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Perception

 

 

Definition (William James)
Definition (Peter Caws)
Definition (Deobold B. Van Dalen)
Living as perceiving (David Hume)
Perception and knowledge (John Locke)
Perception as empirical consciousness (Immanuel Kant)
From perception to cognition (Arthur Koestler)
Aspects and functions of perception (R. L. Gregory)
Processes of perception(Fremont E. Kast and James E. Rosenzweig)
Perception and valuation (Hans Ozbekhan)
Selective perception (Ludwig von Bertalanffy)
Perception and experience (John Madge)
Perception and paradigm (Thomas S. Kuhn)
Perception as selective observation (John Madge)
Skill at perceiving (Arthur Koestler)

 

 

Definition

[1890] William James, The Principles of Psychology
“The consciousness of particular material things present to sense is nowadays called perception.”
“Perception ... differs from sensation by the consciousness of farther facts associated with the object of the sensation.”
“Sensational and reproductive brain-processes combined, then, are what give us the content of our perceptions.”
“... the general law of perception, which is this, that whilst part of what we perceive comes through our senses from the object before us, another part (and it may be the larger part) always comes out of our own head.”
(Chapter XIX - The Perception of ‘Things')

[1965] Peter Caws, The Philosophy of Science
“Perception = sensation + interpretation.”
(Part I, Chapter 3, p. 21)

[1962] Deobold B. Van Dalen, Understanding Educational Research 
“Perception is the art of linking what is sensed with some past experience to give the sensation meaning.”
“Meanings are in people’s minds rather than in the objects themselves. Hence, when looking at the same object, everyone does not 'see' the same thing.”
(Chapter 3, p. 42)

 

Living as perceiving

[1740] David Hume, a Treatise of Human Nature
“For my part, when I enter most intimately into what I call myself, I always stumble on some particular perception or other, of heat or cold, light or shade, love or hatred, pain or pleasure. I never can catch myself at any time without a perception, and never can observe anything but the perception."
"... I may venture to affirm of the rest of mankind, that they are nothing but a bundle or collection of different perceptions, which succeed each other with inconceivable rapidity, and are in a perpetual flux and movement.”
(Book I, Part IV, p. 252)

 

Perception and knowledge

[1689] John Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding
“Perception then being the first  step and degree towards knowledge, and the inlet of all the materials of it; the fewer senses any man ... hath; and the fewer and duller the impressions are that are made by them, and the duller the faculties are that are employed about them, - the more remote are they from that knowledge which is to be found in some men.”
(Book II, Chapter IX : Of Perception, § 15)

 

Perception as empirical consciousness

[1787, Second edition] Immanuel Kant, The Critique of Pure Reason
“Perception is empirical consciousness, that is to say, a consciousness which contains an element of sensation. Phenomena as objects of perception ... contain ... the materials for an object (through which is represented something existing in space and time), that is to say they contain the real of sensation, as a representation merely subjective, which gives us merely the consciousness that the subject is affected, and which we refer to some external object.”
(System of the Principles of the Pure Understanding, Section III, § 2)

 

From perception to cognition

[1967] Arthur Koestler, The Ghost in the Machine
“Here we have a very simplified model of the working of the sensory-motor nervous system. On the motor side, we had a series of ‘triggers’. On the perceptual side we have instead a series of ‘filters’ or ‘scanners’, through which the vital input traffic must pass on its ascent from sense-organ to cerebral cortex. Their function is to analyse, de-code, classify and abstract the information that the stream carries, until the chaotic multitude of sensations, which constantly bombard the senses, is transformed into meaningful messages.” (p. 77)
“[Thus] at the series of relay stations through which the input-stream must pass, it is subjected to filtering, scanning and analysing processes, which strip it of irrelevancies, extract stable configurations from the flux of sensations, analyse and identify patterns of events in space and time. A decisive stage is the transition from the perceptual to the cognitive levels of the hierarchy - from sight and sound to meaning.” (p. 81)

 

Aspects and functions of perception

[1966] R. L. Gregory, Eye and Brain
“Perception is not determined simply by the stimulus pattern; rather it is a dynamic searching for the best interpretation of the available data.” 
“Just how far experience affects perception, how far we have to learn to see, it is a difficult question to answer. But it seems clear that perception involves going beyond the immediately given evidence of the senses.” (p. 11)
“Perceiving and thinking are not independent.” (p. 12)
“We think of perception as an active process of using information to suggest and test hypotheses.” (p. 224)

 

Processes of perception

[1979] Fremont E. Kast and James E. Rosenzweig, Organization and Management 
Several basic processes (mechanisms) of perception formation can be identified :
-  selectivity : individuals select information that is supportive and satisfying;
-  interpretation : it depends on past experience and the value system of each particular person;
-  closure : it relates to the tendency of individuals to have a complete picture of any given situation.
Thus a person may perceive more than the information seems to indicate. She adds to the information input whatever seems appropriate in order to close the system and make it meaningful and supportive.
(Chapter 10, p. 243)

 

Perception and valuation

[1968] Hans Ozbekhan in Eric Jantsch (editor), Perspectives of Planning
Prescriptive-perceptions. "I mean by this a manner of apprehending a fact which even at its very first, perceptive, stage, is not free from judgment about it.” 
“... in these cases comprehension itself appears to be a function of valuation, namely of our ability to classify what we observe as ‘good’ or ‘bad’ with reference to its use.”
("Toward a General Theory of Planning", p. 142)

 

Selective perception

[1968] Ludwig von Bertalanffy, General System Theory
“Linguistic, and cultural categories in general, will not change the potentialities of sensory experience. They will, however, change apperception, i.e. which features of experienced reality are focused and emphasized, and which are underplayed.”
(Chapter 10, pp. 248-249)

 

Perception and experience

[1953] John Madge, The Tools of Social Science
“All perception, after the first weeks of life, is compounded of the immediate experience and of the stored experience. Anything that impinges on our senses conveys a meaning to us largely to the extent that we relate it to what we already know. Observation and inference are inseparable.”
(Chapter 3, p. 122)

 

Perception and paradigm

[Second Ed. Enlarged 1970] Thomas S. Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions
“What a man sees depends both upon what he looks at and also upon what his previous visual-conceptual experience has taught him to see. In the absence of such training there can only be, in William James’s phrase, ‘a bloomin’ buzzin’ confusion’.” (p. 113)
“... the scientist with a new paradigm sees differently from the way he had seen before.” (p. 115)

 

Perception as selective observation

[1953] John Madge, The Tools of Social Science
“It is necessary that the scientist should be conscious of the basis of his selection [in perception], and part of the observational skill that he must develop is skill in perceiving his own experiences.”
(Introduction, p. 10)

 

Skill at perceiving

[1967] Arthur Koestler, The Ghost in the Machine
“... the scanning process can acquire a higher degree of sophistication through learning and experience. To the novice, all red wines taste alike, and all Japanese males look the same. But he can train himself to superimpose more delicate scanners on the coarser ones.”
“Thus we learn to abstract finer and finer nuances - to make the perceptual hierarchy grow new twigs, as it were.” (Chapter VI, pp. 86-87)

 

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