ABSTRACT
I will start with perceiving; if there is any other place to start, I’ve never found it. But this chapter, which begins with direct perception, is concerned with several other kinds of knowing as well: interpersonal perception, language, and categories. I will also consider how perceptually given knowledge and linguistic knowledge may be initially related; specifically, how a language learner discovers that spoken words stand for particular objects in the immediate environment. Questions like these have to be faced sooner or later; the study of cognition must not remain indefinitely divided into independent subdisciplines. In particular, it seems important to show that the ecological approach to perception, which specifically denies that perceiving depends on inferential or symbolic processes, can be combined with a more conventionally cognitive approach to language and thought. For this reason, the range of topics to be considered here is unusually broad, and the argument on most of them is correspondingly sketchy. My aim is not to offer definitive analyses of all these kinds of knowledge, but to illustrate how they might—indeed, how I believe they do—fit together.
