Abstract
Reviewed by: Liliana Albertazzi, Laboratory of Experimental Phenomenology, University of Trento, Italy
DOI: 10.1177/0301006618765372
Visual Phenomenology is a promising title, and one would expect new guidelines for developing an empirical science from a phenomenological perspective. In principle, it might interest both philosophers and vision scientists, it being the explicit goal of the book to occupy the space between phenomenology and current approaches to the philosophy of mind and visual cognitive neuroscience: a demanding task and a balance difficult to obtain. The book is divided into nine chapters, covering both philosophical and scientific topics, as well as an Appendix. Given the dual-audience target, each chapter is provided with a short summary that helpfully allows the reader to skip those of lesser interest to him or her; the Appendix, on Husserlian themes, discusses the reasons for adopting such a philosophical framework. The author declares that he is not faithful to the Husserlian terminology, and thought, which allows avoidance of any potential philological criticism, mine included. But still, one may enquire as to the reason for such a demanding reference that risks an unfruitful bending of Husserl’s thought to alien dimensions. The thesis, continuously repeated throughout the book, is based on three points: (a) A descriptive premise (the first part): the phenomenology of vision is best described as an ongoing process of anticipation and fulfillment (AF). (b) An empirical premise (the second part): there are strong empirical reasons to model vision using the general form of AF. (c) A conclusion: visual perception is an ongoing process of AF. Given the space of a review addressing a scientific audience, I shall concentrate my criticism on two basic claims of the book.
First, the concept of anticipation discussed by the author is a mainstream one deriving from current cognitive neuroscience rather than phenomenology. It is tied to that of inference and prediction based on previous experience. This concept of anticipation is a rather rudimentary variant of anticipatory behavior, a kind of inferential reasoning, accountable in terms of forecasting, adequately explained on the basis of the theory of adaptation and evolution. Forecasting, that is, the past-based extrapolation of trends on the basis of accumulated data (big data), is a predictive activity well understood for both short temporal windows (econometrics) or very long ones (climate changes). But it does not capture unpredictable futures evading such probability-based computation. This concept of anticipation does not apply to phenomenology, where perception is conceived and described as the analysis of subjective and qualitative phenomena as they directly appear to awareness (its proper concept of “stimuli”), without any consideration of the (correlated) neurophysiological and psychophysical processes, be they ocular movements or neural correlates. Not only is the anticipation process that occurs in perceiving nonlinear, but it is also impredicative, in the sense that the laws of its internal deployment are embedded within it (Poli, 2017). The dimensions of subjective experience, in fact, appear to behave as components of a self-referential system ruled by internal laws and specific kinds of causation. To be appropriately defined, the phenomenological concept of anticipation should explain how causal bidirectional relations (i.e., not before-after ones) between subjective past and future elements underpin the grouping process in awareness, in very short durations that nevertheless are not uniformly and linearly deployed. Husserl (1966/1991) addressed the structural dimensions occurring in the psychic present with the terms “retention” and “protention.” These are mentioned in the Appendix of the book (p. 180), but neither addressed nor explained from a scientific viewpoint. Yet there is a body of literature (and its successive developments) that illustrates and explains Husserl’s pioneering concept of anticipation showing how a visual presentation actually develops on a brief present-time scale in anticipating phases of the final percept. The magnifying lens of the pervasive structure of this behavior, the specific notion of future embedded in anticipation, and its specific laws of causality is given, among others, by phenomena such as the “window effect” (Vicario & Zambianchi, 1998, pp. 233–239), perceived causality (Michotte, 1946), temporal dislocations (Benussi, 1913), and stereokinetic movements (Musatti, 1975). The experimental analysis of these phenomena, in fact, shows that what comes afterwards has a (subjective) effect on what comes before. This is the essential Husserlian proposal of anticipation that seems to be missing in the book. Anticipation, from a phenomenological viewpoint, is a structural dimension of the present, not a forecasting based on past learning (Albertazzi, 2017). The causes governing these specific phenomena are qualitative, ranging from similarity to tonal proximity and whole/parts internal organization (see, e.g., Hachen & Albertazzi, in press). There is no way to escape the problem of constitution in Husserl’s phenomenological concept of anticipation, although it “would meet resistance from a good number of philosophers and scientists today,” as the author himself observes (p. 182).
Second, and strictly related to the earlier considerations, the divide between phenomenology as a philosophical description (descriptive premise) and scientific explanation (empirical premise), although embraced by a few neuroscientists, is reductive: Besides being descriptive, phenomenology can be empirical and explanatory as well, as testified by its excellent tradition in Gestalt and experimental phenomenology.
Having criticized some of what seems to me to be the erroneous conceptual assumptions in the book, I must acknowledge that it is scholarly, providing a broad review of the literature in the fields of perception and action, embedded cognition, attention and perception, and so on (see Chapter 5). These can perform a dissemination role toward philosophers who have yet to update themselves on the current development of science (see also Chapters 6 and 7) and are still devoted to the propositional account of perception (which Chapter 4 makes very clear). With a different title and perhaps the choice of a specific target (philosophers), the book would have been very useful in freeing the field from unnecessary sophistry and providing a useful overview of researches and achievements ongoing in science. However, from an empirical scientist’s perspective, particularly one already receptive to, or learned in, phenomenological ideas, the book does not seem to be very useful: there are aspects that science has already explained (perspectival vision, low-level grouping, crowding, cortical paths, etc.) that a reductionist viewpoint is largely able to explain and would not need any phenomenological validation. From a philosophical perspective, then, to force phenomenology to validate neuroscientific and computational models under the umbrella of Husserlian phenomenology is once again to avoid considering the specific descriptive and explanatory value of phenomenology per se.