The Objectivity of Perception

Perception is the basic means by which an organism is able to grasp reality’s nature. This process consists of sense organ(s) which are each stimulated by a limited range of phenomena within existence. When a sense organ senses its specified phenomenon, transduction occurs, sending signals to some form of processing faculty. After these percepts are processed, the organism must attempt to interpret the sense data, usually on the basis of past experience. It is then that an organism can draw conclusions, true or false, based on the sense data acquired.

Man’s perceptual faculty has sustained vicious philosophical attack at the hands of one monstrous philosopher: Immanuel Kant. One of Kant’s basic epistemological claims was that sense perception is subjective; that since perception involves the processing of reality, it must thereby distort it and reflect something other than the world as it is in itself, which Kant called the noumenal world. According to Kant, perception creates an entirely different world, the phenomenal world, which is all human beings have access to. Because of Kant’s attack against man’s perceptual faculty, many people in contemporary culture have been led to question their own eyes and ears, reject objectivity, and flee into subjectivity.

This essay will affirm the objectivity of perception, and will show why Kant’s theory of perception is erroneous and based on unwarranted conclusions.

Kant’s first error is his notion of intrinsic qualia: that there is an inherent way that entities look, sound, feel, smell and taste without perception. But what does it mean for something to look like X? For an entity to look like X entails a means of perception; nothing can intrinsically look like X without a perceiver because there is no perceiver. To say an entity looks like X is to say “this entity looks like X from the perspective of a particular sense organ". This same principle applies to sound, feel, smell, and taste.

Kant’s notion of intrinsic qualia is a staggering stolen concept; to speak of “unprocessed” precepts is to speak of unacquired percepts. But no phenomenon becomes a percept until it stimulates a sense organ. In fact, there is no conflict between processing reality and perceiving it correctly. To perceive reality is to perceive it in a particular way; there is always an identity to the perception of a particular organism. Just as to grasp an object with your hands is to grasp it in a particular manner, so too grasping percepts must have a particular nature. Living organisms, being finite, must adapt to exclude certain phenomena from their sensory awareness which are unrelated to their survival. They also must perceive reality from a particular point in space, meaning that they cannot be aware of all phenomena simultaneously.

But to perceive a delimited range of reality is not to perceive it subjectively; to perceive something subjectively would mean to perceive it in a warped way, which would be unrelated to the facts of reality. To perceive certain phenomena within the context of a greater reality is still to see that limited range of phenomena correctly. Just because a being is non-omniscient does not make that being nescient.

Perception, insofar as it actually extends, is incapable of error. However, conceptual identification of sense data is fallible, which is often why some people misidentify things that they think they see. For example, if you see what looks to be a white blot in the middle of a green field, you might interpret that to be a sheep. However, moving closer, you might discover that it is actually a man wearing a sheep costume. In this case, you would not have “misperceived” this man, since you saw that white blot correctly. It was your interpretation of what you saw, in this case, not your senses themselves.

Rather than being subjective, sense perception is as objective as anything could be. Perception is, in essence, entities interacting with the phenomena of other entities, and such a process cannot be either erroneous or subjective by any means.

“Immanuel Kant”. Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Online.

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/kant/#TwoObjInt