Contemporary interpretations of phenomenology, as well as current theories of perception, define perception (and seeing) in terms of sense. This chapter brings out certain difficulties for the idea of perceptual sense, difficulties raised by Wittgenstein (and Austin). These difficulties come from the specific point of view of ordinary language philosophy. Talk of perceptual sense takes its start in Frege's notion of sense. This notion was the basis for the so-called Fregean readings of phenomenology. The criticisms in Austin's Sense and Sensibilia, though leveled directly at traditional empiricism, are perhaps even more useful today, now that a whole analysis of perception has been worked out in terms of sense. A phenomenon is not a symptom or a sign of something else that is real: on this point, Wittgenstein and Austin agree. Wittgenstein shows that the myth of seeing as an activity is bound up with a myth of seeing as passivity.

One of the earliest issues in cognitive ethology concerns about the meaning of animal signals. This chapter takes a new look at this debate in the light of recent developments in the philosophy of language under the heading of "neo-expressivism" (Bar-On). It provides three approaches to the study of animal communication: an approach that emphasizes its affective function, an approach that emphasizes its referential function, and an approach that combines both. The chapter presents four "conceptualist" principles characterized by Gunther: compositionality; cognitive significance; reference determinacy; and force independence. It discusses the application of these four principles of conceptuality to animal communication. If the issue for understanding non-human animal communication were that of truth-evaluability alone, perhaps either a conceptualist or non-conceptualist account would be appropriate, even non-conceptual content (NCC) can be true or false. The chapter concludes by proposing some future directions that continuation of the discussion might take.