Seeing What to Do: Embodied Instructive Representations in Vision

Most representationalist accounts of visual perception hold that visual representations are belief—or judgement-like sensory staates with veridicality or accuracy conditions. In a word: visually perceiving is seeing something as being some way. I propose an alternative account on which visual representations are intention-like and have “appropriateness” rather than veridicality or accuracy conditions. In a word: visually perceiving is seeing what to do. According to this view, visual representations are a species of “embodied instructive representation.” After sketching the general account of embodied instructive representations and saying a bit about why they deserve to be called representations, I’ll argue that visual perceptual representations may be fruitfully understood as embodied instructive representations.