Abstract
In Knowing by Perceiving, Alan Millar aims to set out a novel philosophical approach to the relationship between perception and knowledge that recognizes the common-sense idea that perception serves as a direct basis for our knowledge. The book wholeheartedly adopts a conceptual-analysis methodology to try to understand the relationship between perceiving and knowing, attempting to understand the nature of knowledge and its relation to perception through introspective analysis of our everyday concept of knowledge. In doing so, the author actively eschews consideration of empirical enquiry into the nature of perception. Given that this methodology is likely anathema to those working in the psychological sciences the book may not be particularly appealing to readers of Perception. The writing style is very dense and dry, so may be hard for those without a background in traditional analytic philosophy to engage with. If Millar were merely focused on knowledge, this armchair approach to philosophy might be warranted, as knowledge is arguably a normative or evaluative concept beyond the remit of the sciences. Yet, as soon as one brings perception into the picture, this inoculation from empirical import is arguably no longer viable, as we must understand how perception actually works to discover how we yield knowledge from it, and the history of psychology suggests that we are often very poor at understanding how perception works from the inside. It is thus a pity that Millar does not see any value in turning to the psychology of perception, particularly as some of the theses of the book, such as the emphasis on direct perception or the notion of recognitional abilities, could potentially be supported by recent developments in the cognitive sciences, such as an ecological approach to perception (e.g., Gibson, 1979) or a predictive-processing account of our perceptual capacities (e.g., Clark, 2015).
The opening chapter of the book provides an explanation and defense of the use of conceptual analysis to understand knowledge. The traditional approach in epistemology has been to try to provide an analysis of knowledge in terms of other concepts, such as justification, truth, and belief. However, in Chapter 2, Millar provides a convincing case that this gets things the wrong way around. We should begin with the concept of knowledge because this is a concept that everyday folk are more at home with than notions like justification, which tend to be solely the concern of the philosopher. Rather than analyzing knowledge in terms of justified beliefs, Millar takes knowing to involve having adequate reason for belief, requiring him to provide a distinctive account of perceptual knowledge, as perception is not usually characterized in terms of reasons.
In Chapter 3, Millar sets out an account of direct perception that can play the required role of explaining knowledge from perception within his preferred framework. Millar adopts a conception of perception that is likely to be alien to most psychologists, insisting that perception is “experiential” (p. 43) and thereby ruling out by fiat the well-established idea that perception can be unconscious. Millar takes perception to be “direct” (pp. 44–45), however, not in the sense that may be familiar to psychologists (e.g., in the debate between ecological psychologists who see perception as direct, Gibson, 1979; Michaels & Carello, 1981, in contrast to those, such as Marr, 1982, that take perception to involve computation over stored representations).
In Chapter 4, Millar elucidates his notion of appearances and explains how perceptual knowledge depends on recognitional abilities. Millar’s understanding of appearances is somewhat strange, in that he sees appearances as properties of objects that they possess independently of the minds of perceivers. Millar’s focus on the relevance of orientation and our active control of our own perspective in explaining recognitional abilities is welcome; however, it would have been nice to hear more about precisely what the exercise of these abilities consists in. In Chapter 5, Millar focuses on the relationship between perception and justification, arguing that it is the relationship between a perception and its object, rather than perceptual experiences, that provide justification. An interesting feature of this account is that knowledge-generating perception is taken to always involve recognitional and hence conceptual, abilities. In Chapter 6, Millar explains the idea of recognitional abilities in more depth. By turning to abilities, Millar is able to explain both how we reliably yield knowledge from perception while also accommodating the fallibility of perception. In Chapter 7, Millar further clarifies and defends the idea of recognitional abilities, rejecting attempts to analyze them in terms of more basic abilities or dispositions. In Chapter 8, Millar extends his account to cover more complex cases, including perceptual knowledge that derives from perceived indicators (such as when one recognizes the presence of deer by seeing their tracks in the snow).
In Chapter 9, Millar returns to the broader task of justifying his particular methodology, re-emphasizing the importance of relying on our familiarity with the concept of knowledge. In short, he argues that “our philosophizing about knowledge should be constrained by what we know about knowledge” (p. 189). While this is a worthy aim, one may question whether Millar’s methodology can achieve this, as there is a danger that he relies on false, yet commonplace, beliefs about perceptual knowledge. He fails to consider two significant potential pitfalls. First, neglecting that his own philosophical education and expertise may taint his grasp of the everyday conception of perceiving and knowing. Second, ignoring the possibility that our common-sense conception of the relation between perceiving and knowing might be wrong. This may seem like an outlandishly skeptical position to consider, yet the history of psychology is littered with cases where our common-sense preconceptions about the mind and its workings have been shown to be deeply flawed. From a psychologist’s perspective, Millar’s theory is therefore best seen as an important hypothesis about the nature of perceptual knowledge. Yet, until more work is done to connect Millar’s ideas with what we know about perception from the empirical sciences, they are likely to remain merely hypothetical.
