Perceiving and Knowing as Activities

According to the tradition of most empiricists, perception is the basis for all our knowledge (at least of the world). The tradition also assumes that perception by humans is a passive activity resulting in some static states pertaining perception and belief, which are then, in some versions, modified by the mind before being passed onto memory and knowledge. Following the work of J. J. Gibson, we argue that perceiving involves many activities and actions. This is true of both visual as well as olfactory-taste perception. The main moral of this paper is that perceiving and knowing are best thought of not as involving static states, but rather as ongoing temporal activities involving change. This presumably means giving up a frozen ontology of states and moving towards something like a dynamic ontology as a basis.