The present study takes its starting point from the enactive or sensorimotor, or, as I now prefer to call it, the actionist approach to perception and perceptual consciousness (O’Regan & Noë 2001; Noë 2004, 2012). Actionism is the thesis that perception is the activity of exploring the environment making use of knowledge of sensorimotor contingencies. Sensorimotor contingencies are understood to be patterns of dependence of sensory change on movement. The proposal, then, is that we make use of this knowledge of the way our own movement gives rise to sensory change to explore the world. This knowledge-based or skilful activity is perceiving.
We characterized the relevant kind of knowledge as knowledge precisely in order to mark the continuity between perception and “higher”, more intellectual kinds of cognition such as thought and planning (O’Regan & Noë 2001). At the same time, we were quick to characterize the relevant forms of knowledge as practical, non-propositional, as implicit, or as “skill”, precisely in order to avoid over-intellectualizing perception.
In Action in Perception (Noë 2004, Ch. 6), I defended the view that perception requires the mastery and exercise of concepts. In doing so, I took myself to be lowering the bar on what it is to have a concept, rather than raising the bar on what it is to be a perceiver. It was always my view that the resulting account was one in which understanding (mastery and use of concepts, including sensorimotor skills) and perception (exploration of the environment drawing on a variety of skills, including concepts, as conventionally understood, and also sensorimotor skills) worked together in human and animal mental life. As I put it later, “understanding” and “perception” arrive at the party together (Noë 2012).
Although actionism places great emphasis in the importance of movement, action, and the body for the theory of perception, on the claim that perceiving is an activity, and on the proposition that perception is not a representation-building activity, it was never the intention of the view to deny the critical role of understanding and knowledge. The point, rather, was to offer a unified account of perception, consciousness, thought, and action. But the details were not entirely worked out. Knowledge, skill, ability, and understanding were not carefully defined, and the precise relation between the account of perception and that of conceptual understanding was not spelled out in detail. I try to rectify that here.
My basic strategy in this paper is as follows. In part I, I offer an extended discussion of what I call intellectualism. I define the view, criticize it, and show how even critics of the view tend to share many of its presuppositions. In part II, I try to offer an alternative to intellectualism, namely concept pluralism, which builds upon the actionist conception of concepts as “skills of access”. Concepts, I propose, should be thought of as techniques for enabling access to what there is. In this way—the details will become clear later on—I offer a way of thinking about concepts that is unified with the basic elements of the earlier theory of perception.
One caveat: I don’t take up the issue of animal experience and cognition in this paper, even though it is directly relevant to the topic.