he had no relevant belief (even a suppressed one).
What are we to say about that portion of his sensory field, the field of visual
sensation, that the cufflink 'inhabits' or is peculiarly responsible for? It may
seem that a reductive belief-theorist such as Armstrong will not be able to
countenance any such non-cognitive sensory phenomenon; and that a non-
reductive theorist such as Reid or Sellars will have to regard certain portions
of the visual field as featuring 'mere sensation' or the non-cognitive sensing
of sensa: epistemic blind-spots wholly unrelated to the 'external world', and
hence, in that respect at least, to the surrounding, 'cognitive' portions of the
visual field. But such a view would, of course, be absurd. Our visual field,
prior to the question of what is noticed and hence believed in, already consti-
46
Taken from Dretske's 'Conscious Experience', Mind 102 (1993), p. 273.

tutes the unitarypresence of our physical environmentto us. Taking particu-
lar cognizance of particularobjects is somethingthatoccurs within a realm of
world-directednessthat is alreadyattained.So it may seem that if we cannot
pair every sensory element in a state of perceptual consciousness with a
belief, then belief analyses of perceptionwill be incapableof doing justice to
the fact that a perceptualstate is perceptual throughand through-or at least
(in case this implies that everything in one's visual field is perceived, or
'seen -something we have seen to be at least moot) that a perceptualstate
be intentionalthroughand through.So the issue here is not merely 'verbal'.
The root of Dretske's opposition to epistemic theories is the conviction
that in perception we are typically in receipt of more informationabout our
surroundingsthan we can epistemically handle.47Such informationis con-
sciously presentin the form of a richly detailed arrayof visual sensation that
typically outstrips our ability to 'take it all in'. Visual belief, however, is a
matter of what we 'take in'. Dretske has made use of well-known tachisto-
scopic experiments by Sperling and his associates to reinforce this point. In
these experimentssubjects are exposed to an arrayof up to a dozen letters in
rows for a very brief period (1/20th sec.). Although it had been known for a
long time that subjects can identify only about four or five letters from such
displays, Sperling demonstrated(in case demonstrationwas needed) that 'the
span of immediate-memory...is not due to a limit on what the subject can
see'.4 Suppose the subject is presented with three rows of four letters; the
demonstrationconsists in showing that althoughthe subjectcan indeed after-
wards correctlyreportonly four letters (i.e., one row's worth), which row the
subject will reportcan be determinedby the experimenter-by, for instance,
sounding a high-, middle- or low-sounding tone immediately after the
exposure, which serves to direct the subject to one or other of the rows.49As
Sperling himself says, 'The finding that only 4 or 5 letters can be reported
after a brief exposure dates back to the last century. My contribution has
47 The passage from Reid cited earlier indicates a second ground for the possibility of
perception without belief: perceptions just above threshold level. I can be in doubt
whether I really just saw a very faint light or only imagined it. This can be the case even
if I did see such a thing. This, too, is not a matterof perceptualbelief being impeded: it
simply doesn't arise. I shall, however, focus on Dretske's line of attack.
48 'A Model for Visual Memory Tasks', HumanFactors 5 (1963), p. 20.
49 Sperling suggested that this is possible because subjects reportthat 'they can still "read"
the stimulus even when the instruction tone comes several hundred milliseconds after
terminationof the stimulus. In fact, naive subjects sometimes think that the physical light
source is a slowly fading one': E. Averbach & G. Sperling, 'Short Term Storage of
Informationin Vision', in Information Theory,ed. Colin Cherry(Butterworths:London,
1961), p. 200. (Because of this, the informational 'storage' in question was termed
'iconic' by Ulrich Neisser.) The idea that the availability of informationcan be equated
with such a persisting image has since been seriously questioned, however. For a good
discussion of the issues, see A.H.C. van der Heijden, 'Central Selection in Vision', in
Perspectives on Perception and Action, eds. Herbert Heuer & Andries F. Sanders
(Lawrence Erlbaum:Hillsdale, NJ, 1987), pp. 421-46.
298 A. D. SMITH

been, I think, to show that these few letters can be arbitrarily selected from a
considerably larger number of letters which are available momentarily during
and shortly after the exposure.'5""Dretske glosses these findings by saying
that 'although the subjects could succeed in identifying only three or four
letters, information about all the letters was contained in the persisting
icon'." Facts such as these indicate that we need to introduce a distinction
within the domain of sensory consciousness. For although the un-'cognized'
letters in a Sperling display are certainly in one sense present to conscious-
ness-since they are registered in sensation, which is a content of conscious-
ness if anything is-it is not unnatural to say that the subject is not
conscious, or aware, of them. In the latter sense, we are conscious only of
what we 'take in', and only this requires, perhaps, belief (or an inclination
thereto). The problem for epistemic accounts of perception is that sensations
that are in consciousness only in the first sense are not mere features of
sentiency, but can function perceptually.
As a matter of fact, Dretske's claim that all the Sperling figures are seen
goes beyond the conclusion that Sperling himself was prepared to draw. Since
subjects in these experiments do make occasional mistakes (in fact about a
quarter of the time), Sperling himself concluded that with an array of twelve
letters 'the total information available from which an observer can draw his
partial report is about 9.1 letters'.52 Doubtless, however, the disagreement
between Dretske and Sperling here is due to the latter's excessively opera-
tionalistic interpretation of the notion of available information.53 Even if we
went with Sperling's more austere interpretation of available information,
however, the crucial point remains that perception gives us some additional
information that outstrips all possibility of report, or, indeed, of any
behavioural manifestation. As Dretske says, 'The sensory systems, and in
particular the visual system, delivers more information than we can ever
(cognitively) digest.'54 We seem once again to have to recognize cases where
things are certainly seen, and, indeed, appear 'as' something, without them
being the object of any belief or identification. Dretske claims that 'to
confuse the information that was available in the percept with the informa-
tion that is actually extracted, stored, and effective (or potentially effective) in
determining behavior is to confuse perception with cognition'." Moreover, it
50 Averbach & Sperling, p. 211.

Si 'The Role of the Percept...', p. 119.
52 'The Information available in brief visual presentations', Psychological Monographs:
General and Applied 74 (1960), pp. 26-27.
53 The behaviouristically orientated perspective within which Sperling was working is
indicated by his remarkthat 'observersenigmatically insist that they have seen more than
they can remember afterwards,that is report afterwards': ibid., p. 1. Most of us would
find this far from 'enigmatic'.
54 'Simple Seeing', p. 11.
55 'The Role of the Percept...', p. 120.

is no good appealing to unconscious belief in the manner of John Heil, since,
once again, there is simply no appropriate behaviour to explain.
Perhaps, however, an appeal to unconscious belief could be differently
motivated-by appeal, for example, to hypnosis. What if, after participating
in the Sperling experiments, subjects were put under hypnosis and, when
asked, correctly identified all of the characters in the displays they had seen?
Would this not show that all the objects seen had been recognized and catego-
rized, and so that they were perhaps objects of belief, although unconsciously
so? There are three objections to this suggestion. First, even if it could be
shown-something I take to be unlikely in the extreme-that all subjects
when hypnotized were infallible in retrieving all the relevant information
contained in the displays, this would be but a contingent fact concerning
human information processing and storage. In order to sustain the claim that
such cognition is essential to perception, such facts would have to be neces-
sary truths concerning any possible perceiving organism-something that is
even more implausible. Secondly, the issue we are concerned with relates to
the nature of the conscious state at the time of perceiving. Perception of all
the Sperling figures is a conscious affair. What we are interested in is what
makes this conscious episode of sentience a case of perception. To be told
that it is so because, although the sensations are conscious, they are backed
up by non-conscious beliefs, seems barely intelligible. Finally, why suppose
that a subsequent avowal under hypnosis indicates that the subject previously
possessed relevant beliefs? We should certainly have to conclude that the
subject was already in some sense in possession of information about the
unnoticed object, but why, in the absence of any capacity to act in relation to
the object, should we suppose that this information was originally encoded in
the form of belief? Why not suppose that the very process of hypnosis
converts such information into belief?
The reason why Dretske's challenge to belief analyses of perception is so
significant is that it presents itself as incompatible with even the weakest
form of such theories. Not only recognition, but even discrimination is
excluded from the essence of perception as such. For although he requires that
a seen object be differentiated from its surrounds, it is not the subject who
differentiates or discriminates it. It is of the essence of Dretske's position that
such discrimination is a higher, or later, cognitive achievement than percep-
tion as such. So he can explicitly contrast his position with all functionalist
and behavioural analyses of perception-for all of the latter attempt to specify
the content of a perceptual state at least in part in terms of possible actions
and reactions of the subject.56 If, however, as Dretske stresses, some part of
the perceptual content inevitably gets lost-fails to be 'digested'-in any
such utilization of the perceptual information, any such functional
56 See, for example, 'Simple Seeing', pp. 6-7.
300 A. D. SMITH

specification will be inadequate. When a Sperling subject identifies just four
out of twelve presented letters, the subject does not even discriminate any of
the other eight letters. Perhaps it will be suggested that at least the subject is
aware that all the other letters are there; but even that is not true with respect
to the extra spot in Figure 1. In one sense, you failed even to detect the
presence of that spot. If belief is understood, as it standardly is, as what,
given suitable desires, motivates action, you just did not have any belief
concerning that spot. Even if a million pounds were riding on it, you would
fare no better than chance in any behavioural test. Of course, if you were
allowed a longer look at the array, such 'cognitive' criteria would perhaps be
met. But what are the grounds for supposing that in such a situation we have,
as it were, a belief that is allowed its proper expression, as opposed to a pre-
doxastic informational state acquiring the character of belief?
David Armstrong, even before Dretske's book appeared, had, under the
title 'small perceptions', explicitly raised the very problem now in question,
and had attempted to circumvent it by just such an appeal to temporal consid-
erations. 'The trouble seems to be,' he wrote, 'that the impression made upon
us is too evanescent... The state is gone before there is any possibility of a
manifestation of belief, and if there is no possibility of manifestation how
can we speak of belief?' He went on, however, to dismiss the worry: 'This
very description of the phenomenon, however, shows that there is here no
threat to our analysis. What happens in the case of a "small perception" is
that we acquire a certain state, a state which hardly persists for any time, but
which, if it had persisted, would be a belief...'."7 We can perhaps view this
response of Armstrong's as in some ways analogous to the treatment of
'potential belief considered earlier. There it seemed not unreasonable to regard
such states as having positive doxastic force in their own right-a force that
is merely inhibited by other beliefs, and one that, moreover, is never nuga-
tory. The present suggestion is that 'small perceptions' are similarly
possessed of such force, but one that is 'inhibited', as it were, simply
through lack of time. Simply focusing on the issue of time does not, how-
ever, allow us adequately to deal with the phenomena in question. For one
thing, Sperling subjects in one and the same span of time apprehend certain
letters but not others. The shortness of the exposure of the arrays does not,
just by itself, explain why a certain subject did not 'cognize' this letter in the
array, when it did allow him to 'cognize' that one. For another, even allow-
ing more time for perception would not guarantee that every discriminable
feature of a scene will be detected; for it may be a while before you spot the
extra patch in Dretske's diagram-even if you know that there is one there,
and are actively searching for it. If it is not the temporal extension of percep-
tion that accounts for the distinction between 'small' and fully cognitive
57 A Materialist Theory of Mind, p. 233.

perceptions, Dretske's suggestion that what does differentiate them is some
later stage of cognitive processing that is essentially separate from perception
naturally presents itself.
III
I believe that Dretske's stance against the suggestion that we relate to all
perceived objects in a doxastic manner cannot be gainsaid.58 Often there is,
indeed, simply too much to 'digest'. If, therefore, one thinks of philosophical
analyses only as the giving of strictly necessary and sufficient conditions,
then belief is no part of the 'analysis' of perceiving an object. Nevertheless,
an adequate account of perception, even of 'non-epistemic perception', is not
to be had without reference to epistemic factors-and this for two reasons.
In the first place, non-epistemic perceptions are dependent upon epistemic
perceptions. Note that all of Dretske's plausible cases of non-epistemic
perception are partial, in the sense that they occur in a wider perceptual
context that is epistemic (in the sense of being 'doxastic').59 The cufflink
was, we may suppose, wholly overlooked, but the drawer itself was not; and
we certainly take there to be two arrays of dots in Figure 1.6() If such is
universally and necessarily the case, epistemic perception will have primacy,
in so far as non-epistemic seeing will be possible only in the context of
actual epistemic seeing, and will be comprehensible as seeing at all only by
reference to epistemic seeing. So the question now is whether there could be a
wholly non-epistemic perceiver of the world: a creature who, as it were, over-
looked everything: who either could not be brought, or at least never is
brought, to notice anything. Dretske thinks there could.6" 'We would have a
much different world, of course, if no one was ever inspired to believe
anything as a consequence of their [non-epistemically seeing] things, if
nothing was seen in any other way than the fundamental way I
have.. .depicted,' he writes; 'but one of the differences would not be that no
one saw anything in this altered world.'62 This, I believe, is false: such a
58 As mentionedabove, the term 'doxastic' covers not only actual belief, but also inclination
to belief, whether suppressed or not, and potential belief. 'Small perceptions' remain,
however, wholly non-doxastic.
59 This has been pointed out by FrankSibley in his 'Analysing Seeing IF,in Sibley, op. cit.,
esp. pp. 102-5. The same may be said of the thresholdconditions that I mentionedearlier
as being anothersource of non-epistemic perception.
60 In discussing the cufflink case, Dretske claims that we say such things as 'But you must
have seen it!' whether or not the subject 'thoughthe saw anything at all' (my emphasis).
Interpretedliterally, this is most implausible. I take it that Dretske meant 'anything at all
of the object in question'.
61 This is not incompatiblewith Dretske's allowing that a subject who entirely lacked beliefs
might not qualify for such a 'mentalistic' notion as that of seeing. The possible total
absence of belief with which we are now dealing concerns beliefs that are specifically
about the objects of particularperceptions.
302 A. D. SMITH

being would simply not be a perceiver of the physical world at all.63 Accord-
ing to Dretske, there is at most a psychological connection between seeing
and any doxastic state; he suggests, indeed, that although seeing in the
absence of any belief, at least in adult humans, would be extraordinary, it is
extraordinary only in the sense in which an adult's being eaten by a tiger
without acquiring any beliefs would be extraordinary.64 This is surely very
wide of the mark. A wholly non-epistemic subject could certainly enjoy inner
states, and even 'visual' states (if by this one means only that they arise as a
result of the normal functioning of eyes), that contain information about the
visually detectable elements in the subject's environment. Furthermore, such
states may be component in, and indeed prerequisite for, any possible
epistemic seeing, and therefore, in this sense, be more 'fundamental' than
epistemic seeing. Such states, of themselves, would not, however, constitute
any form of seeing the world.65 Few would doubt this, I imagine. The real
issue is whether there could be such inner informational states that took the
form of visual sensations-sensations wholly lacking any doxastic character.
This is what it is surely difficult to accept as a possibility. To postulate a
conscious sensory state wherein the subject notices nothing, even minimally,
seems to postulate a state wherein the subject is not aware or conscious of
anything. And no such state, clearly, could constitute the seeing of any-
thing.66 A totally non-attentive consciousness seems to make little
phenomenological sense. The nearest that I can come to envisaging such a
possibility is to think of a subject so thoroughly immersed in thought-
perhaps profound meditation-that nothing of his environment is registered,
even minimally. Now, it is perhaps not entirely clear that this is a possibil-
ity: perhaps to the extent that such immersion in thought really is total-
which is what is needed in the context of the present argument, since the
most minimal discrimination of anything suffices, for Dretske, to render the
perception epistemic-to that extent doubt is cast on the suggestion that
conscious sensory states are still being experienced. But even allowing that
such is possible, if this is the only way in which wholly non-epistemic
perception is possible, then a reply on behalf of a fundamentally epistemic
account of perception is at hand-one which parallels the earlier treatment of
63 Recall that I am not using the term 'perceive' in Dretske's concessive sense. The
disagreementwith Dretske here is not merely verbal.
64
Seeing and Knowing,pp. 40-41.
65
This, and what follows, is directed at George Pappas' attemptto give a fundamentalrole
to non-epistemic seeing: see 'Seeinge and Seeingn', Mind 85 (1976), esp. pp. 186-87.
66 Not conscious seeing at any rate-but the point carries over even to non-conscious
perception. Suppose that some insects are non-conscious, but that they are possessed of
inner 'visual' states (in the sense of being delivered by recognizably 'optical' structures
sensitive to light) that are informationallyindicative of their environment-but also that
such states are wholly dissociated from any possible behaviouron the insects' part.There
are surely no grounds for regardingsuch states as perceptualin any sense.

merely potential belief. For we are now no longer considering a sensing but
wholly inattentive subject, but a sensing subject whose attention is directed
away from the senses. Whereas, earlier, we saw that perceiving is not essen-
tially believing, but that it can fail to be so only when it is suppressed by
other beliefs, so now we may say that perceptual experience, although not
essentially a matter of having beliefs (or 'doxastic' states), can fail to be so
only when overridden by the exercise of thought directing attention elsewhere.
We are, then, dealing with a default position for perception, not an originary
condition. It follows, also, that perceptual experience does entail belief for all
perceivers who cannot think-such as mere animals and babies. Since, as
Dretske would be the first to admit, thought is a higher function than percep-
tion, we can defend the position that perception, in and of itself, with respect
to its most fundamental character, is belief-constituting.67
What, however, are we say of those portions of our sensory fields that are
'inhabited' by objects that we wholly overlook? Such objects have corre-
sponding to them in perceptual consciousness nothing possessing either the
phenomenological or the functional doxastic character that were discussed in
the first section of this paper. Must we not therefore agree with Dretske that a
total perceptual state may be partially non-doxastic? But if so, the epistemic
theorist will be saddled with portions of perceptual sensory fields that are
either accounted for in terms of mere meaningless sensation, or not accounted
for at all. It could, of course, be claimed that such sensory elements are per-
ceptual simply thanks to the fact that some portion of the sense-field with
which it is continuous is doxastic. But even if this is a necessary truth,
which I indeed take it to be, it is hardly, by itself, illuminating. Far more so
would be an account according to which uniformly perceptual sense-fields
were completely doxastic in some sense, since what it is to be perceptual at
all is, for the kind of epistemic theorist in question, to have doxastic force.
This brings us to the second response to Dretske. For one can both recognize
Dretske's sense in which perceptual states are but partially doxastic and yet
also recognize a sense, adequate to the epistemic approach, in which doxastic
character wholly suffuses our perceptual fields.
That there can be two such senses emerges when we note that the question
whether we have a belief about every object that is discriminably registered in
a sensory field is different from the question whether perceptual belief
concerns every portion of such a sensory field. That these two questions are
indeed distinct is evident from the fact that, despite an object being so regis-
tered in sensation, I can believe that there is nothing (relevant) there. Albeit
negative, this is a belief. Thus Dretske's character did indeed have a belief
relating to the very position in the drawer occupied by the unnoticed cufflink:
67 And here 'belief' really is the right word, since mere inclinations to believe and merely
potential beliefs require discursive intelligence.
304 A. D. SMITH

he believed that no cufflink occupied that place. Hence there was a belief
relating to the portion of his visual field 'occupied' by the link; it was not
simply doxastically neutral. Such an observation may well not, however, be
thought to answer the general problem, since the plausibility of the sugges-
tion depends on the fact that Dretske's character was actively looking for
something in particular. In the absence such a theme, it is far from obvious
what the specific content of such negative beliefs would be. It is hardly the
basic function of our senses to inform us that various types of thing are not
around: that presupposes a prior concern for those types of things. On the
other hand, every perceiving subject, in virtue of being alive, has some vital
interests; so it may be suggested that if a subject does not take there to be
something in particular at any point in sensory field, at the very least the
subject will take there not to be anything of particular interest.
Even if the suggestion just made is found not entirely implausible, it does
not take us to the heart of the matter. This is because a merely negative char-
acterization of such beliefs fails to bring out the positive content that they
embody. We can improve on this by asking what it is that perception is
primarily directed towards. Dretske is clearly concerned with our seeing indi-
vidual objects. If one such object is distinctly registered in my visual sense-
field, then I see it. If I fail to take any cognizance of the individual presence
of this object as such, I see it non-epistemically. If this is the issue, Dretske
is correct. I believe, however, that the 'analytical tradition' has much to learn
from the Phenomenological tradition's claim that what we are primarily
directed towards in perception is not such individual objects, but the world.
Every perception of an individual object already implicates the world: each
one has, as Husserl puts it, a horizon, and the latter is itself founded upon
belief.68 A thing has a horizon when it can come to conscious presence for us
only in virtue of our being aware of what does not similarly come to pres-
ence: of an absence. Such an absence goes to define, or 'constitute', what
comes to conscious presence. When, for example, we perceive a physical
body, we see it only from one side, so that other parts of it are hidden from
our view. These further parts of the object which are not registered in percep-
tual sensation are what Husserl calls the object's inner horizon. Possessing
such a horizon is essential for a thing to appear to us as a physical body at
all. Analogously, a physical object only is what it is for us thanks to its
place in an unbounded spatial arena: its outer horizon. Horizons are not
objects, but structures of experience without which no object can come to
68 Husserl's growing appreciation of the primacy of the world arose precisely from a deep-
ening on his notion of horizon. See, for example, Ideas I, ??27-32, and Erste Philosophie
(1923/24), 2. Teil, ed. Rudolph Boehm, Husserliana VIII (Nijhoff: The Hague, 1959),
??47-5 1.

consciousness.69 The world is the ultimate horizon for any physical object:
the horizon of all horizons, as it is sometimes said. We do not come by an
appreciation of a world by perceiving this thing, and that thing, and many
other things, and then synthesizing them together with indefinitely many
other supposed and remembered things into one big thing called a 'world'.70
Phenomenologically speaking, the world is not a big 'thing'. Indeed, it is not
an 'object' at all, except for a wholly theoretical attitude-and to explicate the
world at that level would be to bring it in too late, and to miss its
phenomenological origin, which is to be found in each individual perceptual
experience.
Now, what is of particular importance for us in this phenomenon of world
is its essentially unitary character. Each perceptual field is essentially
unbounded; every scene necessarily gives on to another-even if it be but an
empty waste-that can in principle be attained and explored in turn. At the
present moment, for example, my perceptual attention is given over to a few
objects immediately before me in my study; but I am equally, albeit non-
focally and less determinately, aware of the surrounding area and its contained
objects, which present a permanent invitation to a possible exploratory
glance. I am even aware, albeit implicitly and in a way that is not directly
registered in sensation at all, of the space extending behind me, which a turn
of the gaze can explore. Although the walls of my study in a sense restrict
my awareness of the surrounding world, they are but temporary screens
between me and the whole surrounding world which is constantly there for
me-indeed, in a sense, perceptually there, since implicated in the very char-
acter of my awareness as perceptual. That there is such a world is not a
function of memory and familiarity, in such a way that what is truly percep-
tual is augmented by a fringe of images. Such images may well occur to me,
but they may not. And even when they occur, what they serve to do is merely
to fill out in a more or less determinate way the details of the wider layout of
the world which, as world, as the implicated horizon of my present and of any
possible perception, is already there. Even the behaviour of an animal that
has been reared entirely in an enclosed space indicates that for it the walls of
its room are barriers, obstacles to possible further exploration. Because of
69 This is true not only of objects that are possessed of 'objectivity'; it is also true even for
,mental' states in so far as we can be aware of them as such. The horizon here is time.
70 As Heidegger puts it: 'The world is not the mere collection of the countable or uncount-
able, known or unknown, extant [vorhandenen] things. But nor is the world a merely
presumed framework, representedas additional to the sum of extant things. The world
worlds': 'Der Ursprung des Kunstwerkes', Holzwege, Gesamtausgabe vol. 5 (Vittorio
Klostermann:Frankfurtam Main, 1977), p. 30 [English Translation(with omissions), 'The
Origin of the Work of Art', tr. David Farrell Krell, Martin Heidegger: Basic Writings
(Harper& Row, New York, 1977), p. 170]. See also Zur Bestimmung der Philosophie,
Gesamtausgabe vol. 56/7 (Vittorio Klostermann:Frankfurtam Main, 1987), p. 73, where
the young Heidegger apparentlycaused something of a stir with his introductioninto his
lecture of the phrase 'es weltet' ('it worlds').
306 A. D. SMITH

this, even the momentary scene that is registered in a particular sensory array
has a unitary character in virtue of being but a glimpse of this spatially
unified world. Every region of such a sensory field is charged with the
significance of a there-as a place in physical space, even if nothing in
particular is perceived as occupying that place. Hence, all of our sense-fields
are wholly suffused with doxastic force-primarily with belief, indeed
certainty, and only secondarily with other doxastic modalities-because they
open out to us the unbounded spatiality of a world that is present with the
character of reality.7'
So although we may not be doxastically related to every object which we
perceive, we are doxastically related to every portion of our sensory fields.
There are no pockets of 'meaningless sensation' in perceptual consciousness
even when, as with Reid and Sellars, lack of such 'meaninglessness' is
construed doxastically. Dretske's cufflink was wholly overlooked, so the
subject in question certainly had no belief in its existence; and yet even that
portion of the subject's visual sense-field that was 'occupied' by the cufflink
was not doxastically neutral, since it represented an area in the subject's
surrounding space which the subject believed in. This is but the 'epistemic'
counterpart of the metaphysical fact that there are, and can be, no 'holes' in
space. To disbelieve that a certain object is present, or to be agnostic on the
matter, is to relate to a non-presence in a spatial environment which itself is
present, and to which we are perceptually attuned in its presence, and hence is
related to doxastically. Even when we are wholly idle, the world is constantly
'on hand' for us. Everything we do, or don't do, presupposes belief in its
continued reality-indeed, its reliability. Every negation, every doubt-
except, perhaps, for a wholly abstracted philosophical consciousness-is
local: a more or less restricted questioning or cancelling that is performed
within what Husserl called the 'overall thesis of the world'.72 This is the
'Urdoxa', the primal sense-certainty, that entirely suffuses all our sensory
fields in such a way as to constitute the phenomenological presence of the
world to us in perception.
IV
Dretske's influential use of the term 'epistemic' is such that a state is deemed
epistemic if it either involves belief or conceptualization. This is no mere
matter of sloppiness on his part: he is clearly of the opinion that the former
entails the latter.73Indeed, his advocacy of non-'epistemic'-i.e., non-doxas-
71 Indeed, full certaintywould be absent from this stratumof perceptualconsciousness only

in the extreme situationwhere the subject suspects that he may be totally hallucinating.
72 These issues are dealt with in numerousplaces in Husserl's writings; but they all surface
in Ideas I, esp. ?? 1, 27-30, 35, 39, 103-4, 113.
73 He speaks, for example, of belief as 'a concept-charged mental state': 'Conscious
Experience', p. 263.

tic-perception is but an aspect of his more fundamental aim of opposing the
widespread view that the exercise of concepts is essential for perception. I
entirely applaud this aim. It is, however, extremely ill-advised to adopt a
wholly non-doxastic account of basic perception if one is primarily interested
in defending the claim that perceptual content is non-conceptual--despite the
fact that others have followed Dretske down this path.74 For according to
Dretske, any noticing or discrimination brings in the level of the 'epistemic'.
This, however, will lead to intolerable results if one wishes, as Dretske
certainly does, to leave room for the conscious perceptions of non-conceptual
creatures.75Even though a sparrow may lack concepts, it doesn't perceptually
overlook everything! Especially as a result of the work of Gareth Evans there
has been a growing appreciation of the distinctive, because pre-conceptual,
nature of the representational character of perceptual consciousness.76 This is
not the place to defend this line of approach; suffice it to say that if it is
accepted, we need to reject as mere dogma the presumption that belief can
only be propositional in nature, since perceptual consciousness, as I have
argued, is intrinsically doxastic, or engaged. For it is not as if we start out as
cognizers of the world by just having representational or informational states
concerning our environment, some of which we then endorse. As Existential
Phenomenology has rightly stressed, we are thrown into the world, which
means (in part) that we find ourselves 'always already', as they say, in a situ-
ation: in reactive and responsive engagement with the environment. This is
what it is to be alive. Mature human perception of the world is a sophistica-
tion of animal perception, where perception's essentially engaged character is
manifest. The arche and telos of sensory awareness is to guide our living,
active accommodation to the world. Indeed, do animals ever merely 'represent'
the world? Perceptual belief is not information that has somehow (how?)
developed an executive function within the organism. On the contrary, think-
ing, as the entertaining of possibilities, is a reflective achievement that
involves the disengagement of cognition from action; and doubt is a
modification, grounded in intelligence, of primitive sense-certainty. These
facts are indicated by the nature of perceptual consciousness itself, for in per-
ception objects are, phenomenologically, 'bodily present': they are simply
74 Jose Luis-Bermddez' recent defence of non-conceptual content, which, as such, I

entirely approve,also conflates, or at least treats as mutuallyentailing, 'non-doxastic' and
'non-conceptual': op. cit., pp. 335-36; and Tim Crane, again as partof a defence of non-
conceptual content, says that 'belief conceptualises the content of perception': 'The
nonconceptualcontent of experience', in Crane, op. cit., p. 155.
75 'I personally, have no idea what the infant or the rat believes,' he writes, 'or whether
they believe anything':Seeing and Knowing,p. 10.
76 The work of ChristopherPeacocke in this area is of particularinterest: see, for example,
'Analogue Content', Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, suppl. vol. 60 (1986), 1-17
and 'Scenarios, concepts and perception' in Crane, op. cit., 105-35. Evans' original work
is contained in The Varietiesof Reference(Oxford University Press, 1982).
308 A. D. SMITH

there for us, immediately present in the character of reality. Such character is,
at least in the central and original cases, that in the object which answers to
belief on the part of the subject-indeed, to certainty, which Husserl rightly
singles out as the 'primal doxa'. Those who stress the non-conceptual charac-
ter of the content of perceptual consciousness must face up to this fact.


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Perception and Belief

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Perception and Belief

An attempt is made to pinpoint the way in which perception is related to belief.

The question whether perception essentially involves belief-specifically,

PERCEPTION AND BELIEF 283

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16 'The Propositional Structure of Perception', American Philosophical Quarterly 14 (1977),

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20 Ibid., pp. 40-41.

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and Cognition, vol. 9, ed. W. Savage (Universityof MinnesotaPress: Minneapolis, 1978),

PERCEPTION AND BELIEF 295

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Moreover, claiming that the cufflink is not seen in Dretske's original

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50 Averbach & Sperling, p. 211.

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56 See, for example, 'Simple Seeing', pp. 6-7.

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57 A Materialist Theory of Mind, p. 233.

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PERCEPTION AND BELIEF 305

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71 Indeed, full certaintywould be absent from this stratumof perceptualconsciousness only

PERCEPTION AND BELIEF 307

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74 Jose Luis-Bermddez' recent defence of non-conceptual content, which, as such, I

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PERCEPTION AND BELIEF 309

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