But can we say more than just that concepts are abilities? Abilities to do what? Well, we’ve already said: to talk and see and use and judge, and so on.
But I think we can do better. To do so, I draw on the actionist approach to perception developed in earlier work (Noë 2004, 2012). To begin to organise an answer, consider two familiar facts about visual perception. The first is that, as Euclid noticed, when a solid opaque object is seen, it is never seen in its entirety at once. Things always have hidden parts. The second is that the visible world is cluttered with all manner of stuff. Things get in the way, the view is interrupted, occlusion is the norm.
And yet, despite these striking limitations, we don’t experience the world as cut off from us, inaccessible to vision, blocked from perception. The partial, fragmentary, and perspective-bound character of our visual access to the world is not a limit on what we see, a marking off of our liability to blindness; it is, rather, the very manner of our seeing. This is fragility again.
Not seeing through the solid and opaque, as if it were transparent, is not a perceptual failing but rather an accomplishment. And relatedly: we belong to the cluttered environment ourselves. We are not confined to what is projected to a point. We explore. And it is that exploring, that doing, that is the seeing. The seeing is not the occurrence of a picture or representation in the head; it is, rather, the securing of comprehending access, thanks to our possession of a specific repertoire of skills, to what there is. The generic modality of the way the world shows up in perception is not as represented, but rather as accessible (as I argue in Noë 2012). This is why our inability to see things from all sides at once, or to experience a thing’s colour in all possible lighting conditions at once, is no obstacle to the presence of whole objects and colours in our experience.
The immediate environment is present in visual perception, not because it projects to the eyes, but because the person, by means of the use of his or her eyes as well as other forms of movement and negotiation, has access to that to environment. Presence is availability, and its modalities—visual as opposed to tactual, for example—are fixed by the things we need to do, the negotiations, to bring and keep what is there in reach. Wittgenstein, in the Tractatus (1921), said that the eye is a limit of the visual field. But this is wrong: the adjustments of the eye, the need to adjust the eye, difficulties in adjusting the eye, are given in the way we see. Wittgenstein’s point, I suppose, was that the eye doesn’t see itself seeing (unless you look in a mirror). But here’s a different model: seeing is like what an outfielder does. To say that the eye is not in the visual field is a bit like saying that the body of the outfielder is not in the field of play. But in fact the eye and the head and the hand and the arm and the glove are all in the field of play. And what we call fielding the play is precisely a temporally extended transaction in that whole environment. And the basis of the environment’s availability to this or that modality of exploration, beyond the fact that it is there, is our possession of the skills, abilities, and capacities to secure our access to it. The occluded portions of the things we see are there for us, present to us, thanks to our skilful ability to move and bring them into view. Perception is fragile.
JohnCampbell, writing in a related context (2002), has said that we shouldn’t think of the brain as representing the world; we should think of it as making the adjustments that, as he puts it, keep the pane of glass between you and the world clean and clear, as if it were continuously vulnerable to becoming opaque.
My thought is that we (not our brains) need continuously to make adjustments to keep the world in view, and to maintain our access to the world around us.
But I add: the character of the world’s presence itself is precisely a function not only of what there is, but of what we know how to do, and what we do, and what we must always of necessity stand ready to do, just in case, to preserve our access. You need to squint and peer and adjust to see things far away; and this makes a difference to how those things show up.
This is one reason why it is a mistake to suppose that we think of the adjustments that belong to the ways we bring the world into focus as the brain’s work. No, it is our work, even if most of it is low-level, unattended, and done automatically. For it is this work that gives experience the quality that it has.
The scene is present for us in the manner of a field of play. This is a fragile presence. Its presence is not given to us alone thanks to what might happen in our brains, thanks to neural events triggered by optical events. Its presence is achieved thanks to what we know how to do. The basis of our skilful access to the world is, precisely, our possession of skills of access.
And this, finally, is what I propose concepts are. They are skills of access, or rather, a species of such. They are not so much devices by which we make the world intelligible, as much as they are the techniques by which we secure our contact with the world, in whatever modality. From this point of view, concepts like dog and matter are of a piece with other skills of access such as the not-quite-articulable sensorimotor skills we skilfully deploy as we navigate the scene with our thinking bodies.
From this standpoint, it is worth emphasizing that there is no theoretically interesting cleavage between seeing and thinking (as already argued in Noë 2012). Seeing is thoughtful and thought is perceptual at least in so far is it is, like seeing, a skilful negotiation with what there is, as just another modality of our environment-involving transactions. Presence, after all, is always in a modality—that is, it is always dependant on our repertoire of skills. And it is always a matter of degree. The hidden portions of the things we see show up for us, as does the space behind our head, and even spaces further afield. We have access—skill-based, partial, perspective-bound, and fragmentary—to it all.
Perception and thought, from the actionist perspective, differ as sight and touch differ. They are different styles of access to the world around us.