AGAINST A RECENT ACCOUNT OF PERCEPTUAL EXPERIENCE PROPOSED TO COMPLEMENT GIBSON THEORY OF PERCEIVING

Givner (1992) proposed an account Of Perceptual experience that purpor tedly complements Gibson's theory of perceiving. This new account trea ts perceptual experience as a distinct existent from the process of pe rceiving, or the physical basis of perceptual experience; whereas, acc ording to Gibson's unitary view, perceptual experience is an essential ingredient, a product and part, of the living observer's ''psychosoma tic'' activity of perceiving. Givner contended that our perceptual exp erience of entities as being distinct from us, and our experience of t hem, 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 t hings is based on perceiving or, better, something like introspecting our experience. This (a) raises the question of how apprehending our e xperience is accomplished and in such a way that we perceive the envir onment (i.e., the problem of indirect realism in perceiving), and (b) has a still more extreme consequence: We cannot at all perceive the ob jects, surfaces, events, and so forth, that constitute the environment and determine the structure of the stimulus energy flux in ways speci fic to them. On insufficient grounds pertaining to how perceptual syst ems differentiate invariants of stimulation from variants produced by the perceiver's movements, Givner attempted, in effect, to ''improve'' Gibson's theory of perceiving out of existence.