2. Travis’s Move

Let me call to mind the central formulations of the historical/conceptual distinction. Travis holds that representation is a three-place relation between a representing subject, a particular case, and the generality of a thought, which is a way for things to be: things being such as they are thought to be. For someone to represent the pig as snuffling is really this: it is for them to bring the particular case of things being as they are under the generality of the thought that the pig is snuffling. “Things being as they are (history being as it is, or has been so far) is, or is not, things being such that a pig is snuffling” (Travis Reference Travis2013, 4). They represent truly when the particular case does fall under the thought. “If the thought is true, then it is things being as they are which is (a case of) things being as represented” (4). In Travis’s terminology, the particular case then instances the thought; the thought reaches to this particular case. This is probably not meant as a theory of truth in any substantial sense of “theory.” We can take it as a gloss on truth: for it to be true that p is for things being as they are to be a case of things being such that p.

This formula should, I think, elicit surprise. It seems more natural to say that in thinking of the pig that it is snuffling, one brings the pig (not the way things are) under a generality; namely, the concept of snuffling (not the concept of things being such that the pig is snuffling). But as we saw, Travis thinks there is still something general about the pig. Although the pig does belong to the historical, it takes (at least) the concept of an animal to pick it out as the distinct entity that it is. The world in itself—what thought answers to and what is given in perception—is not already partitioned in that way (Travis Reference Travis2013, 19). Travis concludes that what is truly particular is things “in a catholic sense,” as in the expression “Things have been slow around here lately” (93). What is brought under a generality is not an element of the world, but the world as such. And the generality it is brought under is not a way for an element of the world to be, but the generality of a thought, which Travis thinks of as a way for the world to be. To represent the pig as snuffling is really to represent the world as being such that the pig is snuffling. Here the world (things being as they are) is treated as itself a particular (the only particular), and the generality of a thought as a concept of a way for the world to be.

Why does Travis make this move from ordinary objects of reference to a special all-encompassing particular? Reading Travis’s recent work, it seems the particularity of the historical—for anything that one can think, there are endlessly many ways for things to be accordingly—is already supposed to justify his move. He oftenFootnote ⁴ starts by quoting Frege’s Kernsatz 4: “A thought always contains something by means of which it reaches beyond the particular case to present this to consciousness as falling under something general” (Frege Reference Frege, Hermes, Kambartel and Kaulbach1979, 174; as quoted in Travis Reference Travis2013, 6).Footnote ⁵ Then he illustrates the point in ways that I have quoted and paraphrased and concludes that it would be a mistake to look for “a way for a thing to be” in the historical. But this seems too quick. The argument only establishes that a way for a thing to be, such as being blue, exhibits a certain generality: things can be many different ways while still being such that the sky is blue. Indeed, by describing the sky as blue, I capture only one aspect of how it is, and of how “things” are, leaving others indefinite. This contrasts with “the way things are” or “things being as they are.” Such an expression lacks generality because it is at once completely determinate and completely indeterminate: it completely determines everything in every respect by being entirely silent on specifics. We might equivalently speak of “all the ways all things are,” “the world,” “the facts,” “what there is.” But seen in this way, we do not yet have a justification for the thesis that only what is absolutely particular can be found in our surroundings. That the sky is blue is only one aspect of my surroundings; it is general in that sense, but is it not, for all that, an aspect of my surroundings manifest before my eyes?

What we need to understand is why Travis resorts to describing what is given, as such, in the least specific terms. This requires a look at his deeper motivations. He is impressed by the particularity of the changeable world and the way this seems to contrast with the discreteness and finitude of words. In the background, less explicit in recent work, is the idea that our concepts, as we use them on an occasion, reflect some merely human point of view, one determined by our interests and sensibilities. I find it helpful to compare his view to one of the philosophers who most influenced him. J. L. Austin warned against modelling the world on the word, and wrote, “[S]tatements fit the facts always more or less loosely, in different ways on different occasions for different intents and purposes” (Austin Reference Austin1950, 124). He describes the world as exhibiting relations of similarity and dissimilarity but not already structured in the ways that we structure it when we say how things are.Footnote ⁶ The relations of similarity are natural; those between words and world are conventional. The first allows conventions to get a grip on things, so to say. This suggests a picture on which the sensible world is continuous in a way that contrasts with language, which carves the world up in discrete blocks, in things and properties. That picture seems apt for certain forms of conceptual activity. For example, it seems a matter of convention how the world’s seas and oceans are demarcated. That this—pointing at the North Sea—is the North Sea is partly due to where this finds itself, but partly to how we happen to have drawn the boundaries—how we carve things up. The way of carving up is something we language users are responsible for, not the world. According to Austin, in philosophy we have to get clear on who is responsible for what, “above all in discussing truth, where it is precisely our business to prise the words off the world and keep them off it” (Reference Austin1950, 118).

Travis does not appeal to relations of similarity and dissimilarity, but in other respects he inherits the core of Austin’s view. His way with Austin’s idea involves a transition from words to concepts. Here concepts are individuated according to what they are of: ways for things to be. So the concept of being blue and the concept of being purple are different insofar as they are of different ways for things to be: being blue, being purple. The English sentence “The sky is blue” is for speaking of the sky as being blue. Using these words for what they are for, we may, on an occasion, use them to say that the sky is blue. But how we are then to be understood depends on the circumstances of speaking, and on our sense for when, given those circumstances, things would count as being such that the sky is blue. What thus admits of understanding are not just words. Circumstances may fix that the words “the sky” speak of the sky as it is above this city on this February afternoon. But even having fixed what a word speaks of—a thing or a way for things to be—there are still indefinitely many ways of understanding what it is to be that way. On some, a sky dispersed with clouds may count as blue, on another not. On some, a sky that looks blue from ground level but not from a space station may count, on another not . . . and so on indefinitely (cf. Travis Reference Travis2008, 2–3). No predetermined theory or algorithm can determine for us when things would count as being blue as this is to be understood on an occasion (Travis Reference Travis2013, 316). A human thinker, with their parochial sense of what is normal and how to deviate from the norm, is the ultimate judge of this, and the shape of what we say thus reflects human sensibilities and interests.

Travis wants to accommodate this irreducibly human perspective of discursive activity while hanging on to a traditional realism. Although concepts, as they are understood on an occasion, reflect our point of view, this is a matter of our selecting shapes of thought that are anyway there to be thought. This selection having been achieved, the rest of the story is extensional: it is intrinsic to any thought to reach to the historical as it does. If it did not so reach it would not be this thought. There can be an issue about how a historical act of representing reaches to the world; that is, how the speaker is to be understood, which thought they are to be taken to have expressed. But having fixed that, it depends all on how things are, on things being as they are, whether the thought is true. “An assertion might reach in this way or that, depending on whether it expressed this thought or that, but where we take it to have expressed some given thought, we cannot then take that thought to reach in this way or that” (Travis Reference Travis2011, 9). In this way, the objectivity of thought is secured in the face of what Travis calls “the parochial,” human sensibilities and interests: even though the parochial plays a role in selecting thoughts, the truth of what we say (now hearing “what we say” as what does not anymore stand in need of determination) turns all on an intrinsic relation between two realms that are free of human determination.

Although I’ve just done my best to give a motivation internal to Travis’s philosophy, I do not believe it makes his conclusions mandatory. The observation that our concepts and the things and ways they speak of reflect our point of view does not have to trigger an Austinian attempt to prise them off the world. And it attests to the richness of Travis’s thought that even this point can be made in terms familiar to him. Conceptual capacities, rather than limiting us to see only a reflection of ourselves, open our eyes to the ways things anyway are. That thought lies behind his antipsychologistic conception of thought. Parochial sensibilities, we have seen, do not shape the conceptual but rather select shapes that are anyway there to be thought. They are anyway there to be thought because they are ways for things to be, and these are independent of us. “Had evolution omitted sloths,” Travis writes, “there would be no such thing as judging that sloths like bananas” (Reference Travis2011, 264). But if what there is to think is thus independent of us, then why the need to prise it off the world? The concept of being a sloth, as understood, say, from the point of view of a biologist, may reflect our interests in biological classification, but that reflection does not preclude us from apprehending, by means of this concept, a certain slothy unity that is simply to be found in the world, one that can serve as the subject of predication for such predicates as “likes bananas.” It is just an interest in seeing such unities as they really are. That a concept, as understood on an occasion, reflects our interests should not be confused with its reflecting our tastes or whims.

Moreover, this second Fregean line of thought seems to defeat the first Austinian line entirely. Travis takes it to be intrinsic to any bit of the conceptual that it reaches to the historical in the way that it does. A thought would not be the thought it is unless it reaches to the particular cases that it does. That is the difference between speech acts and thought: a thought is the understanding of a speech act and as such is fully determined, not standing in need of further interpretation. But if it is intrinsic to the thought to reach as it does, then how can there be this distance between the thought and what it reaches to? Would it not be equally intrinsic to things being as they are to be a case of things being so? Surely it wouldn’t be this particular case if it did not fall under the generalities that it does: if things being as they are were not things being such that the sky is blue—that is, if the sky were not blue—then things would not be as they are. But if that is so, and the fact that the sky is blue is intrinsic to the way things now are, it seems to be this aspect of things being as they are that renders true the thought that the sky is blue, and not “things being as they are” generically. In this way, the formula “Things being as they are is a case of things being such that the sky is blue” collapses into the proposition that it contains and through which it is understood: that the sky is blue. This suggests that to think truly is to think of something that it is some way that it really is, or to think it is not some way it really is not—as opposed to: to think of the world as a whole that it stands in some relation to one’s thought as a whole. At best, the latter now appears as merely a more convoluted way of saying the same.

3. Out of mind’s reach

Let me recap. Travis moves from the commonplace idea that in thinking a thought, one represents something (the sky) as being some way (blue), to the more contentious idea that one represents “the particular case of things being as they are” as being some way (such that the sky is blue). His central motivation for this move is the difference in generality between a way for things to be and the way things are, as well as the idea that in thought we carve up “the way things are” in ways that are relative to our sensibilities and interests. I have argued that we can resist this move. That a way for things to be exhibits generality and reflects our interests and sensibilities does not preclude it from being there in the sensible world. The arguments considered so far do not show why we should let go of the commonplace conception of representation as bringing some ordinary object of reference (e.g., the sky) under some ordinary generality (e.g., being blue).

That is to say that we need not follow Travis in making this move. But the accusation of “the Myth of the Given” amounts to a stronger conclusion: Travis’s move renders the world alien to discursive reason. That conclusion may seem too strong; although Travis rejects what I am calling a commonplace conception of representation and truth, he can give his own formulation which is just as articulate. He could say: It is true to think that the sky is blue because the particular case of things being as they are is things being such that the sky is blue. This formula is supposed to express a relation between the particular case and a thought; it invokes this relation in order to explain why it is true to think that the sky is blue. It is, however, not hard to see that the relation cannot do this kind of work, even by Travis’s own light. After all, “Things being as they are is things being such that the sky is blue” is itself the expression of a thought, which is an item within “the conceptual,” not “the historical.” (This thought is even, as we saw at the end of the last section, the same item within the conceptual as that expressed by “The sky is blue.”) But according to Travis, the truth of a thought is determined by things being as they are—the historical. If the formula serves any purpose, then, it is not to express a relation but to point to the worldly relatum. What really does the work (of truthmaking, of justification) is not the relation but the particular case. After all, whether it is true or false for me to think that the sky is blue is determined by what is before my eyes when I look up at the sky; and what is before my eyes, according to Travis, is the particular case of things being as they are.

But once we see that not the relation but the particular case does the work, we can understand the accusation of the Myth of the Given. For given this, an explanation of why it is true to believe that the sky is blue would have to take the form: it is true to think that the sky is blue because that . . . and here one points at the particular case. Being reduced to such an act of pointing is what McDowell took to be symptomatic of the Myth of the Given: “The idea is that when we have exhausted all the available moves from one conceptually organized item to another, there is still one more step we can take: namely, pointing to something that is simply received in experience” (McDowell Reference McDowell1994, 6). But, one might think, what is wrong with pointing? Pointing to something may be a valid move within a discursive practice. That is true, but insofar as pointing is a move within a discursive practice, it cannot serve the current purpose. Say that I justify my belief that the pig is snuffling (to shift examples) by pointing to the pig. Even if I only say “that,” it is implicit that I mean “that pig” or “that animal.” Moreover, if I am asked “What about that pig makes it so that it can be truly described as snuffling?” I can answer by saying something about what I pointed to, such as its making funny noises and contracting its nose. But these remarks are, so to say, moves within the conceptual sphere and there is nothing analogous to them for pointing to the particular case. On further reflection, then, we cannot even so much as point to the particular case, for we do not want to distinguish it from anything else or say anything about it. The particular case now appears to be out of mind’s reach. The conclusion should be, I think, not that there is something of which we cannot speak, but rather that we have nothing in mind when we use this phrase as Travis does.

The problem could be put in this way: if what is present in perception bears on what we are to think and do, there must be a way of making it available for discursive reason. But to do that is to bring things under concepts, not to present an unarticulated particular case. Such a particular case would be ineffable and, moreover, since it is not distinguished from anything else it could not even be pointed out. Travis might respond that of course we can only say what we can say, and not the worldly things that make it true. This response can be heard in a passage by Austin, a favourite of Travis: “When a statement is true, there is, of course, a state of affairs which makes it true and which is toto mundo distinct from the true statement about it: but equally of course, we can only describe that state of affairs in words (either the same or, with luck, others)” (Austin Reference Austin1950, 117). It seems one may accuse a philosopher of trying the impossible when something thoughtlike is supposed to be ineffable—an ineffable insight, an ineffable idea. But what could be the problem with unsayable things in the world? To say that the sky is blue is not to say the sky, but to bring the sky under a generality.

It is indeed true that one cannot say—express—an ordinary object of reference, and it would be silly to complain about that. But Austin, like Travis, does not speak of ordinary objects of reference; he speaks of states of affairs, and he construes them, like Travis, as standing in a relation of truthmaking to a thought: “A statement is said to be true when the historic state of affairs to which it is correlated by the demonstrative conventions (the one to which it ‘refers’) is of a type with which the sentence used in making it is correlated by the descriptive conventions” (Austin Reference Austin1950, 116). What creates the present problem is this conception of a state of affairs or particular case as a thing that stands in a relation to a proposition. In one way, such talk accommodates an important truth: the world is incompletely described by listing all things in it. The world is not merely the totality of ordinary particulars (the sky, a tree, its leaves), but how all things are in all respects. Travis acknowledges this when he speaks of “things being as they are” or “the way things are”; he might as well, I think, have used the phrase “how things are.” But by construing “how things are” as a particular, which stands in relation to a proposition, another important truth goes missing. Thus construed, we can only speak about “how things are,” refer or point to it. And on further reflection, as we found, we cannot even do that. The problem is that “how things are” is forced into a logical role, that of an object of reference, which does not suit “it”; for in speaking about ordinary things, we do not speak about how things are—we say how they are. That truism goes missing on a view such as that of Austin and Travis. (They can give another interpretation of the phrase “saying how things are.” That now means: relating a particular case to a proposition. But the particular case is meant to be how things are, and the particular case cannot be expressed; in that sense the truism goes missing.)

I want to suggest that instead of Travis’s “things being as they are,” it would be better to think of the (sensible) world as how all (observable) things are in all (observable) respects. It is then a truism that there is no distance between discursive thought and the world; though we cannot say everything, we can say anything: we can say how something is in some respect. In calling this a truism I am echoing McDowell (Reference McDowell1994) and Hornsby (Reference Hornsby1997). They defended a conception of the world as how things are or, as they put it, as “everything that is the case . . . the totality of facts, not of things” (Wittgenstein Reference Wittgenstein and Ogden1922, § 1-1.1; McDowell Reference McDowell1994, 27). Given that conception of the world, McDowell can put the truism as follows, “But to say that there is no gap between thought, as such, and the world is just to dress up a truism in high-flown language. All the point comes to is that one can think, for instance, that spring has begun, and that very same thing, that spring has begun, can be the case” (27). However, it has seemed to Travis and others that a substantial metaphysical view is smuggled in here and, moreover, one that is false. Although it is true that the very same thing that one can think can also be the case, that sort of thing cannot be present in our surroundings; it lacks “the particularity, the concreteness, of the non-conceptual” (Travis Reference Travis2013, 127; see also Dodd Reference Dodd1995). Looking around, the only things I see are ordinary objects of reference, not that things are thus and so. The latter sort of thing, after all, does not have a career in space and time. Travis quotes Frege’s remark: “That the sun has risen is no object which sends out rays that reach my eyes, no visible thing such as the sun itself is” (Frege 1918, 61, as quoted in Travis Reference Travis2013, 123).

It seems to me that this objection arises because both sides of the debate reify what is said and how things are, referring to items of the form “that things are thus and so” and treating them as things of some sort. To some extent, this is unavoidable; in thinking about the logical role of thoughts and facts, we are bound to refer to them, as I am now doing. But it would be better, and I believe also better in line with McDowell’s and Hornsby’s intentions, to shift our focus. Although we can refer to a thought or fact, when we do so we do not reveal their logical role. A thought is primarily something to think, and only secondarily something to think about.Footnote ⁷ When we think a thought, we think that things are so; and when things are, in fact, so, the very thing we think of is the very way we think it is. Even when the thought is false there is still a certain structure shared with the fact it answers to since then the very thing one thinks of is precisely not the way one thinks it is (cf. Wittgenstein Reference Wittgenstein, Hacker and Schulte1956, § 429). Here a combination of a subject and predicate (a thought, what is said), and of a thing and a way for thing to be (a fact, how things are) are correlated in one move: thinking that the thing is that way. At one point, Hornsby puts the truism in just this way:

In this explication of the idea, there is no need to refer to propositionally structured items and relate them from such a perspective. That is to say, we can avoid reifying what is said and how things are, and this also means that we can look for how things are in a different way. That the sky is blue is not among the things that I see, but that is just to say that it is a mistake to look for it as if for an object. It is clear where and when one must look in order to see that the sky is now blue: at the sky, thereby seeing how it is coloured. In that sense the sky’s being blue, or the fact that it is blue, is an aspect of the spatiotemporal world, of our surroundings.Footnote ⁸ Indeed, Frege is right: that the sun has risen is no object which sends out rays that reach my eyes—the sun does insofar as it has risen. As long as we do not understand a fact as a certain kind of thing, we can acknowledge Frege’s point and think of the world as how all things are in all respects—that is, the totality of facts, not of things.

4. The silence of the senses

I have argued that Travis construes the sensible world in a way that is alien to discursive reason. To Travis it will seem that such a sense of alienation must be based not on his restricted conception of the sensible world, but on my restricted conception of reason’s reach. He diagnoses opposition to scheme-content dualism or the Myth of the Given as motivated by an inability (a “dogma,” [Travis Reference Travis, Gersel, Jensen, Thaning and Overgaard2018]) to see that reason can reach to the particular case as such—that perception simply presents us with the particular case and, only in response, do we recognise it as falling under generalities. But the conviction that reason cannot reach to the particular case need not be based on a restricted conception of reason. Such resistance can be motivated by a well-warranted discomfort with the attempt to construe “how things are” as an object of reference rather than as what is stated when one says how things are. That is not to say that reason’s reach is restricted in any way; reason indeed reaches to everything or even, if you will, “things being as they are”—but here “everything” or “things being as they are” must mean all things that one can think of, being all the ways that one can truly think them to be.

This is not yet to say anything about perceptual experience, only about the structure of the sensible world. But these issues are closely related. Travis has been influential in arguing for antirepresentationalism about perception. Again the view goes back to Austin: “[O]ur senses are dumb—though Descartes and others speak of ‘the testimony of the senses,’ our senses do not tell us anything, true or false” (Austin Reference Austin1962, 11; as quoted in Travis Reference Travis2013, 30). The point of the metaphor, at least for Travis, is that perception is not a matter of representation; to see things is not to represent things as being one way or another. It seems worthwhile to consider to what extent that argument is based on the metaphysics that I have rejected. If what is before our eyes is devoid of generality, as Travis thinks, it seems awareness of generalities, such as awareness that the sky is blue, cannot be perceptual awareness—and so it does seem to Travis. But if what is before our eyes includes ways for things to be, as I have argued, having the scene in view may be, in part, awareness of such generalities. I will now briefly develop this suggestion.

At the heart of Travis’s philosophy of perception lies a realist conviction:

Perception confronts us with what is there. To be confronted with something is not already to take a stance on how it is. We cannot be given that something is the case; we must judge what is the case on the basis of what is given. So Travis thinks that one cannot see, in the sense of visual awareness, that the sky is blue, that one coin is larger than another, that it is raining outside, or that a pig is snuffling around the roots below. He will, of course, acknowledge that there is the expression “seeing that such and such is the case” and that it is used correctly in the familiar way, but he claims that this expression should not be understood in the sense of visual awareness. It is not a mere receptive achievement. To “see that something is the case” is really to tell that something is the case on the basis of seeing things being as they are (Travis Reference Travis2017):

Although such an epistemology can motivate the kind of scheme-content dualism that Travis defends, he usually argues the other way around, from his ontological commitment to his epistemology. What is given in perception is a particular case. A particular case is not the sort of thing one can know in the sense of knowing that something is the case (French, savoir). It is rather the sort of thing one can know in the sense of acquaintance (French, connaître). So perceptual awareness, insofar as it is receptive, cannot already be knowing that things are a certain way. It is mere acquaintance with what can be proof that things are a certain way, a conclusive ground for believing so. To be acquainted with this ground is unlike what people normally understand by being acquainted with a person. When you’re acquainted with someone, you thereby know some things about the person—it is not enough merely to have encountered one another without knowing it. But on the relevant philosophical understanding, acquaintance is in itself not yet knowledge that things are a certain way. When one is acquainted with a particular case, one will undoubtedly, simultaneously and psychologically inseparably, also know some things about the case, but to know this is to bring what one is acquainted with under a generality on the basis of the acquaintance and so, logically, speaking as a response to it. Since what is given is not the sort of thing one can know to be the case, reception cannot be knowledge that something is the case; knowledge that something is the case adds something to reception. Perception is logically, even if not always temporally or psychologically, prior to such knowledge and other conceptual acts.

On this view, even seeing, in a certain common sense, has to be construed as a response to what is given. Speaking of a sense of “seeing” that for him has to be a special sense, Travis writes, “Searching the kitchen counter for my favourite knife, it might be ten minutes before I finally see what was all along in plain view. Here seeing is registering” (Reference Travis2013, 11). Travis thinks of “seeing” in the sense of registering as a response to the scene before our eyes. He will acknowledge that in order to respond to the scene before our eyes, we must be aware of it in some sense. But he construes such awareness—perception properly so-called—as a bare encounter with the scene, which affords but does not already involve any conscious act of the subject. Sight properly so-called is merely to have the scene in view, merely to have one’s eyes open, not yet using them to notice anything. “Sight affords awareness of what is before the eyes. … If it thus puts opportunities on offer, enjoying awareness would be taking these up” (11).

However, to have a scene in view without noticing anything is not yet to possess—have in mind—that on which the truth of a thought depends. When I see a snuffling pig without noticing that there is some animal there making funny noises, I do not yet have any awareness of that which makes it true to think that the pig is snuffling. Perhaps I am “aware” of the scene in a subpersonal sense, but that is not the relevant sense when it comes to me giving an explanation or justification of why it is true for me to think that the pig is snuffling. So it seems that what Travis calls “perception” comes, so to say, before perception in the relevant sense, which he calls “enjoying awareness.” Only by conflating these two moments can he hang on to the thought that what is given is “things being as they are” generically, rather than something more specific. Only in the first moment (“perception”) do we have nothing specific, but then again, nothing is yet given to the mind. Only in the second moment (“enjoying awareness”) is something given to the mind, but then it is always already more specific: such as a knife on the kitchen counter, recognised as such.

It is true that there are certain kinds of judgement that are made in response to perception, or in any case can be abstracted from perceptual experience. We can, for example, easily abstract away our knowledge of the names for various things and people that we find around us. But it is harder to hold apart the perceptual presence of a scene from our grasp of its spatiotemporal and causal structure. It does happen, sometimes, that we enjoy sensory awareness without thereby seeing how things are arranged. Say that I see a cloud in the sky against such a clear uninterrupted expanse that I am unable to place it. Then I see that it is, in fact, a cloud of smoke coming out of a factory chimney and, now, tracing the chimney down to the rooftops and the surrounding houses, I see where it is: things fall into place. But although it happens that we find ourselves in the position before things fall into place, this cannot generally be what perception is. If perception as such did not involve any grasp of how things are shaped, coloured, positioned, and moving about, then how could it afford recognition, as Travis claims that it does? For me to recognise that this is a weather cloud requires my understanding of where it is and where it came from, and that understanding is not itself a matter of recognition on the basis of perceptual awareness. Similarly, in order to recognise that this is a pig I must at least see how it is shaped, coloured, and perhaps how it is moving. To have a scene in view, then, is already a matter of seeing how things hang together in various ways. We cannot entirely disentangle our cognitive grasp of how things are from the presence of things in perception.Footnote ⁹

Travis postulates a nonconceptual moment of perception because otherwise, he thinks, perception would be prejudiced. So my proposal may seem to come down to saying that our senses bring things under concepts “for us” and then we are deprived of the opportunity to judge for ourselves. On this issue, I want to make two final remarks. First, it seems to me inapt to describe perception as something that our senses do for us, as if the senses are external to the subject. It may be true that the senses do not tell us anything, but the senses also do not see. We see, with our senses—not with the help of our senses, as I may be said to see with the help of my glasses. My glasses do some correcting for me, bringing together light waves in the appropriate locations of my retinas. My retinas do not do my seeing for me. They don’t tell me anything, because no part of me tells me anything. So the fact that telling how things are is something I must do for myself, as Travis rightly emphasises, does not mean that it is external to perception. If perception is perceiving how things are (shaped, coloured, positioned and moving about . . .) then this is, so to say, to have our feet in the world, to be in our surroundings—not waiting for them, not merely to have outsourced a task to the senses.

Second, that sense perception is passive is supposed to ensure its objectivity: the world, what is independent of the mind, is given in perception. But as has often been remarked, even when we think of perception as active, it can still be understood as putting us in touch with what is mind-independent. In the contrasting metaphor, perception is a matter of taking in our surroundings. Just as we cannot decide what to believe (other than deciding where to gather information), we cannot decide what to see (other than deciding where to look), but both belief and perception are acts of the subject. On my preferred conception, perception is a receptive act, a matter of taking in how things are around us. And we can make sense of this as a receptive exercise of conceptual capacities once we have available, in accordance with the previous section, that the sensible world is itself structured in terms of the things we can speak of and the ways we can say they are. Just as hearing a melody or chord as such is the exercise of a musical capacity, so seeing that a cloud of smoke is coming out of a chimney is the exercise of a capacity for grasping spatial relations. Nothing is doing this for us; we are doing it. And what we are doing is not adding anything to what is given, bringing it under a generality, partitioning the whole, carving it up, or imposing some form on it; we are just receiving what is anyway there: how things are—and that is, how things can be truly said to be.