The Language of Visual Phenomenology

Abstract

Abstract With a close lexical analysis of the word “see” and the related words “perceives,” “notices,” “observes,” and so on, one can see that the purported phenomenological distinction between the sensory given and what goes beyond the sensory given fails to correspond to the language we use to describe the distinction, though not entirely. Reviewing some key mid-twentieth-century debates about “sees,” and reviewing the lexical properties of a philosophically neutral word, “climbs,” that has important lexical characteristics in common with the perceptual verbs we are considering, it becomes clear that the semantics of these words do not provide the distinctions that would underwrite separating “direct” or “immediate” perception from the products of “judgment” or “inference.” If such a distinction is to be accessible to us by introspection, it would have to come from the phenomenology directly, and to talk about it would require newly minted terminology.