Contentless Perceiving: The Very Idea Daniel D. Hutto “Actually you should point to your own visual impression when you say “I see this’, then you would really be pointing to what you see.” A result of the crossing of different language games. – Wittgenstein, Last Writings on the Philosophy of Psychology, Volume 1 §148 1. Conceiving of Contentless Perceiving (with a little help from Wittgenstein) Many contemporary analytic philosophers find it self-evidently true that perceiving is necessarily, constitutively – always and everywhere – contentful. For them it is axiomatic that if one is to perceive then the world must be represented as being a certain way. Accordingly, the idea that perceiving is necessarily contentful is secured if it is also assumed that “To say that any state has content is just to say that it represents the world as being a certain way. It thus has … a ‘correctness condition’ – the condition under which it represents correctly” (Crane 1992, p. 139). 1 I doubt the truth of this axiom. Not only is it conceivable that perceiving is contentless, it is difficult to get a clear handle on the imagined alternative – that it is inherently contentful – let alone to justify it. Given today’s attitudes adopting this line may seem absurd or, at least, beyond the pale. It flies in the face of certain very powerful intuitions. Nevertheless, this section aims to show that I may not be entirely alone in thinking (assuming I can) such an outrageous thing. There is, I believe, backing for this idea in Wittgenstein’s remarks on seeing and seeing-as (which I take as a guide to his thinking about perceiving generally, at least with respect to the question of its purported inherent content). Matters are slightly more complicated since Wittgenstein has nothing direct to say about this particular issue. He did not anticipate the tendency of today’s analytic philosophers to invoke the contemporary notion of content when thinking about what is essential to perceiving. Although he frequently speaks about ‘what’ is seen or perceived, ‘content’ is not one of Wittgenstein’s words. 2 It appears rarely in his works (it features only twice in the index of the Blackwell edition of the Philosophical Investigations). Moreover, on those odd occasions when Wittgenstein does employ the term ‘content’ he speaks about it in ways that manifestly differ from the uses analytic philosophers make of it. Rather he invokes it mainly to highlight certain dangers associated with its use, as when he associates talk of content with talk of having private experiences or visual impressions. 3