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Givner (1992) proposed an account of perceptual experience that purportedly complements Gibson's theory of perceiving. This new account treats perceptual experience as a distinct existent from the process ofperceiving, or the physical basis of perceptual experience; whereas, according to Gibson's unitary view, perceptual experience is an essential ingredient, a product and part, of the living observer's psychosomatic activity of perceiving. Givner contended that our perceptual experience of entities as being distinct from us, and our experience of them, involves our distinguishing between properties of experience that undergo change with our movements and ones that remain constant as we move. Thus, according to Givner, perceptual experience of objective things is based on perceiving or, better, something like introspecting our experience. This (a) raises the question of how apprehending our experience is accomplished and in such a way that we perceive the environment (i.e., the problem of indirect realism in perceiving), and (b) has a still more extreme consequence: We cannot at all perceive the objects, surfaces, events, and so forth, that constitute the environment and determine the structure of the stimulus energy flux in ways specific to them. On insufficient grounds pertaining to how perceptual systems differentiate invariants of stimula- tion from variants produced by the perceiver's movements, Givner attempted, in effect, to improve Gibson's theory of perceiving out of existence. |
