Before Properties: Background, Boundary, and the Formation of Perceivable Worlds A Worlding-Space Account of Higher-Level Perception

Debates about higher-level perception usually ask which properties can be perceived: faces, kinds, affordances, emotions, values, possibilities, atmospheres, or social meanings. This paper argues that such debates begin after a lower-bound formation problem has already been crossed. Before one can ask whether a higher-level property is perceptually given, one must ask how anything acquires property-status at all. Beginning from the contrast between eyes-open and eyes-closed experience, I argue that object-loss is not world-loss: background remains operative even when object-dominant visual perception recedes. The paper then develops a color case in which black, white, and gray regions become property-like only when they are organized as shadow, illumination, surface, depth, and mutual relation. This motivates a three-stage account of property formation: differential availability, reversal-point, and return-point structure. Existing work on low-level organization, higher-level content, attention, atmosphere, affordance, and modal perception is then reread as locating parts of the formation problem without isolating its threshold. The resulting account treats a property not as an attached label but as a returnable way of holding disturbance within a worlding field.