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p To begin with let us state that the results (“traces”) of the action of an object on human sense organs, though constituting a reflection of an external object, in no way represent knowledge: they are not directly included in the cognitive relation and, being merely its necessary premise, cannot be characterised as cognitive images (they are physical images). "It is a mistake to consider psychical formations as completely identical to the nervous physiological mechanisms. The subjective image is undoubtedly specific and irreducible to the nervous model. "^^2^^

p Indeed, these “traces” carry obviously redundant information, which cannot, because of its redundancy, be a reference point for the subject in an objective situation. For instance, if we should allow that the visual system does not in some way transform or organise retinal images (i. e., the “traces” of the action of light rays on the retina) but merely transfers them from one place to another recording them in some storage mechanism, this system will conduct about a million counts of brightness in 0.1 sec. In a few minutes the number of such counts would reach a magnitude of the order of several thousand million, exceeding the number of neurons in"the cortex.^^3^^

p Therefore a sensory system which has no methods for transforming the information received, for transforming the result of the action of an external object on it, remains blind, having no criteria for discerning useful signals against the background of noise.^^4^^ The cognitive image carrying knowledge about an object contains precisely that information, and only that information, which is vitally necessary tc the subject as a concrete individual and a representative of society.

p But the relation between objective knowledge specific for cognition and, in particular, sense perception, on the one hand, and sensory information, on the other, is not 119 reduced merely to discarding a certain part of the latter with the aid of a system of filters. Objective knowledge is by no means poorer on the content plane than sensory impressions, and in some respects is essentially richer, for we perceive objects in terms of properties the knowledge of which is not directly contained in the sense data.

p As Marx pointed out, a most important feature of perception is that it does not carry information about excitation in the nervous apparatus as a result of the action of the object on the sense organs but about the really existing object itself, the object that is outside the perceiving subject. For example, "the light from an object is perceived by us not as the subjective excitation of our optic nerve, but as the objective form of something outside the eye itself.”^^5^^

p “To perceive a chair,” says Pierre Janet, "means to see an object in which.one may sit, and to perceive a house, as von Weizsacker put it even more forcefully, does not mean to see an image that the eye caught but, on the contrary, to recognise an object that can be entered! "^^6^^ V. S. Tyukhtin indicates that on the one hand, the image is connected with the material substratum, and on the other, what is given in the image is the content of the object and not of the nervous substratum. "The paradox of the unity of these two aspects is insoluble merely on the basis of the principles of physical causality, but it can be explained if the features of objectness and anticipation are viewed as a special functional property of highly organised living systems.... That means that the content of the signal is separated from its form (the material substratum) functionally rather than in an anatomical, physiological, physical or chemical way.”^^7^^

p The mutual relations of the subject and the object perceived by him change almost continually, both as a result of changes in the position of the object and of man’s movements. Naturally, this cannot fail to lead to constant changes in the character and configuration of the “traces” of the object’s action on the sensory system. If the image of the object were entirely determined by these “traces”, we simply would be unable to single out that object as an independent reality. In ordinary conditions, however, the object is perceived as independent from the concrete conditions of perception and from the act itself (the phenomenon of "constancy of perception" known in psychology). Human speech is also perceived in this way. The following observation was made in the attempts at artificial reproduction of speech. When speech is transformed into light impulses in a special apparatus, it turns out that 120 speech sounds appearing as identical under ordinary conditions, prove to be different in their physical characteristics, whereas others, which we perceive as different, leave identical visible traces.^^8^^

p Thus cognition is object-oriented and determined from the very outset, in its most elementary manifestations. The attempts of representatives of classical empiricism as well as modern "sense data "-oriented theoreticians, to present certain elementary subjective experiences uncorrelated with material objects as the initial elements and at the same time units of knowledge, lead to insoluble paradoxes in epistemology and, moreover, directly contradict the available results of scientific psychology.

p Of course, knowledge of objects does not emerge at once in the course of ontogenetic and phylogenetic development. It is important, however, in this connection to bear in mind the following two circumstances. First, where there is no objective knowledge, sense perception’does not exist either, and consequently, neither does knowledge in the proper sense of the word: in this case, sensory information, among other things, serves as the basis for behaviour orientation. Second, the emergence of perception, that is, of objective knowledge, cannot be understood only on the basis of sensory information or of any other kinds of reflection which do not reproduce the objective characteristics of reality.

p James Gibson, a prominent American psychologist, distinguishes two kinds of vision, only one of which is perception, that is, knowledge in the proper sense. "If you look out of the window,” he writes, "there beyond is an extended environment of ground and buildings or, if you are lucky, ‘scenery’. This is what we call the visual world. It is the familiar, ordinary scene of daily life, in which solid objects look solid, square objects look square, horizontal surfaces look horizontal, and the book across the room looks as big as the book lying in front of you... Next look at the room not as a room but, insofar as you can, as if it consisted of areas or patches of coloured surface, divided up by contours... If you persist, the scene comes to approximate the appearance of a picture. You may observe that it has characteristics somewhat different from the former scene. This is what will here be called the visual field. It is less familiar than the visual world and it cannot be observed except with some kind of special effort.”^^9^^

p In analysing the differences between the visual field and the visual world, Gibson observes that the visual field is limited (approximately 150° to 180°) and is 121 oval-shaped, whereas the visual world has no boundaries and stretches behind one’s head as well as before the eyes.

p The visual field is clear and distinct in the centre, its indeterminateness growing towards the boundaries. The visual field shifts as the eyes pass on from one point of fixation to another, whereas the visual world is stable.

p The visual world is always oriented along the gravitational vertical, whereas the visual field is oriented in relation to its boundaries. Changing the position of the observer, e. g., his inclination by 90°, changes nothing in the orientation of his visual world, while in the visual field the horizontals will now become verticals. The visual world is constant. In the visual field, projection relations obtain. In the visual world, the three-dimensional depth forms of objects are perceived, while in the visual field, projection forms. At the same time, although the visual field is projectional, in the words of Gibson "it is never flat, like a surface on which a picture is painted or projected; that is, it is never wholly depthless. Nor is it lacking in the character of being outside of us, in externality.”^^10^^

p According to Gibson, the visual field does not underlie the visual world at all. The two kinds of vision are alternative, emerging as a result of two different attitudes of consciousness. With the ordinary consciousness attitude in perception, the subject confronts the visual objective world. The other attitude is artificial in nature, expressing the civilised man’s chronic habit of regarding the world as a picture.

p A group of Soviet psychologists, who studied under A. N. Leontyev the formation of perception under unusual conditions, gave a somewhat different interpretation of these facts.^^11^^

p In a series of experiments, retinal images were distorted by means of special optical devices (using the pseudoscope, inverting the retinal projections). As a result, the objective image of perception and its sensuous texture were brought completely apart. These experiments showed that under definite conditions the sensuous texture of the image without an objective interpretation may be directly presented to the subject (true, under these conditions the subject, strictly speaking, does not have a knowledge of the world, he is almost incapable of orientation in it); moreover, they have showed that the formation of the perceptual image necessarily presupposes a certain activity with the sensuous texture. But there are certain grounds to believe that the sensuous texture is close to what Gibson called the visual field.

p Gibson’s rejection of the connection between the 122 sensory field, sensation and perception is entirely unjustified. At the same time his opinion about a qualitative difference between perception and the sensory field is quite correct.

p Under ordinary conditions the sensuous texture of the perceptual image (corresponding to the visual field) is not realised by the subject. At the stage of ontogenesis when an adequate objective vision of the external world has not yet been formed, the visual world is not yet present in the subject’s experience and, more than that, the visual field does not exist for his consciousness either. The qualities pertaining to the visual field (colours and their shades, the mutual arrangement of various contours, etc.) are realised only to the extent in which they are included in the visual world, that is, the world of real objects.

p John Ruskin, the outstanding art critic and theoretician, anticipated the findings of the impressionists as he wrote: "The whole technical power of painting depends on our recovery of what may be called the innocence of the eye; that is to say, of a sort of childish perception of these flat stains of colour, merely as such, without consciousness of what they signify,—as a blind man would see them if suddenly gifted with sight.”^^12^^ But under ordinary conditions the stains of colour cannot be realised as such, outside their objective interpretation and correlation. A blind person suddenly recovering sight after a successful operation (and cases like that are well authenticated in modern science) cannot see anything at first, for he can only see in a conscious, objective manner, and that has to be learnt.

p A grown-up person to whom the sensuous texture of the visual image becomes accessible (as a result of a special kind of reflective attitude of consciousness or through application of special technical devices distorting the usual retinal projection of an object) always realises the unnaturalness of such a situation and cannot get rid of the feeling of irreality of the picture given to his consciousness.

p The experiments of Soviet psychologists permit yet another conclusion of great importance for understanding the cognitive specificity of perception. The perceptual image of an object is not only constant in relation to the continually changing conditions of perception and to a certain extent independent of the sensuous texture: it carries in its content structure the conception of the world as existing amodally, that is, objectively, independently of our sensory modalities-^visual, tactile, etc. As became particularly clear in the studies of perceptive activity through inversion of the visual image, the formation of the perception image assumes existence in consciousness, 123 as an element of the latter, of an amodal, objective world scheme, which may exist in the texture of any modality or in the form of certain mnemonic schemes. The perceived world is a form of the existence of the world scheme in a certain modality. It is essential that the world scheme also includes the body scheme as its component, and the perceptual image is formed only through the correlation of the perceived world with the amodal world scheme through the body scheme.^^13^^

p Perception as a kind of cognition thus assumes comprehension, understanding, interpretation of what is seen. This interpretation is a certain kind of activity. Indeed, identical sensory data may correspond to extremely diverse real objects.

p The process of perception always presupposes choosing (the choice being in a sense debatable) of an interpretation of sensory data which appears most probable in a world of real objects. Perception builds something like objecthypotheses. I act in accordance with my perception of the properties of the physical object, a table, rather than with the sensation of a brown spot that is in my eye when I look at the surface of the table.

p The object is perceived as a result of a complex process of comparing sensory information with those standards of objects that are recorded in memory. This process may involve errors.^^14^^

p The process of perception is continual solution of tasks of a special kind, a special kind of thinking, "visual thinking”, as specialists in the psychology of perception now describe it.^^15^^

p Let us formulate the epistemological significance of what has been said above in clearer terms.

p We should take into account, first of all, that from the standpoint of Marxist epistemology, the difference between perception and thinking does not at all consist in that the former is purely direct while the latter, a mediated kind of knowledge, as was traditionally accepted in philosophical empiricism. Cognition is oriented from the outset towards objects, and the singling out in the external world of objects, of real things assumes cognitive activity, adopting certain assumptions and hypotheses which are later verified in sensory and real activity. The development of modern psychology gives concreteness to these fundamental philosophical assumptions.

p Sense perception or, as Lenin referred to it, "living perception"^^16^^, differs, of course, from abstract reasoning. Under ordinary conditions, what is consciously realised by the subject is merely the result of perceptual activity, the 124 object image, while the activity of construction of this image is not given, it is reduced and concealed from consciousness. But thinking, which deals in abstractions, implies detailing of the activity of constructing the object image and a conscious control of its realisation (although by no means everything is realised in abstract thinking, but that is a separate problem). To the subject himself, perception therefore appears as direct givenness of the object and is distinguished from thinking precisely by that criterion. Another important distinction is that knowledge provided by perception assumes existence of objective meaning in a given sensuous texture or sensory modality. Both the number of sensory modalities and their characteristics, just as, to a considerable degree, the properties of the sensuous texture, are determined by the concrete historical circumstances of the emergence and development of the biological species Homo sapiens. This determination is not, of course, accidental: the receptive organs, both in number and capacity, have always coped with providing the Homo sapiens with the information which was initially required for orientation in the environment, in the world of relatively stable macrobodies, in a definite narrow circle of activity. But man’s specificity consists precisely in going beyond the biologically determined kinds of activity.

p This entails the emergence of cognition in the precise sense of the word just as the appearance of the need for cognizing such real objects, their properties and relations, which cannot in general affect man’s receptive system. Cognition of this kind became possible owing to the development of thinking which uses a system of special artificially constructed objects: symbols, signs, diagrams, schemes, models, etc., for establishing the properties of those objects which exist independently of the subject. (Let us note that thinking need not necessarily be expressed in the form of verbal signs: it may also be realised through a special kind of operation upon objects.)

p As we have seen, the referential meaning of the perceptual image does not stand in a one-to-one relation to sensory information, it is in some respects poorer than that information, and in others, considerably richer. This circumstance is explained by the fact that the objective meaning of the image and, consequently, the specifically human cognition, as distinct from sensory information, does not emerge in biological evolution but in socio- historical development through practical activity. The subject can perceive those aspects of objects which do not act on his sense organs. At the same time there are object 125 meanings which cannot in principle be incorporated in a sensuo’us texture and cannot therefore be sensually perceived. These referential meanings are reconstructed by a special type of thinking, one that consciously operates with abstractions.

p The limitations of- perception arising from its distinctive properties (the subjective immediacy, the unconscious nature of interpretation) are the source of possible contradictions between perception and understanding of the object (it would be more precise to say, between two different levels of understanding—in terms of perception and of abstract thinking). Thus the moon is perceived as a disc some 30 cm in diameter at a distance of about a kilometre and a half. All humans apparently perceive the size of and distance to the moon in an approximately the same way, erring by a factor of one million. Such examples are numerous.

p In this context, however, it is more important to stress the similarities rather than the differences between perception and thinking, those similarities which permit to refer to the former as a kind of "visual thinking”, an activity of solving tasks in object recognition.

p The Marxist epistemological position is opposed to both metaphysical materialism and gnoseological empiricism, which in its fully developed form inevitably becomes subjectivist and idealistic. It is at the same time interesting to compare this position with the transcendentalist interpretation of cognition.

p We recall that, according to Kant and Husserl, cognition never deals with subjective perceptions but with objects (it is a different question how the objects themselves are understood, what ontological status is ascribed to them by these philosophers). Let us note, though, that for Husserl, the intentional object, which may in certain cases coincide with the real one, is given immediately, with apodictic certainty, and knowledge of that object cannot in principle be a result of the subject’s constructive activity (the act of intentional orientation at the object is, according to Husserl, the act of grasping some certainty). The theoretical objects with which science deals are not, in fact, genuine from the standpoint of phenomenology, they do not characterise adequate knowledge but merely play the role of auxiliary conceptual constructions. Kant’s position on this point appears at first glance essentially different. Kant insists that the object given in experience, and knowledge of that object, are in fact a result of the creative activity of the Transcendental Subject, a product or synthesis of perceptions. Let us observe, however, that for Kant, too, 126 a referential meaning can exist in the form of knowledge only insofar as it is incorporated or included in some sensuous texture. The subject possesses knowledge, Kant points out, only insofar as the object of knowledge is given in sensory experience (for this reason, experience and knowledge essentially coincide, in Kant’s view). Knowledge and thinking are therefore sharply contrasted: Kant believes that attempts to acquire knowledge through thinking, that is, knowledge of those objects that cannot be given in experience, inevitably lead to insoluble antinomies. That does not mean that one cannot cogitate of the given objects. However, one cannot know anything definite of them, Kant believes, for any knowledge is a synthesis of a manifold, and that synthesis is in his view only possible in experience.

p In reality, the relation between the referential meaning and the sensuous texture is not at all reducible to a mere “synthesis” of varied sensations by means of objective content: many sensations are discarded, contradictions may arise between objective content and certain sensory impressions, and in this case the latter are not noticed, they are not realised. The main point is, however, that a referential meaning can be included in the system of knowledge also in such cases when it is not directly incorporated in sensory experience. In other words, pure knowledge is also possible of such objects which cannot be directly given in human experience. Modern microphysics, on the one hand, and cosmology, on the other^ deal with such objects (which, according to Kant, cannot in principle be the subject-matter of knowledge).

p In classical epistemology, substantiation of knowledge involved postulating such kinds of knowledge which themselves do not require substantiation, those in which the object is grasped more or less directly. This is true not only of the various systems of empiricism, which found such knowledge in metaphysically interpreted sensations or "sensory data”, but also of transcendentalist philosophy. Therefore the search for the "immediately given" and its differentiation from deduced and constructed knowledge have always been one of the most important tasks of preMarxian and non-Marxist theories of knowledge.

p Dialectical materialism emphasises that it is not any knowledge that can be objective, or object-related, asserting at the same time that different levels of knowledge deal with real objects, although at different levels different types of objects and their aspects are reflected (the development of modern psychology and theoretical natural science confirms and specifies this thesis). "Cognition is 127 the eternal endless approximation of thought to the object,” V. I. Lenin writes. "The reflection of nature in man’s thought must be understood not ’lifelessly,’ not ’abstractly,’ not devoid of movement, not without contradictions, but in the eternal process ,of movement, the arising of contradictions and their solution.”^^17^^ Of course, not all theoretical objects with which scientific thinking deals, can be correlated with actually existing objects directly and unambiguously. Real objects exist, however, which can only be reflected through abstract reasoning and cannot be directly given to the subject in sensory experience.

But that means that the classical problem of pre- Marxian epistemology, the problem of substantiation of knowledge, must not only be solved in a new manner but it must also be formulated in a new way. That means that the most important task of scientific epistemology is not the singling out of immediately given entities, the certainties of knowledge, but the discovery of universal referential meanings and norms of the objectiveness of knowledge, the study of the modes of formation, development, and change of these norms and, solution on this path, of the problem of interrelation of knowledge and the objectively existing reality.