Critical Notice

In this initially daunting but ultimately enjoyable and informative book, Mohan Matthen argues that this tradition is mistaken about both the processes of perception or sensing and the relationship between sensation, perception, and cognition. Since this tradition is sufficiently alive and well in the contemporary literature to constitute something like the received view of perception and the role of sensation in it, Matthen’s challenge and the alternative view he proposes are potentially significant. Sensory systems, Matthen thinks, are primarily devices for sorting objects into kinds, a process resulting in sensory quality spaces that provide the basis for judgments about and inductions over what there is in the world perceived. Sensory systems do not deliver ‘raw’ sense data, fleeting qualia, or unordered sensations for true cognitive processing; rather, they deliver an output that is sorted and ordered, an output that is already, in traditional terms, conceptualized. Sensory experience or sensations come not ‘before’ cognition but ‘after’ it. When we think about sensory systems in general, and not just the small subset of them that we possess, sensory experience is thus a kind of icing on the cake of perception, not one of its crucial ingredients.