Several classical philosophical theories of perception presuppose that the meaning of a perceptual object is solely its explicit cognitive content. By contrast, Edmund Husserl and William James offer unique frameworks for constructing a far more satisfactory account of perceptual meaning. Husserl provides a theory of perceptual horizons. His theory of horizonal consciousness grew in large measure from the intellectual promptings of William James. In his description of the stream of thought, Jame…
Read moreSeveral classical philosophical theories of perception presuppose that the meaning of a perceptual object is solely its explicit cognitive content. By contrast, Edmund Husserl and William James offer unique frameworks for constructing a far more satisfactory account of perceptual meaning. Husserl provides a theory of perceptual horizons. His theory of horizonal consciousness grew in large measure from the intellectual promptings of William James. In his description of the stream of thought, James introduces the notion of fringes of objects of consciousness. Both James's fringes and Husserl's horizons of perceptual objects provide good reasons for regarding the explicitly cognitive component of perception as only the tip of meaning-iceberg. Still, neither Husserl's horizon-theory nor James's account of fringes is independently capable of providing an adequate philosophy of perception. The point of my dissertation is to construct a third theory of perception by interweaving the complementary theoretical strengths of both fringes and horizons. In this way I attempt to give a far more careful and detailed account of the contextual and associative processes at work in the formation of perceptual meanings