ADVERBIAL THEORY

An adverbial theory of perception takes the act–object ambiguity of experience to warrant thinking of perception in terms of action. The object of perception then becomes not a true object, but an adverb describing how the action is performed. Thus instead of ‘I see a blue patch’ we would have ‘I see bluely’, describing how the process or activity of seeing is taking place. It is often objected that the adverbs required become too complex, and obviously gerrymandered: ‘I see a blue patch to the right of a red patch’ becomes something like ‘I see red-rightbluely’ and without surreptitiously mentioning the patches it is hard to see how we could give meaning to the complex adverb involved.