SEEING BETTER ON THE LEVEL OF LAMPS: PERCEPTUAL NORMATIVITY IN MERLEAU-PONTY
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This thesis develops an interpretation of Merleau-Ponty’s existential-phenomenological conception of perceptual normativity, that is, how there are norms, internal to perception itself, governing our everyday perceptual involvements with the world. I argue that Merleau-Ponty conceives perceptual norms as being gestalt-structural forms of ‘original sense’, which we experience pre-reflectively in a direct, bodily way. I motivate my interpretation by examining a passage in Phenomenology of Perception where Merleau-Ponty remarks on how perception tends toward an optimal or better view of things, indicating a normative dimension in perception. I make sense of this passage in relation to Merleau-Ponty’s wider gestalt-ontological thought about embodied subjectivity. I unpack how, via the basic intentional structure of perspective by which subject is geared into the perceptual world, body-subject adopts an ‘original sense’ or ‘look’, which undergoes an open process of definition that is experienced as normative. This account can further clarify some questions Merleau-Ponty does not explicitly address about our lived experience of perceptual norms: namely, how perceptual norms are temporal and contingent in their hold on body, and how these norms integrate the subject’s perceptual interests. I further investigate how perceptual norms, in the context of Merleau-Ponty’s thought, are perceived in a two-fold or ambiguous way: the subject lives norms immediately from the ‘inside’, but can also adopt a perspective on norms. In so doing, the subject can perceive the norm itself from the ‘outside,’ which is to partially ‘free’ body from the world’s normative grip. This interpretation is presented as a response to a debate in the literature involving Sean Kelly, Corinne Lajoie, and Samantha Matherne on how Merleau-Ponty conceives perceptual normativity.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.004 | 0.010 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.004 | 0.046 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.007 | 0.013 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".