3 - The Face of Perception

Summary

Near the end of his Dewey lectures, Hilary Putnam remarked:

Part of what I have been trying to show in these lectures is that what we recognize as the face of meaning is, in a number of fundamentally important cases, also the face of our natural cognitive relations to the world – the face of perceiving, of imagining, of expecting, of remembering, and so on – even though it is also the case that as language extends those natural cognitive relations to the world, it also transforms them.

The aim of this essay is to say what it is for perceiving to have a face, and how it matters that it does. At its core, I will show, is a bit of vintage Putnam – an idea that has run consistently through the centre of all his philosophy, from at least 1960 to the present. It is one of the most important ideas in twentieth-century philosophy.

One main theme in the Dewey lectures is endorsement of what might be called naïve realism. That is, roughly, just the view that perception is awareness of one's surroundings; so that the objects of perception are, at least typically, what does in fact surround us – notably, objects, such as pigs and Marmite, and facts of things being ways they are, such as that pig's staring at one through the railings of its sty.