Volume 57, 2018
Philosophy of Mind
Caleb Liang
Pages 69-76
Is Perception the Origin of Objectivity?
In this paper, I challenge a specific claim by Tyler Burge that perception delineates the lower border of representational mind and exhibits the most basic form of objectivity (2010). According to this claim, perception is the most primitive type of representation that, when veridical, accurately attributes properties to non-perspective, mind-independent subject-matters. I argue that perception of the external world, especially vision, is not the most primitive type of objective representation. My approach will be interdisciplinary. After presenting Burge’s theory of perception, I show that the current best empirical accounts strongly suggest that how perceivers represent their bodily conditions plays a key role in the biological functions of perception. Then, I argue that the lower border of objective representation is not given by (visual) perception, but by body representation. Objective representation does not begin with perception.