| View Larger Image | Action in Perception (Representation and Mind) | Paperbackby Alva Noe (Author)
| List Price: | $21.00 | | Price: | $13.55 | | You Save: | $7.45 (35%) | | | Available: | Usually ships in 24 hours |
| | Binding: | Paperback | | Publisher: | The MIT Press | | Page Count: | 289 Pages | | Publication Date: | March 01, 2006 | | Sales Rank: | 118,112th |
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FEATURES | - ISBN13: 9780262640633
- Condition: NEW
- Notes: Brand New from Publisher. No Remainder Mark.
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EDITORIAL REVIEWS |
Product Description
Honorable Mention, 2007 Book Prize presented by the American Philosophical Association. "Perception is not something that happens to us, or in us," writes Alva Noë. "It is something we do." In Action in Perception, Noë argues that perception and perceptual consciousness depend on capacities for action and thought—that perception is a kind of thoughtful activity. Touch, not vision, should be our model for perception. Perception is not a process in the brain, but a kind of skillful activity of the body as a whole. We enact our perceptual experience. To perceive, according to this enactive approach to perception, is not merely to have sensations; it is to have sensations that we understand. In Action in Perception, Noë investigates the forms this understanding can take. He begins by arguing, on both phenomenological and empirical grounds, that the content of perception is not like the content of a picture; the world is not given to consciousness all at once but is gained gradually by active inquiry and exploration. Noë then argues that perceptual experience acquires content thanks to our possession and exercise of practical bodily knowledge, and examines, among other topics, the problems posed by spatial content and the experience of color. He considers the perspectival aspect of the representational content of experience and assesses the place of thought and understanding in experience. Finally, he explores the implications of the enactive approach for our understanding of the neuroscience of perception. |
CUSTOMER REVIEWS (Average Customer Rating: 5.0 based on 6 reviews)
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Serious and Beautifully Written by Tahseen Drenter (Atlanta, USA)  5 Stars
November 18, 2009
Noe's book is both a serious contributor to the contemporary phenomenological project, and a delight to read. A combination that's no common accomplishment.
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J.J. Gibson Reincarnated by William A. Adams (Bainbridge Island, WA USA) 5 Stars
August 28, 2008
Noe convincingly makes the point that perception (especially vision) is not anything like what a camera does. Vision is an activity of the whole organism, and what we see are meaningful affordances, not "snapshots" of scenes. He makes much of the "hidden gorilla" experiments demonstrating change blindness to illustrate that we do not see everything that is there, only what we expect, want, and need to see. Easy to read, mind-stretching ideas. However, he is ultimately, like Gibson, a physicalist and a realist, appealing in the end to a neurological homunculus, as all physicalists must. So there isn't much to push the philosophy of perception. Gibson said all this in 1966 and 1979. But for a concise, empirically based definition of perception as action, this is it.
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Perception as skillful act by MCMC 5 Stars
December 28, 2006
To perceive, according to Nöe, is to understand the relation between our sensory data and bodily skills. To perceive an object in the world, say a cube, we must possess knowledge of how our visual input would change were we to move in relation to the object, and sense-data without such sensory-motor knowledge is blind (or, at the least, not compatible with our phenomenological experience of the world). In this way, our perception is fundamentally and inseparably tied to our embodiment. Although a controversial claim, Nöe makes the case with care and rigor, drawing on neurological evidence for experiential blindness and addressing likely and stated objections from philosophy.
The book is written in a manner that non-philosophers will grasp its main arguments, though philosophers and cognitive scientists concerned with understanding the nature of experience are the intended audience. The only criticism I find is that it does not attempt an account of how its ideas can be captured in a computational framework, though I suspect cognitive modelers will follow in the path set out by this book.
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A book with information known for thousands of years, but not by everybody. by Bill Anonymous (Kathmandu)  4 Stars
January 22, 2006
Action in Perception is a book that points out a way of thinking that was developed not recently, but rather thousands of years ago. While many have tried to describe it by calling it " feeling spiritual energy flow through you," the concept itself of doing actions in order to expand your perceptions is something found in the Ancient customs of Martial Arts.
Many Martial Artists may not know this, but the "forms" they do in the western world are not just for "perfection of movement." This is an impossibly, and is not it's true purpose. Rather, the forms are to have the person "feel" their bodie's movement. Overtime, they slowly take away other perception, while told to repetitiously do the same movements, until they can do them perfectly without the usage of sight, sound, taste, and smell. Only their skin detects everybody; the small electrical currents and vibrations given off by the other person.
This is only a surface of what was developed over the perception ideal within eastern culture. When it was brought to the west, these secrets were lost to many, covered in the honor traditions and other stuff that really mean little. But This book shows this way of thought in a western description, and that is why it may help others understand this knowledge once again, in a languege they can understand.
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A new movement in perception by Shaun Gallagher 5 Stars
November 18, 2005
"Noë provides a persuasive account of the "enactive" approach to perception, according to which perception is not simply based on the processing of sensory information, or on the construction of internal representations, but is fundamentally shaped by the motor possibilities of the perceiving body. ... Noë puts the brain back into the body, and the body back into the world. ... The action, for enactive theorists, is not in the brain; it is the organism as a whole acting in the environment that must be treated as the site of perception. ... After reading
Noë, any account of perception purely in terms of brain representations seems rather washed out." (Shaun Gallagher, Times Literary Supplement).
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