Olcay asked:

I'm really interested in philosophy of perception. I'm trying to write essays about this. But I have a
problem about the sense-data theory. The majority of philosophers are talking about sense data
coming through our eyes, ears etc. Locke and Berkeley had no doubt about this. But when we accept
the faculties and these parts of our body, don't we presuppose and accept the external world in space
and time? After accepting the causal theory and sense data, how can Berkeley and others argue
about an "external world"? I am not a direct realist, but I believe that the representative theory of
perception has structural problems, not only leading to idealism. What do you think about this?

============

I was actually hoping that someone else would tackle this one... oh well. Yes, you're right. But the
problem I have is that I've actually done some reading in this area, and to go further gets us involved
in matters that have had so much discussion that I hardly know to where to refer you. For example, if
you want to stick to philosophy you can look at what Husserl and other phenomenologists have had
to say on this. Merleau-Ponty, one of Husserl's pupils, attacks it directly in several of his books. There
is an absolutely enormous literature on perception throughout the history of psychology, and most of
the better psychologists are at least acquainted with some of the philosophical literature here
(although it's only recently that the reverse is true, by and large, unfortunately). For a good modern
treatment of perception, there's Palmer's book. In other words, what I'm also saying to you is that, in
my strong opinion, to write meaningfully about perception, even the "philosophy" of perception,
requires, now, a knowledge of the psychologyof perception also. There's still people arguing about
whether "colors" are real, and in what sense they are... and that's very close to being straight
philosophy. But if you want to go further than the metaphysics, you need to know something about
what's been done empirically. To put it another way, Helmholtz came up with theories about
perception back when psychologists were still half philosophers. But they were, mostly, wrong, and
what weren't have been elaborated to a quite radical extent, based on empirical work.

Some random readings:

Arnheim, R. Art and Visual Perception: A Psychology of the Creative Eye.Berkeley, CA: University
of California Press, 1974.

Arvidson, P. S. "On the Origin of Organization in Consciousness." Journal of the British Society for
Phenomenology23, no. 1 (1992): 53-65.

Baars, B. J. "Attention Versus Consciousness in the Visual Brain: Differences in Conception,
Phenomenology, Behavior, Neuroanatomy, and Physiology." The Journal of General Psychology126,
no. 3 (1999): 224-33.

Bealer, G. "The Boundary between Philosophy and Cognitive Science." The Journal of Philosophy
84, no. 10 (1987): 553-55.

Bekkering, H., and S.F.W. Neggers. "Visual Search Is Modulated by Action Intentions."
Psychological Science13, no. 4 (2002): 370-74.

Boyer, P. "Natural Epistemology or Evolved Metaphysics? Developmental Evidence for
Early-Developed, Intuitive, Category-Specific, Incomplete, and Stubborn Metaphysical Presumptions."
Philosophical Psychology13, no. 3 (2000): 277-97.

Cariani, P. "As If Time Really Mattered: Temporal Strategies for Neural Coding of Sensory
Information." edited by K. Pribram, 208-52. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum, 1994.

Cariani, P. "On the Design of Devices with Emergent Semantic Functions." State University of New
York, 1989.

Colcombe, S.J., and R.S. Wyer. "The Role of Prototypes in the Mental Representation of Temporally
Related Events." Cognitive Psychology44 (2002): 67-103.

Davis, G. "Between-Object Binding and Visual Attention." Visual Cognition8, no. 3/4/5 (2001):
411-30.

Dennett, D. C. "Quining Qualia." In Consciousness in Contemporary Science,edited by A. J. Marcel
and E. Bisiach, 42-77. New York, NY: Oxford University Press Inc., 1994.

Dreyfus, H. L. "The Current Relevance of Merleau-Ponty's Phenomenology of Embodiment."
Electronic Journal of Analytic Philosophy4 (1996).

Fernandez-Duque, D., and M. Johnson. "Attention Metaphors: How Metaphors Guide the Cognitive
Psychology of Attention." Cognitive Science 23, no. 1 (1999): 83-110.

Flanagan, O. "Conscious Inessentialism and the Epiphenomenalist Suspicion." In The Nature of
Consciousness, edited by N. Block, O. Flanagan and G. Guzeldere, 357-73. Cambridge, MA: The
MIT Press, 1997.

Fogassi, L., V. Gallese, G. Buccino, L. Craighero, L. Fadiga, and G. Rizzolatti. "Cortical Mechanism
for the Visual Guidance of Hand Grasping Movements in the Monkey: A Reversible Inactivation
Study." Brain124, no. 3 (2001): 571-86.

Follesdal, D. "Husserl's Notion of Noema." The Journal of Philosophy66, no. 20 (1969): 680-87.

Gardner, H. The Mind's New Science.New York, NY: BasicBooks, 1985.

Gasche, R. The Tain of the Mirror.Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1986.

Gibbs, R. W., and H. L. Colston. "The Cognitive Psychological Reality of Image Schemas and Their
Transformations." Cognitive Linguistics6, no. 4 (1995): 347-78.

Giurfa, M., S. Zhang, A. Jenett, R. Menzel, and M.V. Srinivasan. "The Concepts of `Sameness' and
`Difference' in an Insect." Nature410 (2001): 930-32.

Goldman, A. I. "Cognitive Science and Metaphysics." Journal of Philosophy84, no. 10 (1987):
537-44.

Gregory, R. "Perceptions as Hypotheses." Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of
London Series B, Biological Sciences290 (1980): 181-97.

Grossberg, S., E. Mingolla, and W.D. Ross. "Visual Brain and Visual Perception: How Does the
Cortex Do Perceptual Grouping?" Trends in Neurosciences 20, no. 3 (1997): 106-11.

Gurwitsch, A. The Field of Consciousness.Edited by A. van Kaam, Duquesne Studies:
Psychological Series.Pittsburgh, PA: Duquesne University Press, 1964.

Hasson, U., T. Hendler, D. Ben Bashat, and R. Malach. "Vase or Face? A Neural Correlate of
Shape-Selective Grouping Processes in the Human Brain." Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience13, no.
6 (2001): 744-53.

Hayek, F.A. The Sensory Order.Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press, 1976.

Helmholtz, H.L.F. On the Sensations of Tone as a Physiological Basis for the Theory of Music.
Translated by A.J. Ellis. 2nd ed. New York, NY: Dover Publications, 1954.

Hollingworth, A., and J.M. Henderson. "Accurate Visual Memory for Previously Attended Objects in
Natural Scenes." Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance28, no. 1
(2002): 113-36.

Husserl, E. Cartesian Meditations: An Introduction to Phenomenology.Translated by D. Cairns.
Dordrecht, The Netherlands: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1995.

Husserl, E.. The Idea of Phenomenology.Translated by W. P. Alston and G. Nakhnikian. Fourth ed.
The Hague, Netherlands: Marinus Nijhoff, 1970.

Merleau-Ponty, M. Phenomenology of Perception.Edited by Ted Honderich. 1st ed, International
Library of Philosophy and Scientific Method.New York, NY: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1970.

Merleau-Ponty, M.. The Visible and the Invisible.Edited by C. Lefort, J. Wild and J. M. Edie,
Northwestern University Studies in Phenomenology & Existential Philosophy.Evanston, IL:
Northwestern University Press, 1995.

Palmer, S. E. Vision Science: Photons to Phenomenology.Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1999.

Steven Ravett Brown