Art and Experience, Utrecht, © 1996. All rights reserved

Perception is the direct and embodied recognition of things and events, under a description. As embodied perception is polymodal and overdetermined, and discounts natural causal effects of relevant distances--the speeds of light and sound are approximately incorporated in the concepts under which we perceive. Seeing a man is seeing something under the description 'is a man', which includes a realistic estimate of his hight and length relative to the distance from the viewer's body. Perceptual imagination introduces the 'description' by 'translating' the variously structured data of the five sense modalities into the coherent whole that answers the description. (II:3; V:3).