Philosophy: Access and Report

Access and Accessibility

We can distinguish between information that is registered in such a way that it could affect our reasoning or our reports, and information that is registered in such a way that it could not affect anything we think or say. There are some sounds and some shifts in lighting that we do not report on or reason about in fact, but that we could report on or reason about if we really needed to (the distant buzz of a mosquito, for example); and it may be that it is our capacity for such reporting and reasoning rather than their actuality that is crucial for perception.

It is not clear, however, when a given prompt activates an already existing capacity and when it creates something new. When does the question “Do you hear a mosquito?” reveal what is already perceived, and when does it focus one's attention so as to create a new perception? If people need extensive training in order to report and act on their physiological responses to very high sounds, [Page 811]has this training activated an already existent capacity or has it created a new capacity and thus a new perception? It may be possible to provide some guidance about what sorts of prompts reveal rather than create the capacities that constitute perception. Open-ended questioning is more likely to reveal already existent perceptions, whereas more pointed questioning is more likely to create new perceptions, for example. Responses that flow easily are more likely to tell us what was already perceived than responses over which we struggle. But there is a lingering suspicion that already existing perceptions depend on already existing access of some sort; that it is this pre-reflective, pre-linguistic sort of access that is crucial for perception.

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