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The aim of this narrow-focused text is to argue against the claim that the appresentation of unperceived features of objects that is implied in perceptual intentionality presupposes a reference to ...

Alva Noe’s strategy to solve the puzzle of perceptual presence entirely relies on the principle of presence as access. Unaccessed or unattended parts or details of objects are perceptually present insofar as they are accessible, and they are accessible insofar as one possesses sensorimotor skills that can secure their access. In this paper, I consider several arguments that can be opposed to this claim and that are chiefly related to the modal status of action, i.e. the fact that the action that would secure access to the absent aspects is a possibility, something that can (or maybe could) be done. The main difficulty Noe’s account must face is –as several situations demonstrate– that the action that should be performed for the absent aspects to be actually accessed does not have to be itself available for these aspects to be perceptually present. What matters for the absent aspects to be present is not their de facto (i.e. effective) accessibility, but their de jure accessibility. To overcome those difficulties, I propose to rely on a ternary model of the role of action possibilities in perceptual awareness. This model builds on Husserl’s analysis of the role of perceptual circumstances in perception and connection between sense (Sinn) registering and horizontal intentionality.

A large number of technical devices attempt to help blind persons improve their spatial perception and facilitate their mobility . We wish to present here the principles on which these prosthetic perceptual devices function, the conditions of their appropriation, and the general perspectives they open concerning the role of technical objects and systems in the constitution of human experience.

The aim of this chapter is to highlight the main phenomenological features of lived space , that is, space as it is experienced by the subject through various intentional modes , first of all perception, but also non-perceptual modes, such as trying to remember where something is or how a room is arranged, or thinking about the way to go from A to B (itinerary planning). A general overview of the most important phenomenological accounts made in the literature is proposed, with a focus on the following topics: the relation between bodily skills, and more generally motricity (i.e. the capacity to move), and lived space; the impact of one’s body materiality on one’s experience of space: how possessing a physical body with material properties such as impenetrability and heaviness affects one’s experience of space; the role of the anticipation of possibilities in the enacting and organization of lived space; the role of sociality and the impact of one’s body ‘visibility’, i.e. the fact that one can be perceived by others, in one’s experience of space. The objective of this overview in the context of this book is to get a better understanding of the experience of space in visually impaired people. Based on this phenomenological account, this chapter will, as a result, offer a series of reflections about the peculiarities of the space blind people live in.

According to several authors in psychology and neurosciences, our ability to perceive affordances is subtended by motor simulation mechanisms. Such mechanisms provide dynamic representations of feasible actions, thus enabling to scale the surrounding structures on the behavioural repertoire and capacities supported by our body. This attractive hypothesis has been taken up in robotics, to build intelligent systems able to determine in advance whether a given action would be successful given the current state of the environment and their own skills. Several arguments, however, suggest that the motor simulation framework is not sufficient to explain affordance perception: (1) it rests on a misunderstanding of what affordances are: not actions that are currently feasible, but actions that are possible; (2) it is computationally unrealistic: motor simulation is too costly in terms of computational resources to explain how one can access prospectively to actions that are potentiated by surrounding structures; (3) it only covers the part of the perceptual field within the scope of our attention, but the affordances we perceive do not reduce to the object or state of affairs our attention is focused on at time t; and (4) it can only work if a first layer of affordances is available: motor simulation cannot explain affordance perception, because its very functioning presupposes such perception. Other mechanisms must consequently be hypothesized.

International audience; Différentes théories psychologiques de la perception soutiennent aujourd'hui que le possible est quelque chose que nous percevons. Pour l'approche écologique par exemple, la perception fournit un accès direct aux possibilités d'action potentialisées par les structures de l'environnement. Cette idée est-elle légitime ? Peut-on réellement percevoir le possible ? Si la perception nous branche sur le réel, ne faut-il pas justement se libérer de la perception pour accéder au possible ? Dès lors, le possible n'est-il pas plutôt pensé que perçu, l'objet d'un savoir et non pas d'un voir ? Répondre à ces questions nécessite d'examiner si la thèse que le possible est perçu est en cohérence avec : (a) la structure phénoménologique de l'objet perçu ; (b) nos modèles du fonctionnement de la perception, en particulier le modèle causal standard. Cet examen permet de montrer que si, dans un sens phénoménologique strict, le possible n'est pas quelque chose qui apparaît sur le mode de l'objectité perçue, il contribue néanmoins à déterminer l'organisation et la sémantique de l'environnement perçu. Le possible comme tel n'est pas perçu, mais il confère structure, forme et sens au monde qui apparaît dans la perception.

International audience; For Husserl, kinaesthetic capability is a key piece of the perception process. By ensuring the junction between the actual and the potential, it allows the exhibition of an object that is always more than what appears. Kinaesthetic capability preserves the transcendence of the object by preventing the phenomenon from being confined to pure actuality. This idea, however, poses significant challenges when one questions the nature of the possibilities that are at stake here. Especially, the perceived seems to enjoy a kind of emancipation from these capabilities as they actually are. How can one justify that the structures of the perceived world are the intentional correlate of the kinaesthetic skills of the subject, if such structures continue to regulate the sense of the appearing objects when those skills are neutralized? We will see that only a genetic perspective, assuming the intrinsically historical character of the subject, provides a satisfactory answer to this question, and that this perspective leads to question the actualist position that Husserl sometimes tends to adopt.