<i>Phenomenology and the Norms of Perception</i>

Doyon’s book aims to demonstrate that perceptual experience is oriented by norms of coherence and optimality, and that it is in virtue of this orientation that perceptions count as perceptions in the first place. Doyon contends that these norms should not be understood merely as epistemic norms but instead as sui generis, belonging to the internal structure of perceptual experience itself and constitutive of what it is to be a perception at all (xiv–xv). Perception is structured by the norms of coherence and optimality, not because this is conducive to knowledge but because of what perception itself is. The main source of evidence for the book’s claims comes from detailed descriptions of a diverse range of perceptual experiences, and the majority of the book is devoted to showing how coherence and optimality structure experiences of different kinds, including experiences of our own bodies and other minds.The book draws its main conceptual resources from the phenomenological tradition. One of the book’s attractions is its clear, textually grounded exposition of a broad swathe of conceptual machinery from phenomenology. Here, the two main sources are Husserl and Merleau-Ponty, who are joined by many others, including classical figures like Edith Stein and contemporary figures like Shaun Gallagher. The book’s most distinctive achievement, however, lies in its synthesis of these phenomenological resources with an impressively broad range of literature on perception from outside the phenomenological tradition, showing where individual phenomenologists can be placed in relation to significant contemporary debates. The book shows how phenomenological analyses can fruitfully inform current discussions about perception in psychology, cognitive science, and analytic philosophy, offering critical responses, amplifications, and clarifications. Throughout, the book offers precise formulations of its claims and is very detailed without being dense. It presents clear, easy-to-follow arguments and well-chosen examples that provide evidence for its phenomenological claims about experiential structure while helpfully illustrating key concepts.Let me briefly characterize the two norms, beginning with coherence. As Doyon puts it, “Coherence … serves as the measure for what counts as perception at all” (6). His contention is that perceptions are constituted by experiences that progress more or less normally given the type of object we are perceiving and the conditions under which we are perceiving it. (The relevant concepts of normality and type are given substantial attention and developed out of Husserl.) Doyon emphasizes that the constitutive role of the coherence norm is tied up with the temporal structure of perceptual experience. When experiences are unmasked as illusions, it is typically because they “break with the temporal laws regulating normal (i.e. successful) experience,” as when a patch of sunlight, initially mistaken for a stone, “does not modify its appearance in progressive and expected ways when I move around it” (48). This example also illustrates the tight connection between perception and awareness of possibilities for bodily action: as the appearance of a stone gives way to the appearance of a patch of sunlight, so too does my sense that I could walk over and stand on it. The coherence of experience is, in this way, connected with our bodily sense of agency. Perception of stones is indexed to my sense of what I can do with my body; by contrast, “illusions are marked by an ‘I cannot’” (49). The coherence of our experiences is a constitutive condition of perception, since, to the extent that it is lacking, we begin to lose our grip on whether we are truly perceiving at all. Doyon’s careful consideration of the temporal structure of perception is a refreshing break from much philosophy of perception, which often overlooks the significance of its diachronic structure.The second norm is optimality. Those of us who have visited an optometrist will be quite familiar with this norm: the optometrist swings the many-lensed phoropter in front of your eyes and flicks between lenses of different refractive indexes, asking ‘Which is better: one or two?’ Our sense that a given perception could be better or worse depends on its relation to an optimum that serves as a norm, a better such that “no further improvement is possible” (13). Here, too, the norm shows up in relation to our bodily agency, insofar as “optimality has a motivating force” (33). As Doyon explains, “seeing things … is accompanied by an awareness of … movements I could produce with regard to the object in order to optimize my perspective” (81). This is apparent, Doyon notes, “when one goes to a concert with no seating and continually tries to improve one’s view of the stage by moving one’s head around and craning one’s neck” (86). Often, we don’t notice that we are making these adjustments, and Doyon uses this as evidence that the motivating force of optimality does not require us to reflect on our perceptions and make judgments about them in relation to the normative optimum. Instead, perception is constituted by norms that are already at play in prereflective awareness. In prereflective awareness, “one feels the ‘tension’ toward the norm or the optimum … one literally feels it in one’s body” (86). Since all perception occurs in light of better and worse, it is constituted by the norm of optimality.The book itself is split into three main parts.Following a brief introduction outlining the book’s project, part 1 lays out the key phenomenological analyses and core conceptual resources that frame the book’s central thesis. Chapter 1 focuses on Husserl and chapter 2 on Merleau-Ponty. In motivating and positioning his own view through these initial chapters, Doyon offers a phenomenological account of illusion and hallucination, as well as critical commentary on Hubert Dreyfus’s account of absorbed coping and Sean Kelly’s interpretation of the concept of maximal grip from Merleau-Ponty.Part 2 focuses on embodiment and its significance for perceptual normativity.Chapter 3 focuses on the structure of embodied experience, defending a phenomenological analysis that ties prereflective awareness to the experience of bodily agency through the body schema, which presents worldly objects in relation to the body via possibilities for bodily action. On the basis of this analysis, Doyon argues that “most of our daily perceptual activities are not epistemic but pragmatic in nature” (69), providing a phenomenological counterpoint to views of perception, like John McDowell’s, that conceive perception as a “rational capacity to represent what there is” (69).Chapter 4 offers phenomenological grounds to think that all perception is multimodal and subject to norms of integration between sense modalities. For Doyon, perception is always indexed to the body, integrating kinesthetic experience of the body’s position and movement with experience of other objects. Vision, for example, presents distal objects as “over there” in relation to the zero-point of the body that sees them. Since the body that sees is also a body that moves, experience of the body’s “I can” is intrinsically connected with a systematically structured, anticipatory “it will.” The experience of bodily agency is structured by a ‘horizon’ of further experiences that we expect to result from bodily movements, a horizon whose exploration through action and perception is subject to the norms of coherence and optimality. Doyon concludes that insofar as all perception makes reference to the body, “the loop of bodily sensations, perception, and movement that co-constitute the subjective space of the body is an intermodal achievement” (120).Chapter 5 carves out a phenomenological position on the nature and scope of perceptual learning. Doyon argues that Husserl’s concept of type points to an important form of perceptual learning, as it involves “long-lasting perceptual change that results from practice or experience” (129). For Husserl, types are experiential structures present in all perceptual experience that allow us to recognize objects of different kinds and furnish us with more or less determinate expectations about how experience will unfold given the kind of thing we are perceiving. For example, “Based on the dogs I have experienced in the past, sensory contents associatively partaking to the type ‘dog’ generate expectations of what legitimately constitutes a dog” (136). Types are shaped and reshaped over the course of our lives through experience of associations and dissociations between apparent qualities. Crucially, types lack the perfectly defined logical boundaries of concepts, making them essentially vague, even as they suffice for a measure of empirical generalization. This allows phenomenologists to stake out a distinctive nonconceptualist position regarding perception, while acknowledging the richness of its contents. Perception is not conceptual through and through; instead, it is structured by types, which furnish the basis for later intellectual activities that regiment the vague structures already present in types into the logical structure of the fully general concepts that figure in our judgments. Doyon’s examination of types in this chapter provides an excellent introduction to genetic phenomenology, which aims to describe structures in experience that change over time, by contrast with the static structures emphasized in many discussions of Husserlian phenomenology.Part 3 turns to normativity in perceptions of—and with—others. Chapter 6 begins with a detailed survey and comparison of Husserl and Edith Stein on empathy, showing how normativity is at work in perceptual experiences of others, while chapter 7 develops and defends a view of the necessary conditions for shared intentionality, as when we watch a film with another person or play a team sport like soccer.I will conclude with a brief comment on the book’s Husserlian commitments. Chapter 6 closes with a Husserlian rebuttal to critical phenomenologists, like Lisa Guenther, who argue that classical phenomenology’s focus on universal and necessary structures of experience prevent it from fully reckoning with “contingent, historical and social structures” (Guenther 2020: 12) like “colonialism, anti-Black racism, and heteropatriarchy” (Guenther 2021: 6) that profoundly shape the structure of experience in ways that go beyond the production of experiences with specific contents. Doyon argues, correctly, that existence of structural variation does not, by itself, imply that there are no universal structures at a more fundamental level. This response falls short, however, of establishing the positive claim that “certain features …really are a priori or universal” (208). Although it remains open to the Husserlian phenomenologist to try to place contingent experiential structures within a system of (presumed) universal invariants, the argument that there remains conceptual space for this possibility despite variation is not a demonstration that there are structures that are universal and necessary. Absent a positive argument for our entitlement to claims about universality and necessity, it remains that phenomenology can be conceived differently, as a more local and situation-specific endeavor, even if it is possible for us largely to agree on, for example, the basic structure of time consciousness. Husserl’s contention was that making concessions of this kind would be fatal for phenomenology qua rational inquiry into evidential norms, turning it into anthropology or psychology. Sartre, Beauvoir, and even Merleau-Ponty, however, seemed more sanguine about the prospects for a phenomenology capable of accepting a thoroughgoing contingency, one that allows that “existence precedes essence.”