There's Sensation and then there's Sensation

[This is perhaps germane to yesterday's exchange with Gary re: Associationism vs Computationalism.]

It seems to me that "sensation" is used ambiguously in the EP literature.  Sometimes (when discussing vision) "sensation" means something like retinal stimulation (as Andrew claims in his post here).  Let's call this sensation-rs.  Sometimes, however, "sensation" means something like an observation report of the sort discussed by the logical positivists earlier in the century.*  Let's call this sensation-or.  Very roughly, at least part of the difference is that the first does not seem to involve conscious mental experience, where the latter does.

So, this means that when one denies that perception is based on sensation, there are (at least) two distinct things one can mean:

1) Visual perception processes sensation-rs.
2) Visual perception processes sensation-or.

Gibson at least seems (to me) to want to reject both claims, but it seems to me that 1) is pretty plausible (it's what cognitivism typically asserts), where 2) is not.

Relatedly, I think that Merleau-Ponty spent some time arguing against 2), but I don't know about 1).

Carman on Merleau-Ponty on Perception

Hurley, Ross & Ladyman, and others, have objected to Adams and myself drawing attention to a distinction between causation and constitution that we take to be implicit, and sometimes explicit, in the EC literature.  Moreover, I have sometimes been taken to task for misreading Noë on the role of action in perception.

Reading through a new text on Merleau-Ponty, by Taylor Carman, however, makes me feel a bit better that we have not simply imagined this distinction and Noë's view on the matter.

Merleau-Ponty maintains that perception is not an event or state in the mind or brain, but an organism’s entire bodily relation to its environment.  Perception is, as psychologist J. J. Gibson puts it in The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception, an “ecological” phenomenon.  The body consequently cannot be understood as a mere causal link in a chain of events that terminates in perceptual experience.  Instead, it is constitutive of perception, which is the most basic—and in the end, inescapable—horizon of what Merleau-Ponty, following Heidegger, calls our “being in the world” (être au monde).  Human existence thus differs profoundly from the existence of objects, for it consists not in our merely occurring among things, but in our actively and intelligently inhabiting an environment.  (Carman, 2008, p. 1)

Obvious caveats apply.  Perhaps Carman has gotten M-P wrong.  Perhaps Noë doesn't buy this part of M-P's view.  My point is that plausibly conscientious readers can come to the view that a causation-constitution distinction is in play in at least some segments of the literature.  (I think that Mike Wheeler, for one, has moved away from this way of thinking about EC.)  Moreover, plausibly conscientious readers can come to the conclusion that Noë, under M-P's influence, thinks (at least at times) that perception requires bodily action.