S. Gallagher (forthcoming).
Phenomenological contributions to a theory of social cognition. Husserl Studies. The version available here is the presented
text of the Gurwitsch Lecture, without full references.
Phenomenological
contributions to a theory of social cognition
The Aron
Gurwitsch Memorial Lecture
Society for
Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy
Boston, November
7, 2003
Shaun
Gallagher
Philosophy
and Cognitive Sciences
University
of Central Florida
gallaghr@mail.ucf.edu
Hidden away in the remote corners of one
of the largest parts of Husserl's Körper, if we can use that word to translate Corpus, there is ein Leib, an animate body of text that
reverberates not only with some of Husserl's other little known texts, but also
with some of the most recent discoveries in neuroscience. These texts suggest a theory of
intersubjectivity, or what psychologists term social cognition. Let me start with a proviso: whether
Husserl ever fully settled on this theory is completely open to
interpretation. Accordingly, I
will leave it to Husserlian scholars to determine whether this is a position
that Husserl actually or ultimately embraces, either in the years 1906 through
1913 when he writes some of these texts, or later when he writes other related
texts. The texts in question are
from Husserl's early years and they are rather tentative and reactive in
nature, since he was just beginning to think of these problems, and he was
responding to proposals put forward by Lipps and Meinung. That's also why I claim that these
texts suggest a theory
of social cognition rather than anything like a pure phenomenology of
intersubjectivity. Husserl was
trying to work out ways to counter the theories of Lipps and Meinung, and his
reflections, I think, should count as phenomenologically informed theory.
The texts that I want to call to your
attention are found in Husserl's volumes on intersubjectivity and I also want
to make reference to the volume on Ding und Raum, and Ideas II.
But my title is not "Husserl's contributions"; it's rather "Phenomenological contributions to a theory of social
cognition," and I will also be pointing to texts by Max Scheler and Aron
Gurwitsch. Here is what I want to
claim.
(1) When Husserl wrote the texts in question,
he was suggesting a theory that was not identical to, but also not very far
from the one that Scheler defended in 1913 and 1923.
(2) Husserl's theory is preferable in its
details.
(3) The insights developed by Husserl
constitute an important but only partial explanation of social cognition.
(4) Aron Gurwitsch develops another
complementary part of the explanation, equally important, but only at the
expense of giving up the insights of Husserl and Scheler.
(5) Only when taken together, these two parts
do constitute the best explanation of the most basic processes of social
cognition and provide an account that is superior to any of the standard
accounts in circulation today.
(6) And finally, recent discoveries in the
neurosciences corroborate and support these phenomenological accounts.
Husserl and Scheler
In
the first of the Intersubjectivity
volumes Husserl, in texts from 1906-13 (Text 2), suggests that our understanding
of others involves processes that happen on the level of bodily sensations, and
that this provides access to others that predates or prefigures anything that
would involve inference or analogy - and here he is targeting Lipp's (1905)
account of empathy which depends on the argument from analogy (Husserl, p.
70). For Husserl, it is not a
matter of intellectual inference but a matter of sensations that are unified in
or by the animate organism or lived body.
But Husserl's thought here is offered more as a question than as a
confirmed view. He asks: "Can what
effects the unitary lived embodiment [Leiblichkeit] extend itself to the
separate and movable bodies
in
the spatial world? (p. 33). And
here he suggests that the perception of a body as object [Körperwahrnehmung] is
in some way different from the perception of a lived body
[Leibwahrnehmung]. These
suggestions are reminiscent of Husserl's writings in Ding und Raum.
There he talks about kinaesthetic sensations that are activated in
perception. When I perceive
something, the generated hyletic data, or what he calls the aspect data
reflective of the particular object, are joined by a corresponding activation
of kinaesthetic sensations in my lived body. If Husserl were Merleau-Ponty he would have put it in this
way; my body reverberates with the things of the world. What Husserl actually said was:
The system of [hyletic] aspect data [which refer to the
constitution of objectivities] is consciously referred to the system of
kinaesthetic movements and in the manner of an ontical motivation. (Ms. D 13,
I, p. 15) [1921].
[For example], a sensation of eye-posture corresponds to
each place in the field of sight (Hua XVI, 170).
Kinaesthesia
is the sensory experience of one's own movement. Quite simply, when I move, I have a pre-reflective and
recessed sense of moving.
Husserl's claim, however, is not simply that we have kinaesthetic
sensation when we move, but that we have kinaesthetic sensation when we
perceive something - the something that we perceive registers in a certain way
within our kinaesthetic system.
Let's make this more specific, in line with his remarks on
intersubjectivity. When we see someone
else act in a certain way, our own kinaesthetic system is activated. This, in part, is what allows us to
understand the other person.
Moreover, and importantly, this kinaesthetic activation is part of the
perceptual process - part of the hyletic processes that underpin the noetic aspect of perception. This is a point that I want to bring
into focus. We are talking about
transformations that inform the noetic side of experience, although, as we
know, this is tightly correlated with noematic content.
The emphasis on kinaesthetic sensation is
a theme that we can find in the early texts, But Husserl also comes back to it in his later texts, in the
late 20's and the 1930s (Intersubjectivit,y texts 33-36 and 18 repectively). And he develops a certain aspect of
this idea in the Fifth Cartesian Meditation, namely, that my own body is given to
me kinaesthetically as the center of my egocentric spatial framework, and this
contrasts to the givenness, also in the kinaesthtic register, of the other's
body - which can move around without re-ordering my own egocentric perspective.
This seems to me to be an excellent and
much more detailed account of what Scheler later proposed as a perceptual
theory of intersubjectivity, also developed in opposition to Lipp's argument
from analogy. Scheler suggested
that rather than a process of inference based on an analogy from our own mental
and emotional processes to the mental and emotional processes of the other, we
actually perceive the mental and emotional states of others.
For we certainly believe
ourselves to be directly acquainted with another person's joy in his laughter,
with his sorrow and pain in his tears, with his shame in his blushing, with his
entreaty in his outstretched hands, with his love in his look of affection,
with his rage in the gnashing of his teeth, with his threats in the clenching of
his fist, and with the tenor of his thoughts in the sound of his words. (1954,
p. 254).
What
Scheler leaves relatively undeveloped, and what differentiates his account from
the Husserlian one I have outlined, is his conception of the perceptual process
involved. We have details of what we perceive - the gestures, behaviors,
movements, postures, etc. of others from which we can directly read off their
emotions and thoughts. But in
Scheler, the status of the perceptual act involves a level of ideation that
makes it somewhat mysterious. For
Scheler, the other person's body is first and primarily a field of expression
(see Schutz, I, p. 177). What
Husserl proposes is that the visual perception of others includes not only the
visual sensations, but the activation of the kinaesthetic modality, and this
activation keys us into what the other is experiencing. So, on this Husserlian view, an
intermodal view of perception that is supported by scientific evidence today,
the other person's body is first and primarily not a field of expression to
thematize visually, but something that interacts with my body. The problem is not solved on the level
of the cognitive aspects of visual perception, but on the level of the sensory-motor
body.
Current debates
I want to take these phenomenologically
informed insights into some current debates about social cognition or what some
philosophers and psychologists call "theory of mind." The standard alternative in the contemporary theory of mind
debate is between an approach called "theory theory" and another called
simulation theory. Theory theory
is so called because it claims that our understanding of others relies on
taking a theoretical stance toward them, specifically appealing to a particular
theory, namely, folk psychology for our understanding of others. Simulation theory, in contrast, is the
grandchild of the argument from analogy (Gordon and Cruz, 2003). It claims that our understanding of the
other is based on self-simulating their beliefs, desires, or emotions. I put myself in their place and ask
what I would be thinking or feeling, and then I project the results onto
them.
I want to focus briefly on simulation
theory - elsewhere I've published phenomenological critiques of theory theory
(Gallagher 2001, 2004). Simulation
theory is relevant here because it appeals to some scientific evidence which
can also be enlisted to support the phenomenological insights offered by
Husserl and Scheler. Jean-Luc
Petit has already linked Husserl's remarks on kinaesthetic reverberations to
the recent discovery of mirror neurons in the motor systems of macaque monkeys
and humans. Mirror neurons in the
pre-motor cortex are activated under two different conditions: when the subject
engages in intentional action, and when the subject observes another person
engaging in that action. The
evidence for this in macaque monkeys is very strong, involving recording from
single neurons. In humans the
evidence is more indirect, but significantly so: in humans, in addition to PET
and fMRI results, one finds higher pre-activation processes in just those
muscles that would be engaged in the action at stake. One would get here, at least, a subliminal activation of
proprioceptive and kinaesthetic systems.
An example might make this clear. If, watching my daughter play soccer, I see that she is about to make a kick, I may feel my own leg being readied to kick. Indeed, if the ordinary motor inhibition does not "kick in," I may even find myself kicking as if I were in fact kicking the ball that my daughter just missed (or perhaps with which she just scored).
Simulation theorists have cited this as
evidence for a simulation process that takes place non-consciously. That is, they interpret this evidence
as involving three steps: (1) perception - I perceive the other person doing X;
(2) simulation: my own motor system (the mirror neurons) are activated and
contribute to a simulation of what it would be like for me to do what I see the
other person do. (3) By way of
analogy, I then use that simulation to project certain intentions onto the
other person. The question,
however, is where precisely do we draw the line between perception and anything
else that happens in the cognitive system. If, following Husserl, we understand perception to be a non-momentary
act of consciousness, then certainly we can think of an act of perception as
extended over time. Setting aside
questions about how one objectively measures the living or specious present,
almost everyone agrees that the living now of perception is significantly more
than 100 msecs, and perhaps on the order of seconds rather than msecs. But it does not take more than 100
msecs for the mirror neurons to fire subsequent to seeing the action of another
person. Where one draws the line
between perception and non-perceptual mental processes is more complex than
this, but I want to suggest that mirror neuron activation, and more generally,
the activation of a more distributed set of shared neural representations
activated when one acts, or perceives another's action, or imaginatively enacts
another person's action (see Jeannerod, Decety, etc.), is part of the
perceptual process, and contributes to the noetic structure of this kind of
perception. This is quite
consistent with recent philosophical arguments, based on psychological
evidence, that perception and action are not fully separate processes (e.g.,
Susan Hurley). And of course it is
quite consistent with Husserl's analysis of kinaesthetic resonance with
perceived objects.
In regard to this last point, however,
one still needs to ask whether the perception of objects is equivalent to the
perception of other persons.
Husserl and Scheler suggest that it is not. And if we understand kinaesthetic-motor activation to be
part of the perceptual process we have good reason to argue that there is an
eidetic difference between the perception of objects and the perception of
other persons. Still, to claim
that person-perception is different from object-perception is somewhat
controversial in the neuropsychological literature. What is well established there, at least in terms of vision,
is that visual perception of an object for purposes of recognition (being able
to say what it is that you see) is different from visual perception for action
(locating and pragmatically relating to something in order to pick it up, for
example). To put this into
familiar phenomenological terms, to see a cup as something Vorhanden (e.g., as something that you lost and
now found) is different from seeing the cup in the context of reaching for it
to take a drink - that is, as something Zuhanden.
The relevant neuropsychological literature distinguishes between the
Ventral visual pathway for recognition and the Dorsal visual pathway for motor
action (Milner and Goodale).
Beyond this distinction, however, it
would be controversial to suggest that there is a third type of vision, namely,
visual perception of other subjects who are neither merely Vorhanden nor merely Zuhanden.
Yet there is good evidence in neuroscience that this is the case, for
both perception and for action.
It is a well-established fact that face recognition depends on the
activation of a particular part of the brain (the fusiform gyrus). At the very least we can say that the
visual perception of a face is quite a different thing than the visual
perception of a tree or a hammer - both neurologically and
phenomenologically. Add to this on
the neurological side, the research on mirror neurons which are activated only
in very specific circumstances when we perceive another animate body (human or
in some cases animal) doing an intentional action - and they are not activated
if we see that action performed by a tool or machine, or if I simply see an
object. Add further evidence
developed in neuropsychological studies of movement in cases of apraxia (see
Gallagher and Marcel, 1999) and studies of gesture in cases of deafferentation
(see Cole, Gallagher, and McNeill, 2001) that suggest that there are
qualitative differences in social and communicative actions versus instrumental
actions.
Phenomenologically speaking, the claim is
that the act of perception, when it is the perception of another person, is
different, not only noematically but also noetically (and this is a point I
want to emphasize); it is noetically different from when we perceive a tree or a hammer. Kinaesthetically, our experience is
different - and our perceptions are shaped differently and have a different
feel - when we perceive a tree as something Vorhanden, a hammer as something Zuhanden, and a person as a person. Just as what it is like to perceive an object is qualitatively
different from what it is like to perceive an instrument that I am about to
use, what it is like
to perceive a face is qualitatively and noetically different from what it is like to
perceive an object or an instrument.
One could appropriate Husserl's notion of "pairing" here, and think of
it as a natural paring that takes place from body to body, at the kinaesthetic
level, in a way that shapes our perceptual experience. I think we can find resources in
Heidegger, Sartre, Levinas, and others, to bear this out.
More than perception
Even if all of this is right, it is not
the complete story of intersubjectivity.
To supplement this story in the right way we can turn to the work of
Gurwitsch, and specifically his 1931 habilitation thesis, translated into
English as Encounters in the Social Environment.
Gurwitsch, like Husserl and Scheler,
offers a critique of the argument of inference from analogy.
In working out his phenomenological critique, Gurwitsch borrows from
developmental psychology and from scientific studies of neuropathology.[1] He also borrows heavily from
Heidegger. But he starts by
following and expanding on the critique of the argument of inference from analogy offered by Scheler in 1913. One point of this critique shared by
Gurwitsch and Scheler, and many other phenomenologists who have considered it,
including Schutz and most recently, Dan Zahavi is, I think off-base in an
important way. The criticism is as follows: In the argument from analogy, the
analogy depends on our ability to compare our own body and bodily behaviors
with those of others. Scheler
notes that the way my body is experienced by me (e.g., more through
kinesthetic-proprioception than through exteroceptive or visual perception) is
quite different from the way the body of another person is perceived by me
(exclusively through exteroception).
If this objection holds, it would challenge the earlier mentioned
insights of Husserl. But this objection
is questionable. Developmental
studies have shown that intermodal perception is operative from the very
beginning of life (e.g., Meltzoff and Moore, 1997). What I see is automatically registered in a code that is
common to other sense modalities, including proprioception; and in the case of
seeing biological movement, perception includes motoric, kinaesthetic
activation. So when I see the
other's body moving in a certain way, I have a kinesthetic-proprioceptive sense
of what that is like.
One thing we can say against the argument
from analogy is that if such intermodal links are made at the level of embodied
enaction, there is no requirement to reduplicate that link at the level of
cognitive inference. That is, to
have some sense of what the other is thinking or feeling, we do not have to
consciously compare the other with myself, or run through a simulation of the
other person's action in our own cognitive system.
Gurwitsch builds his own
positive analysis on something that Scheler points out about the argument from
analogy, and indeed all traditional formulations of the problem, including the
contemporary versions of theory theory and simulation theory. All of these theories assumes that
there is no direct access to the other person's intentions. Scheler contends that this is not the
case. As we have seen, he argues
that we do have direct access to the others' intentions because those
intentions are expressed in their bodily comportment that we directly perceive.
Gurwitsch's
analysis carries this criticism in a different direction. He views Scheler's notion of a direct
access to the minds of others as an advance over this traditional beginning
point, but he contends that the immediate conviction that we live in a world
with other people is prior to and foundational for our ability to directly read
their expressive actions. This
conviction is not reducible to perceptual access to the bodily comportment
(expressive movements, gestures, facial expressions) of others, and our
knowledge of others is not totally accounted for in terms of our direct access
to that expressive movement.
To do
this, Gurwitsch turns to Heidegger's analysis of the Zuhanden
equipment, the circumspective engagement with the surrounding environment, and
the larger action contexts of human existence. I think that Gurwitsch achieves
an important insight here: our understanding of another's expressive movements
depends on meaningful and pragmatic contexts. Following this path, Gurwitsch moves away from the
Schelerian claim that we have a direct perceptual access to
other minds and defends the idea that our primary conviction, that we live with
others, is mediated by the surrounding world that we are involved in from the
very beginning.
Gurwitsch argues that
others are not given primarily as objects that we encounter cognitively: "our originary
encounter with other human beings does not place us as cognizing subjects over
against an object to be cognized (namely, other people)" (p. 35). And directly against a simulationist approach,
he writes:
We
certainly do not encounter an absolutely other person, as it were, a second
example of the genus to which I belong and which I interpret by analogy or
empathy and only make comprehensible by the 'transfer of my own livingness' and
its structure, of my own mental processes and their concatenations such that I
conceive it in an entirely determinate way as alter ego. (1931, p. 108).
Rather,
our primary encounters are framed in pragmatic contexts. "Prior to all specific cognition, and
independent of it, we are concerned with other people in our 'natural living'
of daily life; we encounter them in the world in which our daily life
occurs" (1931, p. 35). The
nature of our concern
with others, as this word signifies, involves mixing with others in relations
that bear on practical matters and interests. It follows that there is not one uniform way in which we
relate to others, but that our relations are mediated through various pragmatic
circumstances.
This,
then, is the alternative approach proposed by Gurwitsch. As our perceptual and cognitive life
takes shape, we are already existing in reference to others. The horizon of this reference is such
that we do not need to add some social-cognitive relation to the other person
on top of our pragmatic concerns in order to make them social, or in order to
constitute a separate understanding of the other. "We do not meet other people alongside of but
rather directly in the concrete sector in which we always stand. ... our
comportment toward the other is codetermined by our entire situational
comportment" (1931, p. 36).[2] Thus, the primary and originary
encounter that we have with others is not only embodied, but embedded, and
pragmatic. We meet up with others, either explicitly or implicitly, in the
pragmatic contexts of life.
Acknowledging
the importance of this insight, I still want to ask whether this gives us the
full picture of intersubjectivity.
Are we, in fact, caught up in such pragmatic circumstances from the very
beginning? One might suggest the
example the infant's dependency on others for nourishment - but it is not clear
to me that this situation is entirely or primarily pragmatic. The emphasis on the pragmatic is both a
positive and a negative for Gurwitsch's analysis. Its positive significance is that it brings out the
importance of context and situation for more sophisticated understandings of
meaning and the significance of others's behaviors. The upshot of this account is that in our ordinary everyday
encounters, we never come upon others as absolutely nondescript others who
conceal a hidden realm of beliefs, desires, or intentions that we need to
theorize about or try to simulate.
How we understand others is implicitly revealed in the pragmatic
circumstances that define their specific roles. We understand the intentions of others primarily in what
they do in the practical contexts that define our relations to them.
Its negative significance, however, is
that it precludes any appeal to intersubjectivity as a primary element in an
account of the meaning-consititution of the surrounding world. To put it most succinctly,
intersubjectivity is portrayed as emerging out of pragmatic contexts. In the Heideggerian framework, there is
a clear and justified distinction between the Vorhandenheit and the Zuhandenheit - between mere objects and instrumental
beings.
The "being encountered first of
all," under which all that is comprehended with which we deal in our daily
living, of which we make use, with which we go about our business and
manipulate, is immediately delimited by Heidegger in a radical way from
physical things as physical things 'on hand' [present-at-hand] that belong to
Nature with the material properties and determinations accruing to them.
(Gurwitsch, 1931, p. 66).
But
the Mitsein is framed
within our Zuhanden
encounters.[3] It is through such scenes of
instrumental dealings with the surrounding world that we discover an implicit
contact with others. The practical
context operates as an implicit scaffolding of meaning that rises around us,
and shapes our individual encounters.
Only when this scaffolding collapses do we find ourselves taking a
cognitive and abstract attitude toward the other. "It is in this milieu that we also encounter our
fellow human beings. We encounter
them because we live
in determinate situations of the surrounding world of utensils" (p.
95). Specifically, Gurwitsch
suggests that other people are always implicitly on the horizon of our practical
dealings with the world. It is the
constant and implicit references to others in our pragmatic affairs that
generate the inescapable conviction that we live in a human world. This network of implicit references to
others is the basis for our experience of being-with, or being together with
others. "In these horizonal
situations the 'co-included' others appear. That they come to light in this situation, and are not 'near by' or 'merely
beside' it, signifies that they appear as belonging to the situation in their
specific roles and functions" (p. 97). Here Gurwitsch suggests that our understanding of others is
from the beginning in terms of the roles that they play in relation to our
projects. "But it is always a
matter of a person in his role. Understanding is yielded here by virtue
of the situation and is, therefore, limited to what is inherent in it" (p.
114). For Gurwitsch, there are no
perceptual or cognitive acts that have special empathic insight -- the
explanation is not to be found in "some magical psychical mechanism" (perhaps a
way to characterize Scheler's notion of direct perception). As such, however, this theory does not
address the question of how our pragmatic understandings of others get off the
ground - and specifically, why we are able to discern others as other persons
rather than just other pragmatic elements of the context - rather than mere
role players. As Gurwitsch himself
puts it,
[...]
this orientation characterizes this understanding not primarily because it
involves other people but because it represents a moment in the knowledge about
the immediately actual situation-totality. This orientation grips fellow human beings only insofar as
it is a component of the situation.
In other words, we are dealing with a functional understanding.
(Gurwitsch, 1931, p. 112).
What
is left unexplained, however, even in his detailed explication of the
appearance of the other on the horizon of our pragmatic projects, the supposed
basis for our strong conviction, is precisely how, in the first place, the other appears as another person
rather than simply another piece of equipment.[4] It is also not clear how just
such pragmatic encounters are necessarily the basis for encounters that are not
just pragmatic -
emotional and ethical encounters, for example.
I
could carry this critique further if time allowed, and I have done so in other
papers (Gallagher, 2003, 2004).
Like Gurwitsch himself, I could cite evidence from developmental
psychology to show in opposition to Gurwitsch, that the solution framed in
terms of pragmatic encounters is inadequate. In the developmental literature reference is made to both
primary intersubjectivity, which correlates directly to the embodied
perceptual, sensory-motor level of analysis that we find in Husserl, and
secondary intersubjectivity, which has a direct correlation to the emphasis on
pragmatic contexts that we find in Gurwitsch. Secondary intersubjectivity, however, can be shown to depend
on an innate primary intersubjectivity which is built into our sensory-motor
embodiment, and without the latter, the pragmatic framework of secondary
intersubjectivity simply does not get off the ground. Thus, for a full phenomenological theory of
intersubjectivity, we need accounts of both primary and secondary intersubjectivity
- we need both Husserl-Scheler and
Heidegger-Gurwitsch.
I
can also bring to bear on this issue studies of pathologies, and specifically
studies of recovery from apraxia (Marcel, 199X; Gallagher and Marcel, 1999) and
of gesture (Cole, Gallagher, and McNeill, 2001) which show that social
comportment is irreducible to pragmatic movement, and which suggest that there
is something unique and quite basic to social cognition that cannot be captured
in purely instrumental relations.
Conclusion
Since time does not permit further
explication along these lines, let me conclude with a summary of what I have
argued.
(1) Husserl, in a number of unsystematically
developed texts suggested a theory of intersubjectivity or social cognition
that was based on an embodied, intermodal perception. This perceptual experience of the other person involved a
kinaesthetic reverberation of the perceived action of the other in our own
sensory-motor system.
(2) Husserl's analysis explicated certain
aspects of a theory that on the surface was close to Scheler's, in details that not only went beyond Scheler's
demotion of the body, but find support in contemporary scientific evidence.
(3) The insights developed by Husserl
constitute an important but only partial explanation of social cognition -
specifically the part that directly contributes to what developmental
psychologists term primary intersubjectivity.
(4) Gurwitsch develops, within a Heideggerian
framework, another important aspect of what would be a fuller explanation -
specifically he emphasizes the contribution of our involvement in pragmatic
contexts to gain more sophisticated understandings of others. Unfortunately he does this at the
expense of giving up Husserl's insights into the perceptual mechanisms that
allow us to key into others in the first place - something, however, that
Gurwitsch did not have give up.
(5) When taken together, these two analyses
go a long way to constitute the best explanation of the most basic processes of
social cognition and provide an account that is superior to any of the standard
accounts in circulation today, for example theory theory or simulation theory.
(6) And finally, as mentioned, these
phenomenological accounts are fully supported by recent discoveries in the
neurosciences that show the importance of mirror neurons, and neural
representations that are activated both when I act and I observe someone else
act.
There
is much more to say, much more evidence to discuss, more phenomenology to
do. Let me close, however, by indicating
what I suggested was a controversial claim, namely that there is a special kind
of perception that is a perception of others and that contrasts with a
perception of things and of instruments.
This suggestion is controversial in the neurosciences, although there is
good evidence for the distinction between a visual perception of things and a
visual perception of instruments.
If I am right to foreground Husserl's insights into kinaesthetic
reverberations, however, I think this is a less controversial claim in
phenomenology. I would suggest
that there are more phenomenological resources to explore (I'm thinking of
Sartre, Merleau-Ponty, Levinas) to make secure the idea that the noetic
structure, and not just the noematic structure, of this kind of perception is
quite different from the noetic structure of object perception or instrumental
perception.