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Perception
Perception
First Form of Mind
T Y L E R BU R G E
1
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Acknowledgments
Chapter 1: Iris Murdoch, Existentialists and Mystics: Writings on Philosophy and Literature,
© 1950, 1951, 1952, 1956, 1957, 1958, 1959, 1961, 1962, 1964, 1966, 1969, 1970, 1972,
1977, 1978, 1986, 1997 by Iris Murdoch. Used by permission of Penguin Books, an imprint
of Penguin Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. All rights
reserved.
Chapter 3: Stephen E. Palmer, Vision Science: Photons to Phenomenology, The MIT Press,
1999, p. 32.
Chapter 6: W.G. Sebald, translated by Michael Hulse, from The Rings of Saturn, © 1995 by
Vito von Eichborn GmbH & Co Verlag KG. Translation © 1998 by The Harvill Press.
Reprinted by permission of New Directions Publishing Corp.
Chapter 11: William Blake, Notebook, British Library Add MS 49460, 3rd and 4th lines
from first draft of the poem.
Chapter 16: Excerpt from Vladimir Nabokov, Speak, Memory: An Autobiography Revisited
© 1947, 1948, 1949, 1950, 1951, 1967 by Vladimir Nabokov. Used by permission of
Alfred A. Knopf, an imprint of the Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, a division of
Penguin Random House LLC. All rights reserved.
Chapter 19: Hans Moravec, Mind Children: The Future of Robot and Human Intelligence,
© 1988 by Hans Moravec. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Contents
Preface xi
Animal Eyes xxi
Figures xxii
Abbreviations xxiv
PA RT I . P E R C E P T IO N
1. Introduction 3
Biological Function, Action, Sensing, and Perception—The Emergence of Mind 3
Principal Aims of the Book 10
The Fregean Source of Key Semantical Notions for Perception 15
2. Perception 19
Perceptual States as Sensory States 20
Representation and Information Registration 21
Representation and Veridicality Conditions 28
Representations and Representational Contents 30
The Three Fundamental Representational Constituents in Perceptual States 36
The Basic Representational Form of Perceptual States 49
Perception as Objectification 50
Perceptual Constancy—First Mark of Representational Mind 60
3. Perceptual Constancy: A Central Natural Psychological Kind 64
Scientific Practice Demarcates Perceptual Constancies from
Other Invariances 65
Two Misguided Ways of Thinking About Perceptual Constancies 70
Even Non-Perceptual Invariances Contribute to the Fitness of Individuals
that Sense 74
Efference Copy: An Example of a Non-Perceptual Invariance 76
Path Integration: Another Non-Perceptual Invariance 78
Very Simple Perceptual Color and Lightness Constancies 80
Retinal Image Contour Registration and Surface Contour Perception 82
Visual Spatial Property and Relation Constancies 90
Visual Body Categorization 91
Visual Spatial Perceptual Constancies and Body Categorization 94
Visual Temporal Perceptual Constancies 99
PA RT I I . F O R M
4. Some Basics about Perceptual Systems 109

Principles Governing Transitions Contrasted with Representational Contents 109
Perception, Computation, and the Language-of-Thought Hypothesis 111
Representational-Dependence Hierarchies in Perceptual Attribution 118
Two Methodological Points About Natural-Kind and Functional Attributives 120
Taxonomic Hierarchies in Perception 124
viii contents
5. Perceptual Reference Requires Perceptual Attribution 131

Basic Form of Perceptual Contents 131
Perceptual Reference is Partly Guided by Perceptual Attribution 133
Support for (AA1) 134
Support for (AA2) 143
General Remarks on Attributives and Perceptual Discrimination 146
Criticism of Two Attempted Rejections of (AA1) and (AA2) 148
6. Form and Semantics of Representational Contents of Perceptual States 156
Review of Basic Form of Perceptual Representation 156
Perception of Property-Instances 159
Betokening and Four Types of Perceptual Attribution 169
Perceptual Attribution of Relations 175
Scope Hierarchies in Perceptual Content 179
Scope and Modificational Attribution Hierarchy 185
Absence in Perception of Negations, Conditionals, Disjunctions,
Quantifiers 190
Perceptual Contents, Propositions, and Noun Phrases 201
7. Perceptual Attributives and Referential Applications in Perceptual
Constancies 208
Perceptual Constancies and Frege’s Sense–Bedeutung Distinction: Similarities 208
Perceptual Constancies and Frege’s Sense–Bedeutung Distinction:
Differences 213
Minimalism: Defocus and Color Constancy 214
Minimalism and Iconic Representation in a Spatial Coordinate System 219
Perceptual Units in Packages in Iconic Visual Spatial Representation 233
Linkage of Different Perceptual Attributives in Perceptual Constancies 237
The Form of Perceptual Attributives in Linkages 241
Accuracy Conditions for Perceptual Attributives in Perceptual Constancies 244
Referential Applications in Accuracy Conditions for Tracking Particulars 248
8. Egocentric Indexing in Perceptual Spatial and Temporal Frameworks 255
Egocentric Spatial Indexes in Perception 255
Egocentric Temporal Frameworks and Perceptual Representation of Motion 264
Is Temporal Representation Constitutive to Perceptual Representation? 275
9. The Iconic Nature of Perception 293
Noun-Phrase-Like Structure and Iconic Representation in Perception 296
Iconic Aspects of Perceptual Spatial Representation 304
Temporal, Qualitative, and Packaging Iconic Aspects of Visual Perception 312
Iconic Visual Perception and Maps or Pictures 314
Some Ways Not to Think about Iconic Representation 315
Iconic Perception, Iconic Concepts, Iconic Representation in Propositional
Thought 331
Part–Whole Representation in Pictures and Visual Perception 334
Compositionality in Iconic Perceptual Representation 347
Spatial Mapping in Visual Perception Again: The Non-Planar Surface
of the Scene 350
Relations Between Iconic Format and Representational Content 355
The Tractability of Iconic Attributional Complexity 360
contents ix
PA RT I I I . F O R M AT IO N
10. First-Formed Perception: Its Richness and Autonomy 367

What are First-Formed Perceptual States Like?: Three Limitative Views 367
Framework 372
Marr’s 2½-D Sketch 378
Change Detection 380
Treisman’s Binding Theory 383
Two Lines of Empirical Criticism of Treisman’s Theory 391
Philosophical Views Influenced by Treisman’s Binding Theory 401
Two Types of First-Formed Perception 405
11. Intra-Saccadic Perception and Recurrent Processing 409
Two Changes in Scientific Understanding of Perception-Formation 409
Some Main Brain Areas Involved in Visual Processing 413
Timing of Visual Processing; Some Main Types of Representation 420
Categorization and Timing 423
Levels of Specificity in Perceptual Categorization 427
Perceptual Constancies in Categorization Processing 431
12. Further Attributives: Primitive Attribution of Causation, Agency 433
Methodology for Finding Perceptual Attributives 433
Primitive Attribution of Mechanical Causation 446
Primitive Attribution of Agency 466
Attribution of Further Structural Elements of Agency 475
PA RT I V. SYS T E M
13. Perceptual-Level Representation and Categorization 483

Perceptual Categorization is Perceptual 487
Richer Perceptual Categorization and Perceptual Processing that
Contributes to It 493
14. Conation: Relatively Primitive, Perceptually Guided Action 502
Action Imperialism 502
Relatively Primitive Action 504
Form of Relatively Primitive Conative States 508
Broader Structure of Conation in Causing Relatively Primitive Action 512
Summary: Philosophical Issues 526
15. Perceptual Attention 531
Forms of Perceptual Attention 532
Attention and Accuracy 537
Sources and Levels of Attention 545
Perceptual-Level Attention Commands and Guidance of Saccades 547
The Executive Control System and Propositional Drivers 556
Supra-Perceptual Effects on Perceptual-Level Operations: An Example 565
16. Perceptual Memory I: Shorter Term Systems 567
Perceptual Memory and Consciousness 569
Priming and Memory 570
x contents
Visual Sensory Memory 572

Fragile Visual Short-Term Memory 575
Trans-Saccadic Memory 576
Visual Working Memory 584
Conceptual Short-Term Memory 599
17. Perceptual Memory II: Visual Perceptual Long-Term Memory 609
Overview 609
Ability-General Long-Term Visual Perceptual Memory 613
Episodic Visual Memory; De Re Long-Term Non-Episodic Visual Memory 619
Perceptual and Conceptual Attributives in Long-Term Memory 622
Summary of Relations Among Major Types of Visual Perceptual Memory 623
18. Perceptual Learning, Perceptual Anticipation, Perceptual Imagining 625
Perceptual Learning 625
Perceptual Anticipation 630
Perceptual Imagining 641
19. Perception and Cognition 647
The Original Epistemic Grounds for Reflecting on Cognitive Influence
on Perception 649
Fodor and Pylyshyn’s Conceptions of Modularity; The Visual System
as a Module 655
Uses and Misuses of the Term ‘Cognition’ 662
The Issue of Cognitive Penetration 677
Framework Issues 680
Conceptions of Penetration 684
The Cognitive Penetration Controversy 693
A Computational Construal of Modularity 701
Psychological Systems and Psychological Kinds 710
The Empiricist Model of Perception and Conception: Degrees of Abstraction 714
What Should Count as Cognition? 722
20. Conclusion 735
Emergence of Representational Mind 735
Empirical Characteristics of First-Formed Perceptions 738
Changes in the Science; Reading the Changes Philosophically 740
Perception: Form and Representational Content 744
Perception: The Seed of New Things to Live and Die For 746
Bibliography 749
Author Index 813
Subject Index 839
Preface
This book is not the one that I set out to write over twelve years ago. I had intended to fol-
low Origins of Objectivity with an account of what is distinctive about the main represen-
tational capacity more advanced than perception. I thought, and still think, that that
capacity is propositional representation. I took some steps in that direction in the Petrus
Hispanus Lectures, Lisbon, 2009, and the Nicod Lectures, Paris, 2010, and developed an
argument for connecting propositionality, constitutively, with propositional deductive
inference. I remain interested in that other book, and hope to complete it. But it was
pre-empted.
In writing a lead-up to discussing propositional capacities, I wanted to elaborate an
account of perception. Perception is, I think, the first representational capacity to evolve. It
is the main pre-propositional representational capacity. The lead-up was intended to be a
relatively concise refinement of the account of perception in the last chapters of Origins of
Objectivity, a refinement that now occupies approximately Chapters 1–3 of this book.
I became interested in vision just before I spent a semester teaching at the Massachusetts
Institute of Technology (MIT) in 1982. My interest resulted in part from reading David
Marr’s important book, Vision. Although Marr died before I arrived at MIT, I audited
courses in perceptual psychology by Marr’s former colleagues during the visit. I later wrote
some articles on vision and made it a central theme of Origins of Objectivity (2010).
During work on that book and later, I benefitted from discussions of vision science with
my son, Johannes Burge, who is currently a vision scientist at the University of
Pennsylvania. After 2010, I came to understand the science more thoroughly, and devel-
oped ideas about structural and semantical issues associated with perception. I did so
through giving a series of graduate seminars at University of California Los Angeles
(UCLA), and through discussing the science with various scientists—especially in person
with David Brainard, Bill Geisler, and Shimon Ullman, and via correspondence with
Jeffrey Schall and Yaffa Yeshurun—and with Ned Block, one of few philosophers who ser
iously engages with the science. In writing the refinement of the Origins account of visual
perception, I soon realized that I had too much material to present in a run-up to another
topic, in a single book. The preliminary became the whole.
The book is about first form of representational mind. I take perception to be the most
primitive type of representational mind. Relevant first form is three-fold.
One type of first form is the representational structure of perception. Here, first form is
the first representational form that emerges in the evolution of representational mind.
This form is center-stage in Chapters 1–9. I had the main ideas about this structure when I
wrote Origins, but I discovered much more in thinking through its details, applying it to
cases, developing a semantics for it, and reflecting on how it is embedded in the iconic
format of perception.
A central theme in the book, centered in Parts I and II, is developing the foundations
for a systematic semantics for perceptual states. Perceptual psychology takes perceptual
states to be accurate or inaccurate. One of its main aims is to explain, causally, how
xii preface
accurate and inaccurate perceptual states are formed. It has, however, paid little attention
to explaining what it is for such states to be accurate or inaccurate, or to reflecting on how
representational capacities combine to yield a form of representation. Nor have these
issues been related to the obvious iconic nature of perceptual representation. I take steps
toward remedying this situation. In the course of doing so, I think that I have discovered
some basic aspects of attribution, the root of predication. Predication in language and
thought has been a longstanding topic of philosophical reflection, beginning with Aristotle
and Kant, and developing mainly in Frege, but also in Tarski and Strawson. Traditionally,
the topic has been pursued by reflection on logic. I have found it enlightening to reflect on
its roots in perception.
The second type of first form of representational mind is the first-formed states in the
order of perceptual processing. What is the nature of the perceptual states that are formed
fastest? What properties in the environment do they represent? What sort of processing
leads to them? There are empirical answers to these questions, at least for mammalian
vision. These answers provide a starting point for reflecting on what the fastest-formed
perceptual states are like in lower animals and even in evolutionary history. Of course,
each species must be considered on its own. I do not much discuss lower animals, nor do I
provide an evolutionary account, although I occasionally comment on those topics. This
second type of first form is center-stage in Chapters 10–11. Issues about later-formed per-
ceptual representations, such as those used in perceptual recognition of individuals, and
perhaps for causation, agency, and functional attributes, such as mate or edible, are
touched on in Chapter 12.
The third type of first form of representational mind is a natural-kind system of repre-
sentational capacities, with perception at the representational center of the system. The
systems that I highlight are the visual-perceptual system and the visuo-motor system.
The two systems intersect and overlap. What it is to be part of these systems is the
central theme of Part IV, Chapters 13–19. I believe that perception shares its representa-
tional structure and content, outlined in Chapters 2–12, with several other representational
capacities. Generically, the capacities are conation, attention-initiation, memory, affect,
learning, anticipation, and imagining. I think that the listed generic capacities have
perceptual-level species—species that have representational structures and contents that are
essentially those of perception. These capacities differ from perception in mode (memory
vs. perception) and transition-operations, not in form or content. The notion of represen-
tational level is explained in Chapter 1, the section The Principal Aims of the
B ook, and again, more fully, at the beginning of Chapter 13.
Perceptual-level species of the listed capacities share attributional content with percep-
tion. They share attributional and iconic structure with perception. And they involve
operations or transformations that are either similar to those in perception-formation
itself, or at least not more sophisticated than they are. These sub-species join with percep-
tion to form two large, natural-kind psychological systems—the perceptual system and
the perceptual-motor system. These systems are unified (a) in sharing a function (contrib-
uting to perception in the first case, contributing to perceptually guided action in the sec-
ond), and (b) in sharing the representational structure of perception. They are also unified
(c) in using only representational attributive contents in or borrowed from perception;
and (d) in being held together by computational causal processes both within perception
and between perception and the perceptual-level species of the listed generic capacities.
preface xiii
Again, the relevant perceptual-level species are perception-guided conation, perceptual-

attention initiations (or attention commands), perceptual memory, perceptual affect, per-
ceptual learning, perceptual anticipation, and perceptual imagining.
I think that these two large, overlapping systems—the perceptual system and the
perceptual-motor system—constitute the natural-kind center of lower representational
mind. I conjecture that variants of these systems, sometimes perhaps omitting one or two
of the auxiliary capacities—such as perceptual imagining—or adding other auxiliary
capacities—like amodal mapping—occur in all animal perceivers, from insects to human
beings. These systems and the perceptual-level capacity-species are discussed in Chapters
13–19, focusing on visual perception and visually guided action.
The three notions of first form are associated with the general plan of the book. Parts I
and II discuss what perception is. Part III centers on how perception works—how it is
formed and the nature and scope of its processing. Part IV treats relations between per-
ception and satellite capacities, and wherein they form a unified perceptual system and
perceptual-motor system.
A further theme runs through nearly all parts of the book. The theme is opposition—
sometimes implicit, sometimes explicit—to a way of thinking about perception started by
the classical empiricists, Locke and Hume. In trying to understand the main features of
perception, this approach takes too seriously intuitive groupings and senses of similarity
via introspection of conscious perceptual experience. It also errs by distinguishing percep-
tion from conception primarily in terms of differences in abstraction. Perception is sup-
posed to operate toward the concrete end. Conception, toward the abstract end. The
spectrum is intuitive—not very carefully explained. My opposition is centered in reflect-
ing on the explanatory practice of perceptual psychology. It also derives from reflecting on
the form, content, function, capacities, and uses that turn up in systematic explanation—
causal and semantical.
As with language, so with perception, understanding representational form and content
depends not on introspection of intuitively salient features of the vehicle of representation
(sentence or image-like-representation), but on competencies that underlie use of the rep-
resentation. Intuitive reflection on sentential structure would treat it as linear and as simply
being composed of a string of words. Reflection, in logic and linguistics, informed by sys-
tematic consideration of sentential use, reveals a hierarchical structure with words forming
phrase units that are not immediately obvious to intuition. Finding representational struc-
ture in perception is parallel. It depends not primarily on introspection of conscious per-
ceptual images, but on systematic reflection on the capacities evinced in uses and
transformations of perceptions. This reflection must consider the representational func-
tions of perception and the structures of capacities discovered in empirical science. Most of
what there is to be understood about perception is unconscious. All operations that lead to
perceptions are unconscious, and there are many unconscious perceptions. Moreover, given
the way in which perceptual discriminative capacities, and their use in guiding action, are
molded, in evolution and learning, by perceiver-needs and by frequently unobvious causal
and statistical patterns in the environment, one cannot rely on introspection of images,
and intuitive types of image-similarity to understand perception—even the iconic, broadly
image-like character of vision. Perceptual grouping does not in general conform to intuitive
image-similarity. Yet all perceptual groupings are grounded, at least partly, in shape-size-
motion attributions, plotted iconically in an image-like way in perceptual representation.
xiv preface
The book is resolutely a work in philosophy of science—specifically philosophy of

psychology. Perceptual psychology, centrally the psychophysics of vision, has become a
mature science in the last fifty years. It gives philosophy an opportunity to understand
important features of psychological capacities at a level of depth, rigor, and empirical
groundedness that has never before been attainable. Philosophy should leap at the oppor-
tunity to make use of such a powerful and rapidly advancing science, as a basis for philo-
sophical understanding. Some philosophy of perception makes no use at all of perceptual
psychology. Much philosophy of perception makes at best decorative use. I think that it is
no longer intellectually responsible to philosophize about perception without knowing
and seriously engaging with that science. I believe that the practice of centering philo-
sophical reflection about perception on phenomenology, or on analysis of ordinary talk
about perception, without closely connecting the reflection with what is known from sci-
ence (a centering that is a residue of the early empiricist model of perception), and the
practice of allowing epistemology to guide reflection on what perception must be like, will
all soon become museum pieces of past, misdirected philosophy.
Most of the book’s claims are, of course, supported only empirically, by interpreting the
empirical results of the science. Some of the claims are, however, supported apriori. One
should not confuse apriority with innateness, certainty, obviousness, infallibility, dogma-
tism, unrevisability, or immunity from revision based on empirical considerations. To
be apriori supported, or apriori warranted, is to have support or warrant that does not
depend for its force on perception or on sensing. Most apriori warranted judgments in
this book are warranted by reflection that yields understanding of key concepts or prin
ciples used or presupposed in the science. All the relevant apriori judgments are synthetic,
certainly in the sense of being non-vacuous and the sense of not being truths of logic.
I think that the judgments are also synthetic in the sense of not being the products of ana
lysis of conceptual complexes into concepts contained in the complexes. I think that most
concepts that are central to our discussion are not complexes. They are simple. They are,
however, necessarily and apriori embedded in networks with other concepts. Reasoning
through such networks sometimes yields synthetic apriori understanding of foundations
of mind.
Apriori supported judgments can be further supported empirically, by the science. But
insofar as they are apriori warranted, they have sufficient warrant to support belief; and
the warrant derives from reasoning or understanding, independently of support from per-
ception, perceptual experience, or sensory registration. An example of an apriori war-
ranted judgment, I think, is that perceptual states can be accurate or inaccurate. Another
example is that perceptual states have a representational function—to accurately pick out
and characterize particulars via causal relations to them: perceptual states fail in some way
(representationally) if they are not accurate. I doubt that one can know apriori that any
individual has perceptual capacities. Our empirical knowledge that we do have such
capacities is, however, firm. It is more certain than some things that we know apriori about
perception. As noted, being apriori does not imply some super-strong type of support.
Apriori warrant for belief in simple arithmetical truths is super-strong. But much apriori
support is not stronger, often less strong, than strong empirical support.
Our firm empirical knowledge that individuals have perceptual states does not require a
detailed, reflective, philosophical understanding of what perception is. Knowing that indi-
viduals have perceptual states requires only a minimal understanding. One must be able to
preface xv
distinguish perception, at least by some cases, from just any sensing. And one must be able
to recognize various examples of perception. Detailed philosophical understanding
requires reflection, articulation, and elaboration of a minimal understanding of the con-
cept perception and of relations between perception and other matters—semantical, func-
tional, biological, causal, and so on. Elaboration is mainly empirical, but partly apriori. Given
an elaborated understanding of what perception is, it is possible to draw, apriori, some fur-
ther conclusions about the form, semantics, and functions of perceptual states. Such con-
clusions are abstract and limited. They are important in being basic to understanding.
Again, most of the book’s claims are empirical. For example, the accounts of how per-
ceptual and perceptual-motor systems work in Parts III and IV, and the accounts of what
these systems are in Part IV, are warranted partly by appeal to explanations in the science.
Those accounts and those explanations are certainly empirically, not apriori, warranted.
I became interested in perception partly because it promises insight into basic types of
representation of the world, and partly because it is a key factor that must be understood if
one is to understand empirical knowledge. This book shows some fruits of the first motiv
ation. In investigating the structure and semantics of perceptual representation, one inves-
tigates primitive and basic types of reference and attribution. My interest in the role of
perception in empirical knowledge remains. But I take understanding perception to owe
almost nothing to epistemology, whereas understanding epistemology absolutely requires
understanding perception. Epistemology investigates epistemic norms for capacities that
can contribute to obtaining knowledge. One cannot understand the norms without under-
standing the capacities. One understands perceptual capacities by reflecting on empirical
science and its basic commitments, not by reflecting on epistemology. Understanding per-
ception is the task of this book. Epistemic use of an understanding of perception is poster
ior. For epistemic work in this direction, see my ‘Perceptual Entitlement’, Philosophy and
Phenomenological Research 67 (2003), 503–548; and ‘Entitlement: The Basis for Empirical
Warrant’, in P. Graham and N. Pedersen eds., Epistemic Entitlement (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2020).
I have some slight hope, even in this specialized world, that this book will interest not
only philosophers, but at least some scientists in perceptual psychology and other areas of
psychology. The best science is informed by a breadth and depth of perspective that is
philosophical. This point is particularly relevant to perceptual psychology. A central, often
stated, aim of the science is to understand conditions in which accurate perception occurs,
and conditions under which illusions occur. (See Chapter 1, note 25.) Accuracy is a
semantical concept.
So the science is committed at its very core to there being a semantics for perception—a
systematic account of relations between perceptual representation and its subject matters.
The account must explain what it is for perception to be accurate or inaccurate. Of course,
the science is mainly concerned with causal patterns and mechanisms. Much of it, indeed
probably most of it to date, focuses on pre-representational, pre-perceptual states that
register the proximal stimulus. But the point of this scientific work is partly to build
toward understanding perception of the physical environment. Part of understanding per-
ception scientifically is to understand not only the causal patterns that lead to accurate
and inaccurate perception, but also to understand the form and content of perceptual
states, and what it is for them to be accurate or inaccurate.
xvi preface
Yet the science has paid no serious attention to these issues—specifically to semantics.
It has not developed a vocabulary or set of principles that enable it to discuss accuracy and
inaccuracy of perception with the precision and clarity of its accounts of causal, forma-
tional aspects of psychological states and processes. It provides no answers to questions
like ‘What is it for a perceptual state to be accurate or inaccurate?’, ‘What sorts of represen-
tational competencies are involved in forming a state that is accurate or inaccurate?’; ‘In
what ways can a perception be partly accurate and partly inaccurate?’; ‘What is the repre-
sentational form or structure of perceptual states?’. Such questions are addressed in Parts I
and II of the book.
Scientific understanding of perception is incomplete if it does not incorporate a system-
atic semantical understanding of perceptual states into its understanding of principles
according to which perceptual states are causally generated. Semantical understanding is
understanding of the representational contents, their forms, and their accuracy condi-
tions—the conditions for representational success. Perceptual psychology would benefit
from mastering the vocabulary necessary to think systematically about the semantics of
perception.
Philosophy is the source of modern work in semantics—first the semantics of mathem
atics and logic, later the semantics of natural language. The basic semantical concepts, in
something like their modern form, come from Gottlob Frege, about 130 years ago. In the
last section of Chapter 1, I explain some of Frege’s basic concepts. I think that these con-
cepts, with some modification, are valuable in understanding perception, even though
they were first developed for understanding much higher-level representation—represen-
tation in mathematics.
I think that parts of the science need not only a deeper grip on semantics, but a much
more rigorous terminology. Uses of terms like ‘representation’, ‘knowledge’, ‘cognition’,
‘recognition’, ‘judgment’, ‘belief ’, ‘concept’, ‘prediction’, ‘intention’, ‘voluntary’ are far from
reflective, much less standardized, in the science. Assimilating the whys and wherefores of
terminology, is often the beginning of better, more fruitful empirical inquiry. Centrally, in
Chapter 19, the section Uses and Misuses of the Term ‘Cognition’, but also
throughout the book, there is a concerted effort to emphasize sharper uses of key mental-
istic terms so as to respect basic differences in representational level. Such differences cor-
respond to important differences in representational kinds—that is, representational
capacities.
This is a long, complex book. Understanding anything well requires effort and patience.
Genuine philosophical and scientific understanding cannot be grabbed off the shelf. The
time and effort required to understand this book will be considerable. One cannot get
there in a few sittings. The key point is to read and reread carefully and slowly, noting and
reflecting on nuances and qualifications, mastering terminology, reading in context, con-
necting different contexts together, reading the footnotes, going back to earlier passages—
all the while, reflecting. Few readers outside philosophy ever read this way. Most
philosophers have, I think, lost the art. Iris Murdoch, in harmony with the marvelous
quote that heads Chapter 1, wrote: ‘In philosophy, the race is to the slow’. Too many race at
high speeds. The psychological and sociological pressures to form opinions and publish
them quickly, and often, are very strong. Academic pressures and computer fluency have
yielded much more writing, with no more time to master the increasingly complex topics
written about. Careless reading, misdirected criticism, uninformed opinions, simplistic
preface xvii
proposals abound. Perhaps it was always so. However, as knowledge grows—and grows
more complex—lack of patience in pursuing understanding is an increasingly debilitating
vice. Given that philosophical understanding of this book’s topics has become harder—
because more is known and what is known is more complex—patience is more required
than ever.
For those who may have some interest in the book, but are not initially willing to invest
large of amounts of time in it, I set out a plan for getting some of the book’s gist. My hope
is that after achieving an overview, some readers will be tempted to go back for more—not
just noting fine points, but mastering the book’s conceptual framework and conceptual
intricacies.
For vision scientists, Parts I–II deal with the least familiar ideas—principally, the repre-
sentational form and semantics of perception. Part III and Chapters 13–18 in Part IV
mainly describe matters that many vision or visuo-motor scientists are familiar with,
although these passages cast those matters in a conceptual form that may be more unified
than specialized accounts provide. Chapter 19 of Part IV, supported by Chapters 13–18,
presents a large view of the visual system and visuo-motor system that uses perhaps famil-
iar empirical materials to develop a possibly less familiar, or more sharply articulated,
view of those systems as wholes.
For those, either vision scientists or others, who simply want to get a sense for the main
lines of thought, I offer the following, tentative guide.
I recommend, in Part I, the first two sections of Chapter 1 and all of Chapter 2. In
Chapter 3, I recommend the prologue and the section Retinal Image Contour
Registration and Surface Contour Perception. This section illustrates con-
cretely how I think perceptual constancies are distinguished from other invariances in
visual perception.
In Part II, I recommend the prologue at the beginning of Chapter 4, and the third and
fifth sections of the chapter (Representational-D ependence Hierarchies in
Perceptual Attribution and Taxonomic Hierarchies in Perception). In
Chapter 5, I recommend the first two sections (Basic Form of Perceptual
Contents and Perceptual Reference is Partly Guided by Perceptual
Attribution). In Chapter 6, I recommend the first three and the last of the sections
(Review of Basic Form of Perceptual Representation; Perception of
Property Instances; Betokening and Four Types of Perceptual
Attribution; and Perceptual Contents, Propositions, and Noun
Phrase). Chapter 7 gives the central account of the semantics of perception. This may be
hard to follow if one has skipped too much of the slow development of concepts that lead
up to it. The key section is the next- to-
last one (Accuracy Conditions for
Perceptual Attributives in Perceptual Constancies). Chapter 8 centers
on the way space and time are represented in visual perception. It can be skipped by those
not interested in details of perceptual representational structure. Chapter 9 connects basic
representational structure (the structure of reference and attribution) with the iconic form
of visual perception. The key sections are the first and the last two (Noun-P hrase-L ike
Structure and Iconic Representation in Perception; Relations
Between Iconic Format and Representational Content; and The
Tractability of Iconic Attributional Complexity).
xviii preface
In Part III, I recommend the prologue at the beginning of Chapter 10 and the first and
last sections of that chapter (What Are First-F ormed Perceptual States
Like?: Three Limitative Views and Two Types of First- F ormed
Perception). In Chapter 11, I recommend the prologue and the first section (Two
Changes in Scientific Understanding of Perception-F ormation). The
second section is a brief run-through of the course that visual processing takes in the
brain. The main points will be familiar to any vision scientist. The remaining sections pro-
vide basic facts about timing and about perceptual categorization. They may be skimmed
or skipped by those seeking only gist. All these sections in Chapter 11 are mainly descrip-
tive—with some improvements, I think, in conceptual rigor—of facts familiar to many
vision scientists. Chapter 12 has a methodological discussion of considerations that bear
on whether an attributive is, or should be, considered a perceptual attributive—an attribu-
tive, or characterizer, generated in the visual system (Methodology for Finding
Perceptual Attributives). That section tries to codify and state more precisely
methods already in place in the science.
Part IV treats the visual system at a level of generality far from the focused empirical
studies that make up most of the science. The prologue for Chapter 13 is recommended. It
sets the plan of Part IV. Readers trying for an overview can pick and choose within, or
skip, Chapters 13–18. These chapters discuss categorization, conation, attention, various
forms of short- term memory, long- term memory, affect, learning, anticipation, and
imagining. The chapters develop the idea that all these capacities have functions at the
representational level of perception. As noted, the notion of level is explained briefly in
Chapter 1 and in more detail at the beginning of Chapter 13. The chapters are part of an
extended argument that the perceptual-level functions and operations of these capacities
occur within the visual system or the visuo-motor system, in a specific sense of ‘occur
within’. Chapter 19 can be read by sampling the beginning of each section, then determin-
ing how much further to read. Chapter 19 uses work in Chapters 13–18 to develop the
idea that the perceptual system—for which the visual system is paradigmatic—and the
perceptual-motor system are lower representational mind. A proposal for understanding
the unity of lower representational mind is advanced in A Computational
Construal of Modularity. Although I explore some intermediate territory in
What Should Count as Cognition?, I think that lower representational mind
contrasts most dramatically with capacities for propositional inference and language, the
more primitive of which constitute the first capacities in upper representational mind. I
believe that the most important feature of upper representational mind is competence to
produce explanations. This capacity develops into science, moral thinking and practice,
and, most broadly, into understanding. The section The Empiricist Model of
Perception and Cognition: Degrees of Abstraction brings together criti-
cisms, which recur throughout the book, of an old way of thinking about the relation
between perception and thought that, while not prevalent in psychophysics of perception,
remains widespread in other parts of psychology and in philosophy. This section might be
useful to psychologists as well as philosophers. Chapter 20 summarizes main themes, and
concludes.
For valuable input, I am grateful to: Marty Banks, John Bartholdi, Blake Batoon, Ned
Block, David Bordeaux, David Brainard, Denis Buehler, Daniel Burge, Dorli Burge,
Johannes Burge, Susan Carey, Sam Cumming, Will Davies, Frank Durgin, Chaz Firestone,
preface xix
Julian Fischer, Bill Geisler, Katherine Gluer, Peter Godfrey-Smith, Peter Graham, Gabe
Greenberg, Michael Hansen, Catherine Hochman, Gabby Johnson, Nancy Kanwisher, Ed
Keenan, Philip Kellman, Ela Kotkowska, Bill Kowalsky, Kevin Lande, Hakwan Lau, Gavin
Lawrence, Yannig Luthra, Tony Martin, Peter Momtchiloff, Bence Nanay, Peter Pagin, Alexi
Patsaouras, Christopher Peacocke, Sam Pensler, Atthanasios Raftopoulos, Jacob Reid,
Michael Rescorla, Pieter Roelfsema, Jeffrey Schall, Brian Scholl, Wesley Seurat, Houston
Smit, Sheldon Smith, Irene Sperandio, Galen Strawson, Paul Talma, Shimon Ullman,
Tamar Weber, Fei Xu, Yaffa Yeshurun. Thanks also to three anonymous reviewers. The two
complex drawings, Figures 9.2 and 9.3, are by Bill Kowalsky, as are the other drawings,
except for one by Johannes Burge.
My immediate family—sons and wife—has supported and taken interest. I am espe-
cially grateful to my wife, Dorli, for patience in understanding her often distracted hus-
band and for helping me to look more carefully at the world, especially appreciating details
and finding joy in the beauties of little things.
Tyler Burge
Animal Eye Grid
1 2 3 4 5 6
7 8 9 10 11 12
13 14 15 16 17 18
19 20 21 22 22 24
25 26 27 28 29 30
31 32 33 34 35 36
Animal eye grid credit lines: (1) Tarsier monkey, © nikpal/Getty Images; (2) Horse, © Magdalena Strakova/EyeEm/
Getty Images; (3) Cat, © Dobermaraner/Shutterstock.com; (4) Racing pigeon, © triocean/Getty Images;
(5) Red-eyed tree frog, © Mark Kostich/Getty Images; (6) Indian elephant, © Volanthevist/Getty Images; (7) Bearded
vulture, © Slowmotiongli/Dreamstime.com; (8) Robber fly, © suwich/Getty Images; (9) Blue-spotted pufferfish,
© Shahar Shabtai/Shutterstock.com; (10) Deer fly, © ekamelev/Unsplash; (11) Goat, © Tsuneya Kudoh/EyeEm/Getty
Images; (12) Iguana, © Gaschwald/Dreamstime.com; (13) Grey butterfly, © egor-kamelev/Pexels; (14) Emerald tree
boa, © George lepp/Getty Images; (15) Ant, © Visual&Written SL/Alamy Stock Photo; (16) Jumping Spider, © Razvan
Cornel Constantin/Dreamstime.com; (17) Discus Fish, © tunart/getty Images; (18) Tokay Gecko, © Spaceheater/
Dreamstime.com; (19) Octopus, © iStock.com/leventalbas; (20) Eurasian Eagle Owl, © GlobalP/Getty Images;
(21) Sumatran tiger, © ekamelev/Unsplash; (22) Human, © Tatiana Makotra/Shutterstock.com; (23) Chameleon,
© aluxum/Getty Images; (24) Bee, © ekamelev/Unsplash; (25) Chimpanzee, © Karl Ammann/Getty Images;
(26) Green tree python, © Zoran Kolundzija/Getty Images; (27) Finschs Imperial Pigeon, © Marc Dozier/Getty Images;
(28) Sparrowhawk, © Katie Kokoshashvili/Shutterstock.com; (29) California grey whale, © Michael S. Nolan/Alamy
Stock Photo; (30) Lion, © Ben Puttock/Alamy Stock Photo; (31) Northern harrier eagle, © Wildlife World/
Dreamstime.com; (32) Mantis shrimp, © Alex Permiakov/Shutterstock.com; (33) Napoleon wrasse fish, © ifish/Getty
Images; (34) Caiman crocodile, © Jonathan Knowles/Getty Images; (35) Fly, © egor-kamelev/Pexels; (36) Parrot,
© Couleur/Pixabay.
Animal Eyes
Figures
3.1. Geisler Contours 85

7.1. Drawings conveying the different modes of representation for the top edge and
side edges and their lengths in two orientations of the same surface, or two
orientations of two different but similarly sized and shaped surfaces 211
9.1. A sample surface made up of six smallest-discriminable cells 337
9.2. A model of the iconic representational content of a perceptual state representing
the 6-cell surface. 339
9.3. Depiction of a scene showing different points of view 353
10.1. Illustration of a simple example of the Rapid Serial Visual Presentation (RSVP)
experimental paradigm. Source: M. Potter, B. Wyble, C. Hagmann, and E. McCourt,
‘Detecting Meaning in RSVP at 13 ms per Picture’ 393
11.1a. Diagrammatic section through the head, sketching major features of the main visual
pathway linking the eyes to the striate cortex (V1). Source: J.P. Frisby and J.V. Stone,
Seeing, second edition, figure 1.5, p. 4, © 2010 Massachusetts Institute of Technology
by permission of The MIT Press 413
11.1b. Illustration of two visual pathways underneath the cortical areas of the brain.
Source: J.P. Frisby and J.V. Stone, Seeing, second edition, figure 1.6, p. 5, © 2010
Massachusetts Institute of Technology, by permission of The MIT Press 414
11.2. Some main visual areas of the brain 416
12.1. The launching (top row) and entrainment (bottom row) effects, discovered
by Michotte 448
12.2. Habituated launching sequence and the same sequence in reverse 451
12.3. William Ball experimental paradigm 456
12.4. Causation and overlap 463
14.1. Important states in Relatively Primitive Action-Motor System 523
15.1. Sequence of display in each trial of flashed discs 538
15.2. A visibility map of a 15-degree-circumference-sized part of a retinal image.
Source: J. Najemnik and W. Geisler, ‘Simple Summation Rule for Optimal
Fixation Selection in Visual Search’, figure 2a, p1288, © 2009, with
permission from Elsevier 555
15.3a. Flow chart for computational program of Tsotsos and Kruijne for visual
discrimination task. Source: Adapted from J. Tsotsos and W. Kruijne, ‘Cognitive
Programs: Software for Attention’s Executive’, Figure 1, p. 4, open-access distributed
under the terms of the Creative Common Attribution License (CC BY) 559
15.3b. Abstract diagram of the structure of the functional components necessary to
support the executive control of attentive processing with information-passing
channels indicated in red arrows. Source: Adapted from J. Tsotsos and W. Kruijne,
‘Cognitive Programs: Software for Attention’s Executive’, Figures 5–6, p8,
open-access distributed under the terms of the Creative Common
Attribution License (CC BY) 559
figures xxiii
15.3c. Diagram of model for system of processing of visual executive-control system’s

(vAE’s) attention commands for visual task execution. Source: Adapted from
J. Tsotsos and W. Kruijne, ‘Cognitive Programs: Software for Attention’s
Executive’, Figures 5–6, p8, open-access distributed under the terms of the
Creative Common Attribution License (CC BY) 560
16.1. A typical Sperling test display 574
18.1. Examples of figures used in mental rotation experiments. Source: Adapted from
Roger N. Shepard and Lynn A. Cooper, Mental Images And Their Transformations,
figure, page 495, © 1982 Massachusetts Institute of Technology by permission
of The MIT Press 643
19.1. Causal analogy 727
Abbreviations
CSTM conceptual short-term memory

FEF frontal eye fields
FFA fusiform face area
FFE fast field echo
fMRI functional magnetic resonance imaging
FVSTM fragile visual short-term memory
IT inferior temporal cortex
LGN lateral geniculate nucleus
LOT language of thought
LTM long-term memory
MST medial superior temporal area
MT middle temporal area / medial temporal cortex
ms millisecond
OFC orbital frontal cortex
PFC pre-frontal cortex
PHC para-hippocampal cortex
RC retrosplenial cortex
RDS random dot stereograms
RSVP rapid serial visual presentation
SM simple model
SOA stimulus onset asynchrony
TSM trans-saccadic memory
V1–V5 visual cortical areas
VLTM visual long-term memory
VWM visual working memory
WM working memory
PART I
PE RCE P T ION
1
Introduction
In philosophy, if you aren’t moving at a snail’s pace, you aren’t moving at all.
Iris Murdoch, Existentialists and Mystics
In the grand array of occupants of the universe, from sub-atomic particles through higher
animals, the animals with minds stand out as special. Some of the specialness derives from
our being in this group. We interest ourselves. This interest extends to animals like us.
The natural interest is grounded in more than self-interest. It is grounded in a deep
joint in nature—the joint between the minded and the mindless. The joint may be ragged.
It may have borderline cases. But it is real. It is relevant to matters of great value and
importance—science, understanding, morality, art. Without mind, none of these pursuits
or goods exist. They seem good independently of whether we engage with them. They
depend for being good on realizing functions of certain types of minds. The minded-
ness and the type of mind ground the goodness, not their being ours. My project is
understanding—understanding some central aspects of mind.
Understanding the mind–mindless joint requires understanding mind in its most basic
forms. Of course, mind depends on the mindless and makes use of it. Without the regularities
of organic chemistry, minds could not be minds. Without the regularities of the broader
macro-physical world, minds could not navigate through it. In many ways, the non-minded
physical world stamps itself into the very natures of mental states. In understanding mind,
however, it is important to understand what is new and different about it, at its most
elementary levels. Such understanding aids understanding richer forms that guide the
listed pursuits. Those pursuits are not possible where mind begins. They are not possible for
the first forms of mind. However, they depend on and employ these forms. A central aim of
this book is to understand forms of mind at this initial juncture—forms of perception.
Biological Function, Action, Sensing,

and Perception—The Emergence of Mind
Before mind emerged, another deep and interesting joint in nature had already developed.
Brief attention to this joint is valuable in understanding the joint on which mind hinges.
Most of the universe is fire, rock, or emptiness. Already with life, there is a momentous
difference. Life occupies small crevasses in the universe. However, it marks a large change
from the chemical mixes from which it emerged. Although the living share a material
basis with the non-living, the living comprise a genuinely new and different group of the
universe’s occupants.
The point is not just intuitive. It shows up in new terms and methods in the scientific
study of life. Notions of function, growth, reproduction, natural selection, adaptation,
Perception: First Form of Mind. Tyler Burge, Oxford University Press (2022). © Tyler Burge.
DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198871002.003.0001
4 Introduction
life-cycles, ecology have no place in physics or chemistry. They are central to biology. The
historical study of evolution and a lesser emphasis on law, are foreign to physics and
chemistry. These scientific differences signal subject-matter differences. The living are
very different from the rest.
A key aspect of life, lacking in the lifeless natural world, is function. Rock and fire have
no functions in themselves. Biological functions are patterns of operation whose existence
derives from their contributions to success in reproduction.1 The function of photo-
synthesis is to convert light energy into chemical energy that subsequently is transformed
in a way that feeds an organism’s other operations. The process exists in plants and other
organisms because it contributed to their reproduction. It was naturally selected.
Like other types of function, biological function is conceptually linked with doing well,
being successful. These types of goodness are not moral, or products of plans or purposes.
They are good for the system, or individual, or species, because they aid survival long
enough to reproduce. Being a biological function is an objective matter: functions are
what they are independently of whether anyone recognizes them. They are open to object
ive evaluation, even scientific evaluation, by rational standards. Whether and to what
degree a process fulfills one of its functions can be empirically assessed. Either a process
functions well or it does not.
Some functions are attributable to plants and animals as whole organisms. Others are
attributed only to subsystems or parts of a plant or animal. For example, functions to grow
and reproduce are functions of the whole plant. By contrast, production of pollen grains is
a function of the anther in a plant’s flower. Photo-synthesis is an operation in each indi-
vidual cell. The whole plant, its sub-systems, and its parts can succeed or fail in realizing
their functions.
Functional processing in plants responds in ways sensitive to the environment. Photo-
synthesis depends on features of the plant that are specialized to be sensitive to light.
Photo-synthesis yields responses, such as directional growth, that depend on chemical
reactions in the plant that transform the light’s energy into chemical energy. These are
antecedents of sensing and action that occur in animals. I think it well to follow common
sense in thinking that these are not strictly cases of sensing or acting. I say that plants are
sensitive to the environment, whereas animals sense it. Animals, but not plants, act.
Directional growth and pollination are not actions. A plant’s absorption of water and
nutrients is not drinking or eating. The Venus Fly Trap’s engulfing of visitors is not eating.
I conjecture that this is so because the relevant changes in the plant can be too easily
1 This conception of biological function derives from L. Wright, ‘Functions’, The Philosophical Review 82
(1973), 139–168. There are other, compatible notions of function that figure in biology. I use Wright’s because
it is familiar, explanatory, and teleological. Other conceptions of function in biology also take teleology ser
iously and are not as centered in evolutionary history—so-called organizational conceptions. A revision of the
Wright account of function, which I think of as an expansion of it, rather than purely a correction of it, cen
ters on any contributions to reproduction within a living system, rather than purely on original-etiological
contributions. For excellent work on this conception of function, see G. Schlosser, ‘Self-Reproduction and
Functionality: A Systems- Theoretical Approach to Teleological Explanation’, Synthese 16 (1998), 303–354;
W. Christensen and M. Bickhard, ‘The Process Dynamics of Normative Function’, The Monist 85 (2002), 3–28;
M. Mossio, C. Saborido, and A. Moreno, ‘An Organizational Account of Biological Functions’, British Journal
of Philosophy of Science 60 (2009), 813–841; M. Mossio and L. Bich, ‘What Makes Biological Organization
Teleological?’, Synthese 194 (2017), 1089–1114. See also J. Garson, A Critical Overview of Biological Functions
(Dordrecht: Springer, 2016). Although I use Wright’s notion, the notion of biological function that I rely on does
not need to be specific enough to choose between these conceptions. Any scientifically based explanatory notion
of teleology will suffice.
Biological Function, Sensing, and Perception 5
explained in terms of summations of changes that occur in plant cells. There is no need to
postulate a central locus of conation, as we do for agents.
Some speak metaphorically, even poetically, of sensing and acting by plants. Some sci-
entists like to say that plants communicate with one another. Perhaps there is a broad
enough notion of communication to allow such talk to be non-metaphorical. I believe that
any such communication is not action. Calling functional, cross-individual patterns of
sensitivity and response among plants’ “communication” serves advertisement more than
understanding. True understanding depends more here on exploring differences than on
engaging in assimilation.
I think that serious conceptual and scientific investigation of these matters will confirm
some variant of what common sense assumes. Plants may communicate. They do not act.
Some or all animals, and perhaps other organisms that are neither plants nor animals, do.
I think that action has to do with a coordination among central capacities of an
organism—typically, but not necessarily, endogenously causing movement by the individual.2
As noted, I conjecture that plants do not act, because their changes derive not from a central
coordinating capacity, but from a mere aggregation of changes in plant parts. Photo-synthesis
occurs in every plant cell. Growth is not action partly because it is a summation of aggre-
gate increases in various cells. Directionality in growth stems from the fact that more
stimulated cells multiply faster. Plants are sensitive to light. Relevant stimulation for
growth is often from light. Plants grow toward the light. Directional growth is an aggregate
response of changes in the plant’s most stimulated cells. This is not action. Similarly, for
absorption of water and nutrients. Such absorption is not drinking or eating. These points
are at best a gesture at a position on a complicated topic.
I take the notion of sensing, as distinct from that of sensitivity, to be tied to action.
Plants are sensitive to stimuli. Animals sense stimuli. Sensing and action emerge
together.3
The distinction between plant responses and animal (or other organisms) action is not
central to the present project. It is background. What I have pointed to is a broad analogy
between plant sensitivity and functional growth-like responses, on one hand, and animal
sensing and functional behavioral responses that include action, on the other.
The sensing-action nexus is very old, older than the emergence of mind. Organisms
that surely lack minds—paramecia, simple worms, snails—act. They eat, swim, or crawl.
They depend on elementary sensing capacities in fulfilling these activities’ functions.
Here again, biological functions of the organism are to be distinguished from biological
functions of organs and operations within the organism. For example, eating, mating,
swimming, crawling, and navigating are biological functions of the whole animal. All
meet earlier-discussed conditions for being a biological function. All depend for being
functional on the well-functioning operation of biological systems or organs within the
organism. For example, eating’s fulfilling its function depends on the well-functioning
operation of a digestive system. The whole-animal functions are relevant to understanding
success and failure for the whole animal, not just sub-systems or sub-parts of the animal.
Acting and sensing are functional pursuits at the level of the whole animal. They form the
womb out of which basic forms of mind are born.
2 See T. Burge, Origins of Objectivity (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), chapter 8.
3 I advance this conjecture in Origins of Objectivity, 376–377; see also 331–334.
6 Introduction
Philosophical tradition has come to a broad consensus on the most general marks of
mind. They are consciousness and representation.4 Thought and perception—both of which
are types of representation—can be conscious or unconscious. Consciousness, I think,
can be either representational or not. A representational state like a perception can,
obviously, be conscious. A feel of a pain or a tickle can, I think, be distinguished from a
proprioceptive representation of its location. Such feels are conscious, but not in them-
selves representational in the ordinary sense of representation—the sense that I will refine
and develop.
This book focuses on representation, not consciousness. I take perceptual representa-
tion to be a basic mark of mind and a mark of nature’s mind–mindless joint. This view
does not compete with the idea that consciousness is also a basic mark of mind. There may
be two joints in nature between minds and the mindless. Many minds are both representa-
tional and at some times conscious. But it may be that there are conscious beings that do
not represent and representational beings that are not conscious. I focus on the first mark
of mind—representation. Vastly more is known about it. The science of consciousness is in
its gestation stage. The science of perceptual representation is in its early maturity.
There is no consensus about how consciousness and representation are related in being
marks of mind. The issue is complicated by the fact that there are importantly different
historical understandings of the putative subject matter here—mind. The notions of mind,
psyche, soul, psychological system, and so on, each has different historical associations.
I ignore nuance here, in the interests of providing a broad-brushed setting for the main
project. I think that having consciousness and having representation are each sufficient for
having a mind.
Neither is by itself necessary for having a mind. An animal that feels pain—and hence is
conscious—has a mind. It may or may not have a capacity to represent, in the sense
of ‘represent’ that will occupy us. For example, it may or may not have perceptual states.
An animal that perceives, and hence represents, has a mind. It may or may not be capable
of consciousness.
So I think that representation and consciousness are in principle separable. Each is a
mark of mind.5 It follows that there could be two paths to mind in the evolution of
animals—one through consciousness, one through representation. If one wants to distin-
guish mind—marked by consciousness—from psychology—marked by representation—,
I have no strong objection. Then there may be minds without psychologies, and psycholo-
gies without minds. I do not, however, write in these ways. I do sometimes write of con-
scious mind or representational mind.
I assume that the two marks of mind—consciousness and representation—are each suf-
ficient for having mind. Having at least one is necessary. Neither is by itself necessary.
Of course, many animals that are conscious are capable of representation, and many
animals capable of representation are conscious. All higher animals, certainly all
4 What I call ‘representation’ is often called ‘intentionality’. I think that the latter term is historically associated
with unclear thinking about representation, and is best discarded. I mean ‘representation’ here in a specific
restricted sense, developed in Chapter 2.
5 One could qualify these points. Consciousness is historically more closely tied to the notion of mind.
Representation is more closely tied to the notion of psychology. Some may find saying that an always uncon-
scious animal has a mind is harder than saying that it has a psychology. Some may find that saying that an ani-
mal, that feels pain but represents nothing, has a psychology is harder than saying that it has a mind, though not
much of a mind. One could talk of conscious mind and representational mind to ease the rub. I sometimes do so.
mammals, have representational capacities and are (often) conscious. So if there are, in
evolutionary history, separate streams into mind—animals that are conscious but do not
represent and/or animals that represent but are not conscious—, these two streams flow
back together in more complex animals.
The point about the separability of consciousness and representation is a very general,
conceptual point. There is no necessary connection between consciousness and
representation.
The point is not just of general conceptual importance. It bears on understanding the
kind of representation that figures in this book. I have said that, for all we know, there may
be animals that have perception and lack consciousness. Bees and other arthropods have
perception. They may lack consciousness. We do not know enough about consciousness to
settle the question. One day, unconscious robots might be produced so as to have visual
perception.
I think that perception without even a capacity for consciousness is epistemically, meta-
physically, and nomologically possible. Epistemically: I think that nothing that we know,
either empirically or apriori, rules out perceptual representation without consciousness
(or vice-versa). Metaphysically and nomologically: I think it a real possibility that an ani-
mal have perceptual representation and lack any capacity for consciousness. Representation
is primarily a functional matter. It hinges on what an individual or the individual’s sub-
systems can do. Consciousness is not a functional matter; it hinges on an individual’s
material basis.
Psychophysical explanations posit human perceptual states that are not and cannot
become conscious.6 Much of the science of perception is carried on without specifying
whether a perception is conscious. These points form the ground for the conjecture that
there is nothing in the nature of things that requires some association between conscious-
ness and representation.
Of course, conscious perceptions are an interesting topic. They have different
psychological-representational, as well as phenomenological, properties from uncon-
scious ones. But consciousness itself is not yet a central scientific topic. Perceptual science
has been spectacularly successful without theorizing much about it. Eventually, more will
be known.
Some philosophers claim that perception must be conscious. Some claim that percep-
tion that picks out bodies, or perception that is not guesswork and could support know
ledge, requires consciousness. None of the arguments that I know of for such positions has
any force. I discuss some in Chapter 10, the section Philosophical Views
Influenced by Treisman’s Binding Theory. Several are incompatible with what
is known from science. Issues about consciousness are not central in our story, but they
arise recurrently. I mention them here both to acknowledge their natural interest and to
motivate not centering on them. My primary focus is representation.
6 For one of many reviews of psychological work that posits unconscious perceptual states, see S. Kouider and
S. Dehaene, ‘Levels of Processing During Non-Conscious Perception: A Critical Review of Visual Masking’,
Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London B 362 (2007), 857–875. When I generalize about vision
science or perceptual psychology, I usually intend psychophysics. Sometimes when I make a point about vision
science, I do not cite specific articles. In such cases, I take the point to be uncontroversial in the science’s main-
stream. Then, I encourage novices to become acquainted with the mainstream, and to check my judgment. I take
the point footnoted in this case to be mainstream-uncontroversial. But since there has been some dissent in
philosophy, I give the nod, above, to the scientific literature.
8 Introduction
More specifically, I focus on perceptual representation. Perceptual representation is

where representational mind begins. I reflect on the joint in nature between mind and the
mindless by reflecting on differences between perceptual representation and those non-
perceptual sensory capacities that underlie it. I center on perception—and related capaci
ties like perceptual memory and perceptual anticipation—because it is functionally the
most basic representational capacity. No other representational capacity evolved earlier.
If other representational capacities (perceptual memory, for example) evolved equally
early, they depend functionally on perception.
Perception is, evolutionarily, the first known manifestation of representational mind.
Arthropods—bees, praying mantises, and certain spiders—are known to have visual per-
ception. Visual perception is distinct, in ways to be discussed, from other types of light-
based sensing. Snails, molluscs, and tapeworms sense light, even light-direction. Ants
respond to light-produced templates that correspond to surface shape.7 These capacities
for visual sensing are not perception. Snails and molluscs are not known to have visual
perception. I think it unlikely that animals that evolved much earlier than the arthropods
had perceptual representation. So we have a rough sense of where representational mind
begins. It begins among the arthropods.8
I do not center on the evolutionary emergence of representational mind, despite its
great interest. My topic is different. Given that perception is the earliest form of represen-
tation, and that other forms develop from it, what can be learned about representation and
the earliest form of representational mind by reflecting on perception? I center on what
perception is—its structure and function—not on how it evolved. Evolution will, however,
recurrently come up.
7 On snails and other molluscs, see P. Hamilton and M. Winter, ‘Behavioural Responses to Visual Stimuli by
the Snail, Littorina irrorata’, Animal Behaviour 30 (1982), 752–760; V. Zhukov, M. Bobkova, and A. Vakolyuk, ‘Eye
Structure and Vision in the Freshwater Pulmonate Mollusc, Planorbarius corneus’, Journal of Evolutionary
Biochemistry and Physiology 38 (2002), 419–430. On these animals and tapeworms, see M. Land and D. Nilsson,
Animal Eyes (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 4. On ants, see K. Basten and H. Mallot, ‘Simulated Visual
Homing in Desert Ant Natural Environments: Efficiency of Skyline Cues’, Biological Cybernetics 102 (2010),
413–425; V. Aksoy and Y. Camlitepe, ‘Behavioural Analysis of Chromatic and Achromatic Vision in the Ant,
Formica cunicularia (Hymenoptera: Formicidae)’, Vision Research 67 (2012), 28–35; M.-C. Cammaerts, ‘The Visual
Perception of the Ant Myrmica ruginodis (Hymenoptera: Formicidaxe)’, Biologia 67 (2012), 1165–1174. The visual
template capacity mentioned in the text is not perception. But ants are known to have visual perception, with
perceptual constancies. They mainly act not on vision but on olfaction.
8 Bees and other arthropods have visual perception—color, location, and size constancies, for example.
See T. Collet, ‘Peering: A Locust Behavior for Obtaining Motion Parallax Information’, Journal of Experimental
Biology 76 (1978), 237–241; R. Wehner, ‘Spatial Vision in Arthropods’, in H. Autrum ed., Comparative Physiology
and Evolution of Vision in Invertebrates: Invertebrate Visual Centers and Behavior (Berlin: Springer Verlag, 1981);
M. Lehrer, M. Srinivasan, S. Zhang, and G. Horridge, ‘Motion Cues Provide the Bee’s Visual World with a Third
Dimension’, Nature 332 (1988), 356–357; G. Horridge, S. Zhang, and M. Lehrer, ‘Bees Can Combine Range and
Visual Angle to Estimate Absolute Size’, Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London B 337 (1992),
49–57; M. Lehrer, ‘Spatial Vision in the Honeybee: The Use of Different Cues in Different Tasks’, Vision Research
34 (1994), 2363–2385; R. Foelix, Biology of Spiders (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), 87–92; C. Neumeyer,
‘Comparative Aspects of Color Constancy’, in V. Walsh and J. Kulikowski eds., Perceptual Constancy (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1998); R. Wilcox and R. Jackson, ‘Cognitive Abilities of Araneophagic Jumping
Spiders’, in R. Balda, I. Pepperberg, and A. Kamil eds., Animal Cognition in Nature (San Diego: Academic Press,
1998); M. Lehrer, ‘Shape Perception in the Honeybee: Symmetry as a Global Framework’, International Journal of
Plant Sciences 160 (1999), S51–S65; K. Kral, ‘Behavioral-Analytical Studies of the Role of Head Movements in
Depth Perception in Insects, Birds and Mammals’, Behavioral Processes 64 (2003), 1–12. For further discussion of
this issue, see Burge, Origins of Objectivity, 419–420; T. Burge, ‘Origins of Perception’, Disputatio 4: 29 (2011),
1–38; and T. Burge, ‘Perception: Where Mind Begins’, Philosophy 89 (2014), 385–403, reprinted in T. Honderich
ed., Philosophers of Our Times (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015). Whether arthropods are conscious is not
known. Those squeamish about taking arthropods to have minds, if they lack consciousness, can say that they
have representational psychologies.
I also want to understand relations between perception and closely, almost inevitably
associated capacities—perceptual attention, primitive perceptually guided action, per-
ceptual memory, perceptual anticipation, perceptual imagining, perceptual learning.
I argue later that these capacities participate, with perception, in a psychological system
all of whose capacities share representational form and representational content with
perception itself.
Philosophy is fortunate to be able to reflect on science. A science of perception, particu-
larly vision science, has bloomed into a rigorous enterprise over the last fifty years. It is by
far the most impressive psychological science. It is more advanced in mathematization,
and in predictive and explanatory power than many biological sciences. Especially in the
second half of the book, I make extensive use of what is known from this science. Doing
so is part of gaining a philosophical understanding of issues attaching to perception and
perceptual-level representation.
Such understanding is inevitably affected by scientific change. A lot of detail that I dis-
cuss will turn out to be mistaken and superceded. Some of it is probably already known by
someone to be mistaken. The science is so vast that no account can keep up with every
relevant discovery. At worst, my use of empirical work is a challenge to do better.
Some of my most general points are, I think, safe. The referential-attributional structure
of perception, its iconic format, and the distinction between perceptual-level representa-
tion and propositional representation, for example, will weather changes in the science,
such as details of timing, of what perceptual-level attributives there are, and so on.
I focus on vision. I discuss hearing, touch, proprioception—the other main human per-
ceptual senses—only occasionally. This approach inevitably evokes complaints, especially
from those interested in other types of perception, and in relations between perceptual
modalities.
Several answers to such complaints seem to me apropos. First, understanding visual
perception is a huge task. Vision is the most complex of the senses. I plead human limita-
tion. I invite others to do similar work on other types of sense perception.
Second, vastly more is known about vision than about other types of perception. The
number of vision scientists and the amount of work done in visual psychology dwarfs the
number and amount in all the sciences about other perceptual modalities put together.
Third, vision is by far the most important sense for most humans and apes for guiding
their lives. It is the main basis for the development of empirical science by human beings.
Although I think it important to remember that human perception presents only one
suite of capacities, and understanding perception in other animals is of great importance,
I focus on humans because I am interested in situating perception in relation to higher
representational powers. As far as is known, only humans have some of these higher
powers—linguistically expressed thought, reflective deliberation, and scientific reasoning,
for example.
Fourth, many visual capacities have definite analogs in other perceptual modalities. So
understanding vision can provide a boost in understanding them. The sciences of hearing
and touch derive much of their success from using ideas and methods that come from
vision science.
Fifth, many of the most basic features of visual perception—its most basic representa-
tional structure and its iconic format, for example—are present and basic in the other
perceptual senses.
10 Introduction
In no way do I deny the import of non-visual perceptual modalities. Different modal

ities are always connected in perceivers that have more than one. Connections are causally
reciprocal. Perceptual-state formation in one modality can always be influenced by input
from another. Inter-modal influence occurs among touch, hearing, proprioception, and
vision. To limit complexity, I touch on inter-modal relations only glancingly.
My work on vision should not be seen as detracting from work on other modalities, or
on inter-modal influences, in any way. It should be seen as a possible resource in under-
standing inter-modal relations and relations between visual perception and perception in
other modalities.
My focus on perception is also not to be construed as minimizing the huge role of
action and reaction in forming and using perceptual capacities. Perception evolved, fun-
damentally, not because it was accurate, but because it contributed to action and reaction
that, in turn, contributed to fitness for reproduction. Action evolved before perception
did. Its flexibility and precision is enhanced by perception. Perception’s main use is in
guiding action. Its guidance is, of course, sensitive to feedback from states that set action’s
targets and feedback from action itself.
Perception and perceptual-level conative states—psychological states that function to
produce action guided by perception—form a large psychological system, the perceptual-
motor system. I discuss such conation in Chapter 14. I am acutely aware that more could
be said to provide a more balanced account of interaction between perception and con
ation. I believe, however, that perception is the main, or entire, source of representational
resources in primitive conation. That is, perceptual attributives that guide conation are the
main or entire repertoire of representation in primitive action. In primates, action guid-
ance derives primarily from vision and proprioception. Again, visual capacities do not
operate alone, or independently of relations to other perceptual modalities. Still, visual
perception looms large enough and constitutes such a formidably complex phenomenon
that I do not apologize for focusing on it.
Principal Aims of the Book
Five principal aims inform this book.

The first is to develop a detailed understanding of the core fundamental representa-
tional features of visual perception. In Part I of the book, Chapters 2–3, I explain what
I mean by perception. I distinguish it from non-perceptual sensing. I discuss the key mark
of perception—perceptual constancies. In Part II, Chapters 4–9, I develop the form, func-
tion, and content of visual perception. I set out the primary types of representation in
visual perception—such as referring (or picking-out) types and attributive (or character-
izing) types. I explain ways in which these types of representation combine to yield a
representational form—on an analogy to logical forms of propositional representation.
I discuss the basic semantics of visual perception. Finally, I explicate and explore the
iconic, map-like or picture-like format of visual perception.
The second aim, pursued in Part III, Chapters 10–12, is to situate these structures in
the processing of visual perceptual representations. I sketch some of what is known about
how the representational forms discussed in Part II are caused to occur by stimulation.
I discuss processing and time courses of some of the main types of visual perceptual
representation—representation of size, shape, position, motion, speed, color, surface,

body, body-parts, and so on. I consider whether attention is necessary for the formation of
perceptual states. I discuss types of representation that may extend this list of core types of
visual attributives. Possible extensions include attributives for various types of function
and attributives for causation and agency.
The book’s third aim is to understand some relations between visual perception and
closely related psychological capacities—perceptually guided action, perceptual attention,
perceptual memory, perceptual affect, perceptual learning, perceptual anticipation, and
perceptual imagining. I devote special attention to the perceptual level within each of the
generic capacities—conation, attention, memory, affect, learning, anticipating, imagining.
I caution against thinking of the generic capacities as monolithic. I discuss wherein sub-
species are at the same representational level as, and part of the same computational
system as, perceptual representation.
As rough approximation, higher-level, supra-perceptual-level, processes involve types
of representation or transformation that are more sophisticated and more knowledge-like
than those in perceptual-level representation. Higher-level processes use representations
that have forms and functions that perceptual-level representations lack. In most cases
higher-level capacities evolved later than perceptual-level capacities. Roughly, perceptual-
level capacities include perception and other capacities typed by the representational con-
tent of perceptual states. Such capacities do not enter into operations that are more
sophisticated or more knowledge-like than perception. Fuller explication of the notion of
a perceptual-level capacity occurs at the beginning of Part IV. Chapters 13–19 focus on
such capacities.
A fourth aim is not centered in one part of the book. It runs through almost the whole. It
is systematic opposition to an old empiricist way of thinking about perception, and its rela-
tion to thought, inherited from classical empiricists—mainly Locke and Hume. This view
correctly takes perceptions to have an image-like character. However, it conceives the con-
tents of images in terms of what seems salient in perceptual experience. Such a view tends
to ignore, doubt, or underestimate the prevalence of unconscious perception and percep-
tual operations that are not part of conscious experience. More importantly, it neglects the
capacities, functions, and uses that give perception the form and content that it has. (I see
Kant as an early opponent of such neglect.) For example, it takes perception to group
aspects of images by what, to the empiricist, seem to be intuitive types of similarity or
intuitive relations that image-parts bear to one another. Such groupings are taken to be
concrete, in accord with the idea that a perception is an image that is to be understood by
introspection of intuitively salient aspects of experience. All thought is taken to contrast
with perception by being more abstract and perhaps initially derived by a process of
abstraction from perception. So thought cannot be as concrete or imagistically specific as
perception. And perception cannot be abstract, because it is imagistically and intuitively
concrete. All these points are supposed to be derived from reflection on phenomenally salient
features of perceptual images. The empiricist distinction between perception and thought
lies along an intuitive, but not-very-well-articulated, spectrum of concrete-to-abstract. Few
explicitly develop and elaborate the model nowadays. It retains a surprising unreflective
resilience in philosophy and parts of psychology outside mainstream psychophysics.
The view elaborated in this book follows not introspection or intuitive senses of
image-similarity. It focuses on capacities to form and use perception that are discovered in
12 Introduction
perceptual psychology. Some of these capacities produce intuitively familiar features of

conscious perception. But many others produce aspects—especially categorizing aspects—
of perception that depend on specific species-needs or individual-needs and on statistical
patterns in the environment that perceptual systems have capitalized upon. Some of these
do not line up with intuitive senses of image-similarity. In focusing on capacities and use
not introspection, the account also finds perception to engage in levels of abstraction that
can easily seem not to be capable of being represented directly by an image. Yet, I believe
that in being iconic, visual perception is always grounded in image-like representation.
Developing this combination of ideas is a central part of this initiative in the book.
I reject the empiricist way of distinguishing perception and thought (or cognition, or
conception)—which cites differences in levels of abstraction. Both perception and propos
itional thought occur at highly concrete and highly abstract levels. Thought can rely on
perception in its modes of presentation, and be every bit as concrete and detailed as per-
ception can be. Conversely, perceptual representation extends from very concrete and
finely discriminated to very generic groupings. Thoughts share various levels of concre-
tion and abstraction with perceptions by constitutively relying, partly, on perception for
representing. Of course, some thoughts are abstract in ways that no perceptions are.
Thoughts can be about unobservables. Some thoughts are amodal, independent of a sen-
sory modality. Some represent logical functions or numbers that lack instances in space or
time. But since perceptions can be very abstract and thought can be very concrete, the
empiricist way of distinguishing them is misdirected.
The difference between perception and thought resides not in what can be intuitively
introspected in an image. It resides in different forms, functions, uses, and capacities
(or competencies). Although thought shares perception’s basic representational capacities—
specifically reference and attribution—, it constitutively involves further capacities, func-
tions, and forms not present in perception. Use and competence ground constitutive
differences between perception and thought, not image-like format and not (primarily)
levels of concreteness or abstraction.
These themes run throughout the book. They emerge first in Chapter 2, Perception as
Objectification. They become much more prominent in Chapter 4, Taxonomic Hierarchies
in Perception. They run strongly through Chapters 8–10 and 12. They mark all discussions
of categorization. They culminate in the last two sections of Chapter 19.
Replacing the traditional empiricist introspective approach to perception aids the fifth
main aim of the book: developing notions of perceptual system and perceptual-motor sys-
tem. This aim occupies Chapter 19. The aim is guided by the attempt to understand differ-
ences between perceptual- level and supra- perceptual-level capacities, which has as
background Chapters 13–18. I think that the deepest divide in the mind is between
perceptual-level states and propositional-level states. Otherwise put, the divide is between
the level of perception and the level of propositional reasoning or thought. I explore pos
sible non-propositional, supra-perceptual capacities. But the key target is understanding
the large perceptual and perceptual-motor systems. These systems mark, I think, the terri-
tory of lower representational mind.
What immediately follows is an unnuanced forecast of some ideas to be developed
about relations between perception and conception. More detailed discussion of exactly
how I understand relations between higher-level representational resources and percep-
tion, or perceptual-level ones, occupies Part IV, especially Chapter 19.
I believe that one feature of the relation between perceptual and perceptual-level cap
acities, on one hand, and conceptual and propositional capacities, on the other, is that the
former have a kind of self-sufficiency. I believe that no type of perceptual state constitu-
tively, or by computational law, depends for its formation on conceptual influence, or on
influence from propositional states. Any perceptual state can be generated computation-
ally without any concept’s or propositional state’s figuring in the computation. Formation
of perceptual representations does not depend essentially on conceptual resources.
Similarly, relations between perceptual states and other perceptual-level states do not
depend computationally on input from conceptual or propositional resources, and could
in principle occur without such resources. As far as is now known, computational explan
ations of how perceptual memories and perceptual anticipations are formed from percep-
tual states, the perceptual-level initiations of attention and their effect on perception, the
task dependence of perception on conative states, and so on, can be computationally
explained without reference to conceptual or propositional input. Computational explan
ations in the psychophysics of perception do not include reference to conceptual states.
None of this is to say that concepts cannot influence what perceptions are formed.
Instructions in propositional form by scientists influence perceptual search and make per-
ceptual processing take courses that it would not have taken, apart from the instructions.
They thereby influence perceptual processing. I think that there is a sense in which, even
in these cases, they do not enter the process itself. Causal computational sequences that
lead from non-conceptual input into a perceptual system always suffice to explain the
formation of perceptual states.
Similarly, certain types of conceptually initiated attention affect perceptual-level atten-
tion commands, and thereby affect attention during perceptual processing. The attention
affects the processing. So perceptual processing can be causally affected by conceptual
states, even as the processing occurs. However, causal-computational sequences that begin
with the perceptual-level attention commands, or with attention within perception, omit
inclusion of the conceptual antecedents, yet are explanatorily satisfying. In principle, the
same attention commands and attention effects could have been formed without concep-
tual influence. Although not always the whole causal story, explanation by reference to the
concept-free causal computational sequence is, in a sense to be discussed, sufficient to
provide systematic explanation of the formation of a perception. I think that the concept
of perceptual system, and distinctions between perceptual-level and conceptual-level
psychological kinds can be partly understood by reference to these facts.
In the last two decades, scientific understanding of visual processing has substantially
changed. It used to be thought that processing was much more “bottom up”. It is now
known to have substantial recurrent processing–processing that proceeds from more ana-
tomically downstream visual areas back upstream toward initially early areas. Neural pro-
cessing begins with the onset of a proximal stimulus and proceeds to early processing
areas, such as the lateral geniculate nucleus (LGN), the primary visual cortex (V1), and
the middle temporal area (MT). It then proceeds to visual areas, V2–V4, the infero-
temporal cortex (IT), parietal areas, and the pre-frontal cortex. From the beginning, hori-
zontal processing takes place, for example, among areas within LGN or V1. Later, recurrent
processing begins, from V2-V4 and beyond, back to V1 (and similarly for each later
stage—V2 . . .). So processing is much more multi-directional than was thought as recently
as the 1990s. The neurological sequence has psychological analogs.
14 Introduction
The change in understanding how complex visual processing is has encouraged philo-
sophical and scientific discussion of “cognitive penetration” into visual processing. To
what extent and in what ways do representational capacities that are not perception enter
into visual processing? Are some of the capacities, like attention, memory, and so on, “cog-
nitive”? Does background propositional-level intention, belief, or knowledge affect visual
processing? If so, how? This discussion requires detailed reflection on the psychological
processing, and the specific character, of generic capacities like attention, memory, and so
on—insofar as they enter into visual processing. It also requires serious discussion of the
terms ‘cognitive’ and ‘penetration’. The term ‘cognitive’ is used in many, often thoughtless,
ways. The term ‘penetration’ is also used in different ways. In both cases, undisciplined
uses and insufficient reflection obscure how perceptual-level processing is explained in
perceptual psychology.
The philosophical interest of these issues, for me, is that they bear on understanding
joints in nature that border perceptual representation. It is arrogant to think that we
“carve” joints. We do not do anything to them. When we try to carve, we make a bloody
mess. We discover them. At least, sometimes. Discovery is more delicate and less intrusive
than carving. Perceptual psychology has advanced to a stage where it can help guide dis-
covery. I argue that visual perceptual processing forms a system with several capacities
that are not themselves perception—including some types of attention, action-guidance,
anticipation, and memory. I argue that these capacities are perceptual-level in that they
derive all or many of their representational contents from perception and are not in any
way more sophisticated than perception. The basic representational structure and the
sophistication of transitions or operations in these systems are not more advanced or fun-
damentally different from the structure and transitions in perception.
As noted, these perceptual-level capacities do interact with propositional, “cognitive”
capacities. Yet, in a sense to be discussed, propositional capacities are not part of a certain
system with perception, or its most closely associated perceptual-level capacities.
The third and fifth aims bear on the upper border of perception and perceptual-level
processes—their relation to higher level representational capacities, especially propos
itional capacities. In the early chapters of the book, I discuss the lower border of percep-
tion. This border divides perception and perceptual-level capacities from non-perceptual
sensing and from action that is not guided by perception or any other representational
capacity. This discussion mostly reviews accounts already provided in Origins of Objectivity.
It also refines these accounts. Parts II and III of the present book discuss the heartland—
visual perception itself. In Part IV, I try to understand some central aspects of perception’s,
and perceptual-level capacities’, upper border—their border with more advanced kinds of
representation.
Propositional-level intention, belief, and knowledge lie on the other side of this
upper border. I discuss in Chapter 19 whether there are non-propositional types of repre-
sentation that are more “advanced” in some deep principled way than perception—thus
perhaps a kind of intermediate territory between the perceptual level and the level of
propositional thought.
The book concludes with reflections on the importance of the border between perceptual-
level representation and propositional representation. The latter is necessary for science,
understanding, morality, art. Perceptual-level states are an indispensable ground for these
enterprises. This project aims at understanding the capacities that formed this ground.
Fregean Source of Semantical Notions for Perception 15
The Fregean Source of Key Semantical Notions for Perception
I wrote in the Preface that Gottlob Frege fashioned central theoretical semantical concepts
that are relevant to understanding perception.9 These concepts have been refined and sys-
tematized by philosophers and mathematical logicians through the twentieth century. The
concepts have been applied to the semantics of natural language and thought.10 Linguists
appropriated the concepts from philosophy and mathematical logic in the 1970s.
Frege was more concerned with mathematical thought than with language, let alone
perception. Perception is not thought or language. It differs from both in fundamental
ways. Still, four of his concepts are directly applicable to perceptual representation.
I develop them, as they apply to perception, in Part II. I make some general points here.
First, Frege’s understanding of predication, as functional application, took the key step
in gaining a modern understanding of characterization, or attribution. Predication in lan-
guage and conceptual attribution in thought are rooted in more primitive attribution in
perception. Perceiving something as brown is perceptually characterizing it, making an
attribution to it.
As I use the term, predication is attribution that functions to contribute to a propos
itional structure. So predication is conceptual or linguistic attribution. Attribution in per-
ception is not predication. Perceptual states are not propositional. They do attribute
properties, kinds, and relations. Properties, kinds, and relations are attributes. Perceptual
states characterize entities that they function to represent by representing them as having
attributes. I use ‘attribution’ to cover both predication and the purely reference-serving
characterization in perception (and in many uses of pictures). So attribution, but not
predication, occurs in perception.
Second, Frege took the key step in achieving a modern understanding of reference—in
particular the “picking out” of a particular entity. The key step was understanding how
singular reference fits with predication to produce a complex representation. Frege’s
notion of Bedeutung, one form of which is a type of reference, was a highly theoretical
notion, fitted to the semantics of logic and mathematics. However, close examination of
his informal explications of relevant forms of Bedeutung (forms for names) shows that,
in forming his technical notion, he reflected on the common-sense notion of singular
reference—picking out an individual entity. He was aware of connections between his
9 G. Frege, Begriffsschrift (1879), in J. van Heijenoort ed., From Frege to Gödel (Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press, 1970); G. Frege, ‘Funktion und Begriff ’ (1891) and G. Frege, ‘Über Sinn und Bedeutung’ (1892),
both translated in P. Geach and M. Black eds., Translations of the Philosophical Writings of Gottlob Frege (Oxford:
Blackwell, 1966), also in M. Beany ed., The Frege Reader (Oxford: Blackwell, 1997). For extensive discussion of
Frege’s work, see T. Burge, Truth, Thought, Reason: Essays on Frege. Philosophical Essays, Volume 1 (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2005).
10 A. Tarski, ‘The Concept of Truth in Formalized Languages’ (1931, 1933), translated in Logic, Semantics,
Metamathematics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1956); R. Carnap, Meaning and Necessity (1947)
(Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2nd edition, 1967); A. Church, ‘A Formulation of the Logic of Sense and
Denotation’, in P. Henle, H. Kallen, and S. Langer eds., Structure, Method, and Meaning (New York: Liberal Arts
Press, 1951); A. Church, Introduction to Mathematical Logic, Volume I (Princeton: Princeton University Press,
1956); A. Church, ‘A Revised Formulation of the Logic of Sense and Denotation’, Nous 7 (1973), 24–33, Nous 8
(1974), 135–156. All of the relevant Church material occurs in T. Burge and H. Enderton eds., The Collected
Works of Alonzo Church (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2019); W. Quine, Word and Object (Cambridge, MA: MIT
Press, 1960); D. Kaplan, Foundations of Intensional Logic (Dissertation, University of California, at Los Angeles,
1964); D. Davidson, ‘The Logical Form of Action Sentences’ (1967), in Essays on Action and Events (Oxford:
Clarendon Press, 1980).
16 Introduction
notion of singular Bedeutung and perception.11 Perceptual states function to refer to—or
pick out—particular entities in the environment. Their attributive, or characterizing,
function is systematically associated with their referring, or picking-out, function.
Frege’s technical analog of singular reference, singular Bedeutung, was context-free. He
wanted to understand context-free names, like numerals or diagrams of geometrical fig-
ures. Because of his interest in mathematics and logic, he neglected detailed reflection on
context-dependent reference. His conception of how context-free singular reference com-
bines with attribution can, however, be naturally extended to contextual-dependent,
demonstrative-like singular reference. Reference via perceiving something, which depends
on causal relations to what it picks out, depends on context in that it depends on occurrent
stimuli to pick out anything.
Philosophical and mathematical extensions of Frege’s ideas about singular denotation
(Bedeutung) were applied mainly to context-free languages, like mathematics and pure math-
ematical logic, until the 1970s. Philosophers extended Frege’s idea of context-free denotation
to demonstrative uses and other context-dependent devices in language and thought.12
I think that context-dependent demonstrative reference in language and thought are
literal outgrowths from the referential relation between a perceptual state and perceived
entity. Of course, demonstratives in language and much demonstrative-like reference in
thought are applied in individuals’ acts. Perceptual reference is mostly not active. However,
demonstrative-like reference in thought and demonstrative-like reference in perception
are structurally and functionally the same. Although perception is the root of reference,
understanding reference began with understanding language and thought. That under-
standing can be fruitfully applied back to the root source—perception.
Third, Frege’s notion of sense, as a way in which entities are presented to the mind, is a
further semantical idea that he applied to language and thought, but that has clear applica-
tions to perception.13 That notion is the antecedent of modern notions, certainly my
notion, of representational content. In Chapter 2, I explain the notion of representational
content in some detail. For now, think of it as a way of representing that sets, or contrib-
utes to setting, conditions for accuracy or truth. Different thoughts can represent the same
entity in different ways. Different kinds of perceptual states can, and commonly do, repre-
sent a given particular and given attributes of the particular in different ways. Differences
in “ways” constitute different kinds of psychological competence or capacity, different
representational contents. Perceptual reference to a particular, and perceptual attribution
11 Frege, ‘Über Sinn und Bedeutung’; G. Frege, ‘Der Gedanke’ (1921), translated in Beany ed., The Frege
Reader. See Frege’s use and discussion of Kant’s notion of intuition, a form of singular reference, in Begriffsschrift,
section 8; and G. Frege, Grundlage der Arithmetik (1884), J. Austin trans., The Foundations of Arithmetic
(Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1968). See also I. Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, P. Guyer and
A. Wood eds. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), B33–B34. Frege used Kant’s notion to account for
reference in geometry, focusing on Kant’s sub-species of sensible intuition: apriori sensible intuition. Frege was
aware that Kant’s other sub-species—empirical sensible intuition—is equivalent to sense perception. Frege
understood both species to be theoretical notions that function to do the work of the common-sense notion,
singular reference (or singular denotation).
12 See, among others, T. Burge, ‘Demonstrative Constructions, Reference, and Truth’, Journal of Philosophy 71
(1974), 205–223; T. Burge, ‘Belief De Re’, The Journal of Philosophy 74 (1977), 338–362, reprinted in T. Burge,
Foundations of Mind. Philosophical Essays, Volume 2 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2007); D. Kaplan,
‘Demonstratives: An Essay on the Semantics, Logic, Metaphysics, and Epistemology of Demonstratives and
Other Indexicals’ (1977), in J. Almog, J. Perry, and H. Wettstein eds., Themes from Kaplan (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1989); D. Kaplan, ‘On the Logic of Demonstratives’, Journal of Symbolic Logic 8 (1979), 81–98.
13 Frege, ‘Funktion und Begriff ’; Frege, ‘Über Sinn und Bedeutung’; Frege, ‘Der Gedanke’.
Fregean Source of Semantical Notions for Perception 17
of a property or relation, in a specific way that hinges on a specific stimulus and perspec-
tive on the particular, property, or relation, lies at the heart of perception. The psycho
logically specific way is the way of characterizing the entities that are purportedly referred
to in a perceptual state. That way is integral to perceptual constancies.
The modern notion of representational content is an heir of Frege’s notion of sense.
As will become evident in discussion of representational content, my notion drops Frege’s
Platonic ontology of sense, and grounds representational contents in psychologies. In fact,
I take representational contents to be psychological kinds of representational states, events,
or competencies. Representational contents can include psychological events in time
(what I call context-bound referential applications). This idea, too, departs from Frege’s
notion of sense, which was context-free. However, representational contents retain key
functions that Frege assigned to sense. Both sense and representational content set, or
contribute to setting, veridicality conditions, and constitute specific ways in which repre-
sentata are presented to minds.14
A fourth Fregean idea is a corollary of the first three. Since Frege took senses to be or
contribute to thought contents, he took them to have logical form.15 He took thoughts’
logical forms to be structures that ground systematic semantic explanation of truth and
falsity in terms of denotation and predication. Analogs of logical forms also underlie
propositional inference—for him, specifically deductive inference.
Frege’s notion of logical form has an analog and root in perception. The simplest logical
forms involve reference and predication. Reference occurs in perception: perception of
something is a kind of reference to it. Predication is a sub-species of attribution.
Attribution occurs in perception: perceiving something as being a certain way involves
attribution of a property, kind, or relation. Perception attributes properties, kinds, or rela-
tions in perceptually characterizing what is perceived—what perception referentially picks
out. Combination of aspects of perception that function to refer, on one hand, with aspects
that function to attribute, on the other, yields complexes that are either accurate or inaccurate.
These complexes are analogs of thoughts or sentences that have logical form. The com-
plexes are literally representational structures of perceptual states. The combinations of
reference and attribution can be evaluated for perceptual accuracy or inaccuracy. Logical
form is a structure for propositional thoughts and sentences. Logical forms go well beyond
anything present in perception. Perception contains no logical connectives (or, if–then),
no quantifiers (all), and no modal operators or modal attributives (is necessary). I argue
these points in Chapter 6, the section Absence in Perception of Negations,
Conditionals, Disjunctions, Quantifiers. They are intuitively plausible
enough to be stated here. Perception exercises reference and attribution. Reference and
attribution are psychological, representational capacities. Understanding ways in which
these semantical factors combine to yield semantically structured perceptual states, which
are accurate or inaccurate, is part of understanding perception.
14 Burge, ‘Belief De Re’, section 4; and T. Burge, ‘Postscript: “Belief De Re” (1977)’, in Foundations of Mind.
Philosophical Essays, Volume 2.
15 Strictly, for Frege, the notion of denotation (Bedeutung) applied to a relation between symbols and represen-
tata, not a relation between senses and representata. His term for the latter relation was ‘determination’
(Bestimmung). Determination is structurally analogous to denotation. In fact, Frege thought of determination
as more basic than denotation, because he thought that the contents of thoughts (senses) are more basic than
linguistic expression of them.
18 Introduction
Since the science of perception aims at understanding accuracy and illusion in percep-
tion, it should think systematically about the semantics of perception. Although this
semantics is not nearly as rich and varied as the semantics of language and thought, it is,
as we shall see, much richer and more complex than one might imagine from off-the-cuff
reflection.
All four key Fregean semantical notions, then, have roots in perception. Perceiving an
object, or other particular, is a type of “picking out” or contextual reference. Perceiving
something as being a certain way is a type of characterization or attribution. Perceiving
something as having a given property from one perspective, via one kind of perceptual
state—as distinct from perceiving it as having the property from another perspective,
via another kind of perceptual state—just is attributing the property through one kind of
representational content rather than another. All perceptual states can be evaluated for
accuracy. All accurate and all inaccurate perceptual states are combinations (a) of seman-
tical elements (representational capacities) whose representational function is to refer
(to pick out), with (b) semantical elements whose representational function is to attribute
some property, relation, or kind to what is referred to. Such combinations systematically
yield an analog of logical form.
These ideas are, I think, central to obtaining systematic understanding of accuracy and
inaccuracy in perception. The terminology and traditions drawn on here can deepen
understanding of basic aspects of the psychology of perception. They thereby deepen
understanding of perception itself, specifically its representational aspects. That is a reason
why perceptual psychologists interested in understanding general features of their subject
matter would do well to master the technical vocabulary and ways of thinking that mark
parts of this book.
Although the basic notions of reference, attribution, representational content, and
representational form are all applicable to perception, there are differences between
their applications to perception and their applications to language and thought. An aim
of this book is to tailor application of these and other semantical notions to perception.
Since the most basic forms of reference, attribution, representational content, and repre-
sentational form are perceptual, semantical reflection on perception can illumine the roots
of these notions.
A corollary is that one of the deepest contributions that thinking about perception
by using tools from the logical and semantical traditions can make is to clarify what it
is about perception that differentiates it from thought—and vice-versa. Reflecting on
differences between the representational function and representational form of percep-
tion, on one hand, and the representational function and representational form of belief,
on the other, is a route into understanding differences in psychological kinds. Whereas
perception shares reference and attribution with propositional thought, it utilizes these
representational capacities in more limited ways. Belief is propositional. Perception is not
propositional. It is nominal. Understanding the difference will, I think, help in under-
standing the most basic joint in the mind—the joint between perception—and perceptual-
level capacities—, on one hand, and propositional thought, on the other. The structures of
perception that I discuss are not linguistic or logical. They are more basic than and prior
to the structures of language and propositional thought. I think that noun-phrase struc-
tures governed by contextual, referential determiners in language and thought derive from
perception. Perception has the most basic, and evolutionarily earliest, semantics.
2
Perception
…while a sense is what is receptive of sensible [or perceptible] forms without

the matter, just as the wax receives the seal-imprint of the ring without the
iron and the gold, but takes the golden or the brazen imprint, but not qua gold
or bronze, yet in a similar way too the sense is affected by each thing that has
color or flavor or sound, but not qua each of those being called, but qua of
such-a-sort [paralleling qua as golden or as brazen], and according to propor-
tion [or as a measurement]
Aristotle, De Anima, Book 2, Chapter 12, 424a17–24
translation in consultation with Gavin Lawrence
In Origins of Objectivity, chapter 9, I proposed a rough explication of what perception is.

Here I set out that account with minor refinements. The explication is not a definition. It
does not purport to give necessary and sufficient conditions. I think that the notion of
perception is a primitive notion that cannot be defined in other terms in an illuminating
way. The explication functions to provide orientation and background.
Here is the explication:
Perception is sensory, objective representation—paradigmatically by individuals—

that is generated from current stimulation and normally (except in unusual circum-
stances) represents a roughly present subject matter as roughly present.
I say ‘paradigmatically by individuals’. I doubt that all perception is necessarily attributable

to an individual perceiver. Perhaps there are cases in which it is attributable only to an indi-
vidual’s sub-system. I know of no clear cases. Certainly, all cases of perception occur in
individuals and serve perception attributable to individuals. Paradigmatically, individuals
perceive.16 Here, the key concepts in this explication are sensory, representation, and objective.
16 Origins of Objectivity, 369, where I write:

I do not claim that all perceptions are perceptions by an individual. I claim that necessarily and
constitutively, some perceptions in an individual’s perceptual subsystem are perceptions by the
individual. And I claim that all perceptions, including any that are not attributable to the individual,
serve perception by individuals.
I do not push cases of perception that are not imputable to an individual. My reason for allowing for them is not that
I have specific cases in mind. It is that I know of no apriori reason for disallowing them. I do not think that a percep-
tion’s being inaccessible to consciousness, in itself, renders it a perception that is not attributable to the individual.
I lay aside perception by groups. If there is such a thing, parallel points would apply. Paradigmatically, percep-
tual states are attributable to the macro-perceiver, whether the individual or the group. Of course, all perceptual
states attributable to perceivers are also attributable to their sub-systems. For criticism of a debate about uncon-
scious perception that misuses my views on perception “by the individual”, see T. Burge, ‘Entitlement: The Basis
for Empirical Warrant’, in P. Graham and N. Pedersen eds., Epistemic Entitlement (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 2020), 69n45. (cont.)
Perception: First Form of Mind. Tyler Burge, Oxford University Press (2022). © Tyler Burge.
DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198871002.003.0002
20 Perception
Perceptual States as Sensory States
Perception is sensory. It is a certain capacity or competence for discrimination as a result

of current stimulation of psychological states formed from causal impact.17 The discrimin
ation is discrimination of causes. It need not, and commonly does not, discriminate them
as causes. A sensory state discriminates entities that are among its causes. Since a percep-
tual state is a type of sensory state, particular entities that it discriminates are its causes.
Discriminating a type of cause is co-varying with and responding differentially to the
type; the discrimination must have a function for the individual or for the sensory system
of which it is a part. Thus sensory states are information registrational states. Discriminating
a particular—a non-repeatable—is responding to the causal impact of that particular,
where the particular is of a type that is discriminated. I conjectured earlier that the larger
functioning system within which these discriminations occur supports a capacity for action.
Sensory states in a sensory system—including a sensory perceptual system—are not
generated by operations attributable to the individual. The states are produced in the
individual. Although the individual perceives, the individual does not produce the

perceptions.
Sensory states are generated from current stimulation. Here I intend ‘generated’ to
exclude ‘propositionally inferred’. One might make propositional inferences caused by
current stimulation. Neither the premises nor the conclusions of the inferences would be
sensory states.
A sensory state has a basic discriminatory function—to discriminate via causal sensi-
tivity. Perceptual states discriminate via causal sensitivity. Unlike non-perceptual sensory
states, they discriminate representationally. This difference will be discussed shortly.
Perceptual beliefs also have this discriminatory function. Unlike sensory states, including
perceptual states, perceptual beliefs have other functions as well—centrally, contributing
capacities for propositional inference.
Like perception, perceptual memory, perceptual anticipation, and perceptual imagining
are broadly sensory. Their states are not sensings, or hence perceptual states. They are not
generated from current sensory stimulation. Perceptual memory is memory that functions
to retain perceptual contents. The contents of perceptual memory are perceptual con-
tents—prominently, perceptual attributives—that function to retain contents of percep-
tual states already generated. Perceptual memory represents its subject matter as in the
past. Perceptual anticipation is usually mediately related to perception via perceptual
memory. Like perceptual memory, it utilizes perceptual contents, but is not produced by
current sensory stimulation. It does not function to discriminate causes of present sensory
effects. Unlike perceptual memory, it functions to represent future, anticipated states or
events. Perceptual imagining produces states with perceptual content. They are not caused
by current sensory stimulation. Unlike perception, perceptual memory, and perceptual
anticipation, states of perceptual imagining do not function to represent veridically.
For just one of countless examples of scientific discussion of unconscious perception, see V. Axelrod, M. Bar,
and G. Rees, ‘Exploring the Unconscious Using Faces’, Trends in Cognitive Sciences 19 (2015), 35–45. See also note
6 above and note 827 below.
17 Here and throughout, I use the terms ‘capacity’ and ‘competence’ interchangeably. I use them in the sense
that Chomsky articulated—distinguishing competence from performance: N. Chomsky, Aspects of the Theory of
Syntax (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1965).
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In any event Pelias thought he had a good excuse not to keep his
end of the bargain with Jason, a common enough denouement in
itself, one that has been acted out untold times in both history and
fiction.
That is the plot of the legend, as related only to the probable fact
of the fleece’s existence. How the fleece came into being, that is,
how the golden ram descended from the heavens first into Greece
and then betook himself to the far off country of Colchis to be
slaughtered for his radiant coat, all would seem to lie in the realm of
pure myth. So would many other imaginative passages of the legend
as recited variously by bards who have embroidered on the tale.
And, of course, the episodic adventures of the Argonauts have little
or no bearing on the plot.
The story in its origin does appear to have been simply that of a
Greek expedition bent on military commerce in the Black Sea, the
first organized fur trading voyage in recorded history.
From the ancient Greeks, too, comes the English word which
describes the fur skin of an animal. Pelt, a contraction of peltry from
the old Anglo-French pelterie, is derived from the Greek pelta. A
pelta was a half shield made of the skin of an animal. It was carried
by the warriors of Greece and later by the Romans. A foot soldier
armed with a pelta and a short spear or javelin was called a peltast.
Hence also the verb pelt, used to indicate repeated blows by striking
or hurling missiles, as against a pelta.
Although the Greeks had competition on occasion from the
Persians and others, they drove a great trade in the Black Sea for
over a thousand years. At the Bosphorus they founded Byzantium,
one of the world’s best known emporiums. Great quantities of fur
trimmings for the tall bonnets and robes of the Mesopotamians were
traded there. The felting used so extensively by the Scythians, as
well as the valuable pelts which the Israelites used as temple
decorations and as offerings to the deity, all passed through this
famous fur market. And of course from Byzantium came the pelts
which the Greeks themselves used so extravagantly as house
decorations and body raiment, especially battle dress.
After the Romans took over Greece’s trade, they in turn carried on
a brisk commerce in pelts through Byzantium where lambskin,
marten, sable and ermine were exacted in vast quantities as tribute.
The market for pelts expanded tremendously under Rome’s
driving demand for luxuries. From the Slavic steppes and forests and
from the shores of the Black and Caspian Seas came all manner of
pelts. Furs of the finest quality—pure white ermine, black fox and
silvery sable—along with silks and gems, came by trade caravan
from Mongolia and Cathay, across the Asian wastes. Down the Nile
from deep in Africa travelled Ethiopians bearing their lion and
leopard skins. Arabian traders, having learned the law of the
monsoon winds, crossed the Indian Ocean to bring prime pelts as
well as spices and other riches from Hindustan and the Malay
Archipelago to the Mediterranean.
Italy was the main center of the world’s commerce in pelts, with
the Romans reaching out not only for the far eastern trade in
precious fur such as sable and ermine but into northern Europe, to
Flanders and even into Scandinavia for beaver, otter and bear—and
for more ermine. For ermine was becoming the garment of state
wherever royalty held court, pure white ermine being held in highest
esteem. Demand for this regal fur far exceeded the means of supply.
Not until the Germanic hordes cycloned down from the north did the
impetus of this Italian trade in fine pelts abate.
Then all trade, culture, and even most western knowledge of the
world, shrank almost into oblivion. The Dark Ages settled down upon
civilized Europe.
It took the impact of Mohammed’s vicious attack on Christendom

and Islam’s subsequent conquests in the Mediterranean to stir the
western world from its lethargy. The resulting Holy Crusades
awakened curiosity about Moslem luxuries and better ways of living.
Western trade was restimulated; merchants again began bidding up
fine furs.
There was a new, stepped-up demand for ermine pelts by
dignitaries of the Church and other nobility. Fashion came to require
quantities of mantles and robes of the royal white, as whole systems
of protocol on the use of ermine were established. To indicate rank
on state occasions the lustrous white robes of the nobility were often
decorated with the ermine’s black tail tips or the paws of the black
lamb. Decrees were issued permitting peers to wear trimmings of the
white fur on their scarlet gowns. And, king and judge having
originated as one, it was but natural that the judiciary came to be
permitted the use of white ermine as the badge of high legal dignity,
of purity.
The ermine, a slim little animal of the weasel family which
produces a semi-durable pelt of soft, glossy fur, is thought to have
gotten its name from Armenia, a fur center in ancient times. Medieval
writers often referred to the ermine as the Armenian rat. However it
was the breed inhabiting the northern latitudes of Asia that was most
sought after because of its snow-white fur.
In winter the live ermine’s coat ranges from creamy white in
northern Europe to pure white in parts of Siberia; the tip of its tail is
always black. During the summer the white fur usually darkens in
varying degrees to a yellowish brown except for the underparts of
the animal’s body. Medieval nobility’s choicest ermine pelts were
those which were all pure white, except of course for the black tail
tips. Because these came from Siberia they could be obtained only
through eastern trade channels.
To make terminal contacts with these eastern channels eager
Italian merchants risked their fortunes and their very lives.
Eventually, like most frontier traders, they won through by individual
enterprise. Commerce with the Moslems was a hazardous business
however, even after two rising emporiums of Italy, Genoa and
Venice, built armed navies to support it. But bartering and warring,
sometimes between themselves, the Genoese and the Venetians
extended their trade and their navies gained complete control of the
Mediterranean, to make it once more the main western highway of
Eurasian commerce.
These encounters, with the Arabs and the ancient cultures they
had preserved, eventually reawakened a long dead interest in the far
east too. In the thirteenth century the Venetian traveler, Marco Polo,
penetrated beyond the Moslem barrier to the East, visited the Great
Kublai Khan in Cathay and returned to write a wondrous tale about
what he had seen in the Orient.
There was gold plate, and there were sapphires, rubies, emeralds
and pearls to be had in the far eastern countries, just as the ancients
had said. For proof, road-weary Marco Polo brought home with him
samples of these jewels sewed in the linings of his tattered clothing.
Also, in plenteous variety in the East he had found spices for
seasoning and deodorizing, commodities for which all Europe
yearned desperately during the middle ages.
And, Polo reported glowingly, there were silks, and priceless furs!
The clothes of the wealthy Tartars in the far east were for the most
part of gold and silk stuffs, lined with costly furs, such as sable and
ermine and black fox, in the richest manner. Robes of vair were
much to be seen also. These consisted of hundreds of tiny Siberian
squirrel pelts, the grey backs and white bellies of which were joined
together checker fashion. In winter the Tartars wore two gowns of
pelts, one with the soft, comforting fur inward next to their skin, and
the other with the fur outward to defend them against wind and snow.
Sable was esteemed the queen of furs in Mongolia. The dark,
silver-tipped fur of the Siberian sable was thick and silky, the leather
thin. According to Polo prime sable pelts, scarcely sufficient to line a
mantle, were often worth two thousand besants of gold.
However, ermine appears to have been preferred in India where
Ibn-Batootah, a famous Moorish traveller of the fourteenth century,
reported an ermine pelisse was worth a thousand dinars, or rupees,
whereas a pelisse of sable was worth only four hundred at the time.
In any case these two aristocrats of the weasel family, sable and
ermine, depending on the quality of their pelts, vied for favor among
the lords of the east, as did to some extent the rare black fox of the
icy regions in the far north.
Polo said that when the Grand Khan of the Tartar Empire quit his
palace for the chase he took ten thousand retainers with him,
including his sons, the nobles of his court, his ladies, falconers and
life guards. For this entourage great tents were provided, appointed
luxuriously and stretched with silken ropes. The Khan’s sleeping
tents and audience pavilions were covered on the outside with the
skins of lions, streaked white, black and red, and so well joined
together that no wind or rain could penetrate. On the inside they
were lined with the costly pelts of ermines and sables. The Venetian
marvelled at the skill and taste with which the inlaying of the pelts
was accomplished.
When this intrepid adventurer travelled into northern Mongolia he
found the country alive with traders and merchants. “The Merchants
to buy their Furres, for fourteene dayes journey thorow the Desart,
have set up for each day a house of Wood, where they abide and
barter; and in Winter they use Sleds without wheeles, and plaine in
the bottome, rising with a semi-circle at the top or end, drawne easily
on the Ice by beasts like great Dogs six yoked by couples, the
Sledman only with his Merchant and Furres sitting therein.”
These fur traders showed the Venetian huge pelts, “twentie palms
long,” taken from the white bear in the far north. That was the Region
of Darkness, so-called because for “the most part of the Winter
moneths the Sun appeares not, and the Ayre is thick and darkish.”
There, Polo was told, the natives were pale, had no prince and lived
like beasts. But in the polar summer when there was continuous
daylight they caught multitudes of large black foxes, ermines,
martens and sables.
Ibn-Batootah, who later travelled this country, told how the traders
bartered with the mysterious inhabitants of the far north.
After encamping near the borders of the Region of Darkness the
traders would deposit their bartering goods in a likely spot and return
to their quarters. The next day on returning to the same place they
might find beside their goods the skins of sable, ermine and other
valuable furs. If a trader was satisfied with what he found, he took it;
if not, he left it there. In the latter case the inhabitants of the Region
of Darkness might then on another visit increase the amount of their
deposit, or as often happened, they might pick up their furs and
leave the goods of the foreign merchant untouched.
So far as the traders were concerned these people of the far north
with whom they bartered might as well have been ghosts. The
traders never saw them.
The pelts of all the polar animals were lusher and finer and
consequently much more valuable than those found in the districts
inhabited by the Tartars. Because of this the Tartars were often
induced to undertake plundering expeditions in the Region of
Darkness for furs, as well as for domesticated animals kept by the
natives there. Invariably, it appears, the inhabitants simply sought
safety in flight from the raiders, putting up no fight and never
showing themselves.
Marco Polo said that lest the Tartar raiders lose their way during
the long winter night, “they ride on Mares which have Colts sucking
which they leave with a Guard at the entrance of that Countrey,
where the Light beginneth to faile, and when they have taken their
prey give reynes to the Mares, which hasten to their Colts.”
Continuing, he said that from this northern region came “many of the
finest Furres of which I have heard some are brought into Russia.”
About the mysteries of Russia, Polo learned little. But he was
certain that it was of vast extent, bordering in the north on the
Region of Darkness and reaching to the “Ocean Sea.” Although
there were many fine and valuable furs there, such as sable, it was
not a land of trade he reported.
How wrong he was about that!
German merchants were long since firmly established with fur

factories in Russia, and Norse sea-rovers had first tapped the trade
of that land hundreds of years earlier.
During the dark centuries when western Europe was sinking in
despair fierce Vikings in their horned helmets were traversing the
Slavic lands, plundering as they went and dropping Arabian,
Byzantine and Anglo-Saxon coins which later marked their routes.
By way of the Volga and the Dvina the Norsemen brought back far-
eastern spices and pearls obtained on the shores of the Caspian
Sea in exchange for amber and tin. But chiefly they transported
skins. They bartered Baltic furs for lustrous Oriental pelts and
frequently used both slaves and coinage as media of exchange. By
way of the Dneiper and other rivers they even traded on the Black
Sea, and at Byzantium, portaging their dragon boats from stream to
stream with marvelous facility.
In the ninth century the Norsemen established a truly great trading
city of their own at Novgorod. It was located on a table-land where
four main waterways of Russia converged to form trade routes to the
Caspian, Black and Baltic Seas. Here the Vikings, inter-marrying
with the natives, settled down and prospered in the riches of their
commerce with the farthest corners of the world. Furs and other
oriental luxuries, cloths, honey, spices, metals, and the wax
consumed in such quantities by the Christians, all passed through
their hands.
Rurik, the Norse leader of these Russified Scandinavians, or
Varangians, built a castle and a fort at Novgorod in 862 to protect the
independence of the surrounding province, and thus was laid the
foundation of Russia.
An ancient chronicler tells also of the wicked, fabulous trading city
of Julin at the mouth of the Oder River on the Baltic Sea. The
Saxons called it Winetha (Venice). It was inhabited mainly by pagan
Slavs. But there were Norsemen there too, and in fact anyone could
live and trade in this emporium of the north so long as he didn’t
declare himself a Christian. Julin disappeared at an unknown date
beneath the water due to the encroachments of the sea. Trusting in
the wealth of its trade and despising God, it went the way of Sodom
and Gomorrha according to Christian bards.
In the eleventh century whatever did remain of Julin belonged to
the Christian Germans. German merchants, crossing the Elbe from
the west, colonized the Oder valley and other Slavic lands on the
shores of the Baltic. At Thorn in Poland they exchanged cloth and
other goods for ermine, sable, fox and calabar (grey squirrel). They
even penetrated Russia deeply for trade. At Novgorod they had a fur
trading settlement active enough to prompt expressive protestations
from the pious Canon Adam of Bremen.
“Pelts are plentiful as dung” in Russia, he wrote, but they are “for
our damnation, as I believe, for per fas et nefas we strive as hard to
come into the possession of a marten skin as if it were everlasting
salvation.” According to him it was from this evil source in Russia
“that the deadly sin of luxurious pride” had overspread the west.
Indeed, by comparison with the self-mortifying Christian standards
of the time, luxury in dress was very pronounced among the rising
German merchants and their wives. It was even more so among the
men than among the women. The most conservative patricians and
councillors wore cloth hoods ostentatiously trimmed with beaver and
other fine fur, and long fur cloaks of exquisite quality. So proud were
they of their finery that the Councillors of Bremen once forged a
document pretending to prove that Godfrey of Bouillon during the
First Crusade had vested them with the right to wear fur and gold
chains.
The Church frowned upon the use of fur by the laity or any except
the highest ecclesiastics. In fact, since early in medieval times the
wearing of fur by the common man had been regulated by severe
laws. But even among the Christians a man’s wealth and standing
permitted its use in some degree. As always in the past, fur was a
symbol of power and prestige. And, these German merchants were
becoming a real power as they gained a monopoly of the Baltic
trade.
They formed a strong federation of the towns they had founded at
the river mouths along the south shore of their sea. Their luggers
plied the North Sea and the Thames in Britain. At Wisby on the
important Isle of Gothland they early established an emporium. From
the first Christian centuries barbarian Gothland had been the most
active center of Baltic trade. Now it was under the control of this
Hanseatic League of German cities which dominated the Baltic Sea
and was soon permitting no carrying bottoms there other than its
own.
In the thirteenth century the enterprising Hansa towns had
monopolistic trade factories established not only in England and
Scandinavia, and at Novgorod in Russia, but at Pleskow and
perhaps even at Moscow. Their fur traders penetrated to the White
Sea. Within another century they had extended their operations
beyond the Urals into Siberia as far as Tobolsk and the River Taz. By
then their bold assurance had gained them factories or the protection
of trade-guild concessions in Flanders, France and Portugal. They
were granted concessions even in Venice, their great Italian rival,
whose own trading galleys were in turn annually invading England
and Flanders.
But cruelty and haughtiness were born of the Hansa’s strength
and pride, and lasting enmities resulted.
German arrogance met its first tests at Novgorod. There the
Hansa traders incurred the everlasting resentment of the Russians,
who in an effort to cope with mounting indignities resorted to
cheating the Germans at every opportunity. Buying furs was risky
business except in well-lighted places where it was easy to test
quality. Resentments often flared into conflict, and the factory in
Novgorod became a kind of hostile encampment.
In spite of reduced returns, however, the Hansa merchants clung
tenaciously to their trading privileges in Russia for some time. Not
until Ivan the Terrible crushed the independent provinces and
consolidated the Russian Empire were the Germans finally driven
out—in the sixteenth century.
Then the Scandinavian powers revolted against the Hansa
monopolies and the cruelties of the Germans within their borders.
During the wars that followed the power of the Hanseatic League
declined rapidly. With feudalism breaking up on the continent in
western Europe, men had been freed for competitive commerce. It
was the time of the Renaissance and trading impulses were
quickening everywhere. New maritime states, sensing opportunity,
had already risen to challenge the monopoly in the Baltic. Danes,
Dutch and even the commercially-retarded English had been
competing for the prize.
In England as early as 1404 a group of merchant adventurers
organized a company to carry trade to Baltic cities. But as it turned
out the agricultural English were not ready, for, although their sailors
and traders fought savagely during piratical encounters in the Baltic,
at home they were still hindered by their feudal system, a system
against which the Germans had early rebelled as being incompatible
with commercial enterprise. The absence of a large middle class, of
sufficient urban community life in England, forestalled any real
commerce.
The backward Englishmen didn’t have anything but lead, tin and
cheap skins to export, and they had to buy back some of that,
reworked, at a premium. On the continent at the time there was a
saying: “We buy fox skins from the English for a groat, and re-sell
them the foxes’ tails for a guilder.”
The Danes, situated strategically to cut the Baltic trade lane, fared
much better than the English. But in the end it was the Dutch who
succeeded the Hansa in carrying trade. The main lane of traffic from
Bruges in Flanders, over the North Sea, around the Danish
peninsular, and through the Baltic to Russia belonged eventually to
Holland. So did the remnants of the Hansa’s former fur trade at
Novgorod.
Dutch requirements for skins mounted rapidly with the coming of

the Renaissance. Even a brisk market for worn, discarded and
inferior pelts was maintained in Holland. The pinch for pelts came
about as a result of a tremendously stepped-up demand for fur in
manufacture—in the felting of hats!
In Holland, as in other countries crawling out of the Dark Ages,
beaver skin had been permitted as headgear to almost all who could
afford it. Beginning with the time that the wearing of hats became
fashionable in Europe this costly fur was used extensively for that
purpose by people of means. It would appear, in fact, that in England
from the time of Chaucer the word beaver was practically
synonymous with hat.
Now, felt hats, which had brims and other advantages over those
fashioned from pelts, were being pressed out in quantity by the
trade-conscious Dutch for world commerce. Dutch beavers, they
were called, and they came in a variety of shapes and quality.
Due to the peculiar matting quality of fur filaments, felting had
been a profitable manufacturing art for centuries. The Greeks had
practiced it. The Mongolians of Kublai Khan’s time used felt matting
for tents; rich Tartars sometimes furred their robes with pelluce or silk
shag. The Normans who wore felted articles of dress brought the art
to England.
Fur is made up of short, barbed hairs that are downy and inclined
to curl. Matting or felting, which would expose a live animal to cold
and storm, is prevented in most animal coats by relatively stiffer
guard hairs lying alongside the fur filaments and keeping them
separated. But, the ancients had learned that by first plucking the
coarser guard hairs from a pelt, the downy fur that remained could
easily be removed from the hide, processed, pressed into felt mats
and blocked into any shape.
Although many other furs were used in the manufacture of hats,
the best felts were of beaver. For one thing they were practically
indestructible. Discarded beaver hats could be worked over and
made like new. Then, a new method of combing out the fur filaments
of the beaver pelt was developed, to better utilize the skins. This left
the pelts with the guard hairs to be worked into stoles for clerics and
officials, and the combed-out fur fibers of course for the manufacture
of hats.
Dutch beavers for both men and women found their way to
England, to Baltic countries, to France, Portugal and into the
Mediterranean. These, as well as other products of the north, were
eagerly sought in trade-hungry Venice, until recently the mistress of
a thriving Mediterranean carrying trade.
Venice had reached this position of trade eminence in the
Mediterranean after a bitter, hundred years’ war to eliminate Genoa
as her rival. The most savage of the battles between the fine navies
of these two medieval states had been fought over the Black Sea fur
trade. But then the Turks, taking Constantinople in 1453, erected a
toll-gate at this ancient Eurasian cross-roads, and the bite they took
as middlemen all but stagnated world trade through the
Mediterranean.
To make matters worse, the Portuguese, who had been exploring
the south Atlantic, rounded the Cape of Good Hope at the southern
tip of Africa in 1488. An alternative route to India and Malaya had
been discovered!
But, although Italy’s hold on the fur trade and other oriental traffic
was broken, her own need for fine pelts and luxuries had not
diminished. Italian coffers were overflowing with the riches of past
commercial glory, while a golden age of elegance was blossoming in
Europe for those who could afford it.
One of the keynotes of the Renaissance, as illustrated in the art
and literature of the time, was an increasing appreciation of beautiful
furs. Throughout the western world wealthy women took to adorning
themselves with expensive pelts. If, as was said at the time, the
ermined luxury of a Queen of France was cast into the shade by the
furred splendor of a matron of Bruges, much more could have been
claimed for the oft-wed daughter of Pope Alexander in Italy.
When this young lady, Lucretia Borgia, was married to her fourth
husband, Alfonso de Ferrara, furs competed with jewels in dazzling
array. Although the marriage was celebrated by proxy, the twenty-
two-year-old bride wore a diadem of diamonds, thirty strings of
splendid pearls, a gown of ruby velvet edged with sable, and a cloth-
of-gold train lined with ermine. According to Sanuto, the Venetian
diarist, it took ten mules to carry the boxes containing the furs of her
trousseau, there being no less than forty-five robes trimmed and
lined with sable, ermine, rabbit, wolf and marten.
IN EUROPE THERE WAS A TREMENDOUS DEMAND FOR

BEAVER FUR IN THE MANUFACTURE OF FELT HATS.
With the need for such elegance, it is small wonder that the
cooped-up western world, alive and vigorous by then, hailed the
Portuguese discovery of a new spice route to the East Indies and
began casting about in every direction for passages to the even
greater riches of Cathay.
II
Vikings and Skraelings in Vinland
BY the closing years of the fifteenth century, not only were the
mercantile classes of western Europe thoroughly awake to the
possibilities of world trade, but a good number of other people were
beginning to think for themselves about the world around them.
If one could cross by land to China, which itself faced on the sea,
there must be ways to reach that fabulous country by skirting the
land masses of the world. In that manner the Portuguese had
discovered an all-water route to India and Malaya. Or, was there the
possibility of an even more direct passage to both China and the
Indies by sailing straight west across the ocean?
The ancients had said the world was a globe. Hundreds of years
before Christ, Greek philosophers were sure the world was round.
One of them, Eratosthenes, calculated the earth’s circumference to
be 40,000 kilometers (amazingly enough today, within 9 kilometers
of the meridional figure!) And Strabo, a geographer who lived in the
first century, recorded that if it were not for lack of sailing equipment
to negotiate the immensity of the Atlantic Ocean one could travel
from Spain to India by keeping to the same parallel.
Of course this did not agree with the teachings of the scriptures
which spoke of the “four corners of the earth.” All during the dark
ages ignorant clerics of the Church preferred to think of the world as
a flat platter and pretended to forbid a contrary conception because it
did not conform with the Bible. The low level of western culture had
blindly accepted the thesis that the inner edges of this platter-like
world were inhabited by monstrous creatures, and beyond the edges
—a bottomless gulf!
On such grounds most people of the western world still resisted
any notion that the world was round. But there was a question in the
minds of many.
The Phoenicians, the Greeks and the Arabs had navigated the
waters of the Atlantic—so had the Irish and the Vikings who long
since discovered and colonized “islands” across the western sea—all
without falling off the edges of the world. The Arabs, even now, were
making the globes they had made for centuries for their sailors and
traders. Many learned men in the west, geographers and scientists,
were confident that the world was round; only recently at scholarly
Nuremberg a fine globe had been completed showing Asia right
across from Spain.
If there were “islands” they could be skirted, large though some of
them might be according to the legends and the sagas of ancient
mariners. Christopher Columbus, the Genoese sailor, must have
heard about these western islands at Iceland when he visited that
old Irish-Norse settlement in 1477. Certainly he must have heard
much about Greenland.
Greenland, a continent-like island in the west, had been colonized
by several thousand Norsemen in the tenth century under the
leadership of a red-headed, murderous Icelander named Eric
Thorvaldson. From there two of his sons, Leif and Thorvald, an
illegitimate daughter named Freydis, and a former daughter-in-law,
Gudrid, with her new husband Thorfinn Karlsefni, set out on even
more daring trading and colonizing expeditions to other great islands
—“the western lands of the world.”
First, Leif, whose conversion to Christianity against his pagan
father’s will may have had something to do with his wish to get away,
made landings in America in 1003. To Leif it was “White Man’s Land”
or “Great Ireland,” for he knew that Christian Irish had preceded him
there. There is in fact some evidence today that Celtic missionaries
in staunch, hide-covered coracles, and others too, had been
crossing the sea and making settlements in America for five hundred
years before Leif Ericson sailed west from Greenland. But Leif’s visit
is recorded with much more credibleness.
In the tradition of his Viking ancestors Leif and his crew of thirty-
five men visited Newfoundland and Nova Scotia, and appear to have
made their camp for the winter on Cape Cod where they built a good
house. There they leisurely cut timber and gathered vines for cargo
back to treeless Greenland. Some of the crew shaped a new mast
from a tall tree for their dragon ship. Others collected peltries. All
marvelled at the mildness of the new country’s climate.
Leif called the land surrounding his camp site “Vinland,” probably
because of the abundance of the greenbrier vines which grew there.
These made strong, flexible rope material when stripped of their
thorns and stranded together. On the other hand the name “Vinland”
may have been derived from the grape-vines and wineberries
discovered there by Leif’s family retainer, a “southerner” called
Tyrker. If this slave came originally from the Mediterranean area as
his name might indicate he may well have been the first to recognize
grapes and demonstrate their usefulness.
One thing is certain however; the addition of wine to Leif’s already
valuable cargo, when he embarked for Greenland the following year,
made his expedition most exciting—one to be emulated!
Ambitious Thorvald Ericson, for one, did not feel that the western
lands had been sufficiently explored by his brother. He set out in
1004 and spent two years in Vinland investigating the coasts and
rivers. In his Viking ship, the same one that Leif had used, the sagas
seem to say that he ranged north of Cape Cod along the Maine
coast and south through Long Island Sound.
The natives Thorvald met on his voyage were surprised whenever
possible and liquidated without quarter. Skraelings, he called them,
meaning shriekers or war-whoopers. No doubt the rough treatment
afforded the wild Skraelings was an approved medieval means of
taking possession of their fur skins with the least bother. In any case
it ended in Thorvald’s own death. One day hundreds of Skraelings in
their canoes suddenly attacked the Viking ship. Although the
Norsemen drove them off with much slaughter Thorvald was mortally
wounded in his armpit by an arrow. He was buried ashore that same
day. His men returned to Greenland the following year, in 1007.
It has been claimed that the encounter in which Thorvald was slain
took place at Mount Desert Island on the Maine coast. Somes Sound
does seem to fit the site of the battle as related in the saga.
Certainly, great numbers of natives could have been in the habit of
congregating there with their canoes during fur trapping season, for
Mount Desert Island was a favorite haunt of beavers and other fur
bearers in past centuries.
In 1010 wealthy Thorfinn Karlsefni and his wife Gudrid, who had
urged the project upon him, took something over 160 colonists from
Greenland to establish a permanent Norse trading settlement in the
western land. They went in dragon ships and round-bottomed cargo
vessels loaded with “all kinds of livestock,” including a bull. The men
had headgear adorned with horns, antlers or ravens’ wings. They
wore short breeches and were clad with leather armor. Pelts were
wrapped about their legs. The women wore girdled tunics. Heavy fur
coats and lambskin hoods lined with cat fur protected the voyagers,
men and women alike, when the seas were icy and the winds biting.
Most of them survived to reach Vinland, where Gudrid bore her
husband a son, Snorri, the first autumn they spent at Leif’s old
house.
Snorri, who was to become the ancestor of a number of
distinguished men including three Icelandic bishops, appears to have
been the first European of record born in America.
At Vinland the Skraelings came with “packs wherein were grey
furs, sables, and all kind of peltries.” The bull having greatly
frightened them, it was some time before they loosened their
bundles and offered their pelts in trade. They wanted to exchange
them for Norse weapons. Karlsefni rejected this proposition. But the
saga relates that he gave them some milk, whereupon the red men
wanted nothing else and barter forthwith got under way.
In such manner was the first fur trade of record joined in America,
although one cannot resist wondering if the milk was spirituous.
Experienced Thorfinn Karlsefni, who had gained his fortune in other
parts of the world as a seafaring trader, may well have been the first
white man to practice this ancient trick of the trade on the naïve
native Americans.
Very soon after this first successful barter the aborigines came
back in much greater number than before with bundles of pelts and
stood outside the palisades which the Norsemen had been
foresighted enough to erect around their house in the meantime.
Karlsefni, sensing the making of another good bargain, instructed the
women to offer more milk. The Skraelings took it thirstily, pitching
their bundles of furs over the palisades. But then one of them tried to
steal a Norse weapon and a battle ensued during which many of the
Skraelings were slain.
Evidently Karlsefni thought it was too dangerous at Vinland. It
would appear that he moved his colony the second year to a site
probably on the Hudson River. In the meantime according to some
students he had explored the country from its northernmost parts,
where he mentioned seeing “many artic foxes,” to the Chesapeake
Bay, no doubt entering many rivers, the St. Lawrence, the Hudson,
the Delaware, possibly the James, and identifying correctly the
extent of the Appalachian mountain range. There is reason to
believe that he built shelters and maintained a separate camp
somewhere in the Chesapeake tidewater.
It may have been there, as the Norsemen told it, that swarthy, ill-
looking men with broad cheeks and ugly hair on their heads, came in
canoes and stared at them in amazement. Later, these same men
came back with “fur-skins and all-grey skins” wanting swords and
spears in trade. Evidently there was no milk in this camp, wherever it
was, but fortunately the natives finally agreed to take red cloth in
exchange for their pelts.
“In return for unblemished skins, the savages would accept a span
length of red cloth and bind it around their heads. Thus the trading
continued. When Karlsefni’s people began to run short of cloth, they
ripped it into pieces so narrow that none was broader than a finger,
but the savages even then gave as much for it as before, or more.”
And, so the trading continued, according to a version of the saga
in Hauk’s Book, until it ended in a battle as usual. Once more many
of the natives were killed. So were two of the Norsemen.
After three years Karlsefni abandoned the idea of a permanent
settlement. The Skraelings were too hostile. The Norse, with their
superior boats and shields, could cope with them on water. But on
land the red men were too numerous and had the advantage of
surprise. They couldn’t be held at bay—the Norsemen didn’t have
the terrifying firearms available to later colonists coming to America.
All of which may reasonably account for the dearth of Viking
artifacts on the eastern seaboard of America. The Norsemen kept
close to the shore-line, whether on the seacoast or on a tidewater
river, building their huts near the safety of their shielded dragon
ships. Today, the sites of those early camps may well be under water
as the level of the sea has risen at least five or six feet in the
intervening time due to glacial meltings.
A translation of the Flatey Book saga relates that when Karlsefni’s
people returned to Greenland they “carried away with them much
booty in vines and grapes and peltries,” and that after this “there was
much new talk in Greenland about voyaging to Vinland, for this
enterprise was now considered both profitable and honorable.”
Not to be outdone in the matter of profit Freydis, the illegitimate
daughter of Eric the Red and with a heart as murderous as that of
her father, led an expedition to Vinland a few years later. Honor
appears to have had no part in her plans.
Freydis had a husband, but she made the plans. Before leaving
Greenland, she arranged with Leif for the loan of his house in
Vinland and induced two unsuspecting brothers of another family
who had a particularly fine ship to become her partners in the
venture. These two men were pledged to take only thirty warriors
and their women. Freydis had agreed to take a like number, but
somehow she contrived to conceal five extra men in her smaller
ship.
After they arrived in Vinland, Freydis managed to keep the two
groups apart by fomenting antagonism. The brothers were forced to
build a separate house for their men and women. This house,
together with too much wine and heavy sleep, proved to be the
means of their undoing—all according to the Viking lady’s plan it
appears. And what a red-handed proceeding it was!
Freydis, with her husband’s grudging cooperation, succeeded in
murdering the two brothers in their house one night after shackling
their company. She had all of their men put to death and personally
wielded the axe that killed their five women when no one else would
do it. Then, taking her deceased partners’ fine trading ship, she
returned to Greenland with a rich cargo of furs, wine and lumber.
One shudders to think how she went about extracting the furs from
the Skraelings!
For two or three hundred years the Greenland republic maintained
an active trade between America and Norway, and with other
countries, in walrus hides, seal and fur skins, dried fish and whale
fat. Norwegian port records, as well as the sagas, testify to trade with
“Markland,” the name which had been given to Nova Scotia by Leif
Ericson. There are old church records which show that quantities of
the pelts of animals not indigenous to Greenland were exported from
that country to Norway, pelts that could have come only from the
mainland of America. The bills of lading listing church taxes which
had been collected in natura include elk, black bear, beaver, otter,
ermine, sable, lynx, glutton and wolf.
But, in 1261, the Greenland parliament renounced its
independence and swore allegiance to Norway. Independent traffic
with other countries was promptly curtailed. Subsequently the
dominance of the Hanseatic League through its monopolistic factory
at Bergen, which took no interest in Greenland, brought about a
withering of all commerce between Greenland and the continent.
Deterioration of the Greenlanders themselves came about through
malnutrition and intermarriage with the Eskimos who descended on
their settlements. Some who voyaged to America probably remained
there and were eventually absorbed by the natives. There is
evidence that as late as 1362 an expedition of Swedes and
Norwegians, exploring westward in the Hudson Bay, left their ship at
the mouth of the Nelson River and in their afterboats penetrated
through Lake Winnipeg up the Red River into Minnesota. An

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Perception: First Form of Mind Tyler

Perception: First Form of Mind Tyler Burge

Perception: First Form of Mind Burge

Leibniz’s naturalized philosophy of mind First Edition.

Pieces of Mind: The Proper Domain of Psychological

A Multisensory Philosophy of Perception Casey

Evaluative Perception Anna Bergqvist

Recognition and Perception of Images Iftikhar B.

Undercover Wolf Paige Tyler

4. Some Basics about Perceptual Systems 109

5. Perceptual Reference Requires Perceptual Attribution 131

10. First-­Formed Perception: Its Richness and Autonomy 367

13. Perceptual-­Level Representation and Categorization 483

Visual Sensory Memory 572

Again, the relevant perceptual-­level species are perception-­guided conation, perceptual-­

The book is resolutely a work in philosophy of science—specifically philosophy of

Animal Eye Grid

3.1. Geisler Contours 85

15.3c. Diagram of model for system of processing of visual executive-­control system’s

CSTM conceptual short-­term memory

Biological Function, Action, Sensing,

Biological Function, Sensing, and Perception 5

Biological Function, Sensing, and Perception 7

More specifically, I focus on perceptual representation. Perceptual representation is

Biological Function, Sensing, and Perception 9

In no way do I deny the import of non-­visual perceptual modalities. Different mo­dal­

Principal Aims of the Book

Five principal aims inform this book.

Principal Aims of the Book 11

representation—representation of size, shape, position, motion, speed, color, surface,

perceptual psychology. Some of these capacities produce intuitively familiar features of

Principal Aims of the Book 13

Fregean Source of Semantical Notions for Perception 15

The Fregean Source of Key Semantical Notions for Perception

Fregean Source of Semantical Notions for Perception 17

…while a sense is what is receptive of sensible [or perceptible] forms without

In Origins of Objectivity, chapter 9, I proposed a rough explication of what perception is.

Perception is sensory, objective representation—paradigmatically by individuals—

I say ‘paradigmatically by individuals’. I doubt that all perception is necessarily attributable

16 Origins of Objectivity, 369, where I write:

Perceptual States as Sensory States

Perception is sensory. It is a certain capacity or competence for discrimination as a result

It took the impact of Mohammed’s vicious attack on Christendom

German merchants were long since firmly established with fur

Dutch requirements for skins mounted rapidly with the coming of

IN EUROPE THERE WAS A TREMENDOUS DEMAND FOR

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10. First-Formed Perception: Its Richness and Autonomy 367

13. Perceptual-Level Representation and Categorization 483

Again, the relevant perceptual-level species are perception-guided conation, perceptual-

15.3c. Diagram of model for system of processing of visual executive-control system’s

CSTM conceptual short-term memory

In no way do I deny the import of non-visual perceptual modalities. Different modal