Perception

[B147] After asserting that "things in space and time are given only in so far as they are perceptions", Kant defines a perception as "a representation given by sensation". [B208] Again, he defines perception as "empirical consciousness, that is, a consciousness in which sensation is to be found". [B212] Appearances have both an extensive magnitude, "their intuition", and an intensive magnitude, defined as "their mere perception (sensation, and with it reality". [B235] The category of community (as well as those of substance and causality) must be employed in order for us to perceive something: "without community, each perception of an appearance in space is broken off from every other, and the chain of empirical representations, that is, experience would have to begin entirely anew...without the least connection with the preceding representation, and without standing to it in any relation of time". This suggests that perception is a synthesized representation, an appearance, and in particular is associated with the intensive magnitude of an appearance and with sensation. [A324] In the Postulates, Kant's criteria of reality is that an appearance "stand in [a certain appropriate] connection with perception", suggesting a coherence view of [the nature of] truth. [A374] Again (in the Paralogisms in A) Kant writes, "Perception exhibits the reality of something in space; and in the absence of perception no power of imagination can invent and produce that something. It is sensation, therefore, that indicates a reality in space or in time, according as it is related to the one or to the other mode of sensible intuition [i.e., outer and inner?]". Perception here is defined as "sensation...if referred to an object in general, though not as determining that object"; as "data" of experience prior to discursive judgment. (Objective perception is knowledge; perception as "objective" sensation of an object, as opposed to just a spontaneous itch in inner sense. Prior to synthesis, there is no perception, sensation, or experience. Perception is associated with space, sensation with qualia; cf. extensive and intensive magnitude.)

The 'how it is' to cognitive systems in the world. A means of distinguishing how things are from how a cognizer thinks they are.
<Discussion> <References> Chris Eliasmith