Concepts shape sensory perception even before direct experience begins

Evidence

Merleau-Ponty also followed Husserl and the gestalt psychologists in reminding us that we rarely have these sense experiences ‘raw’. Phenomena come to us already shaped by the interpretations, meanings and expectations with which we are going to grasp them, based on previous experience and the general context of the encounter. We perceive a multicoloured blob on a table directly as a bag of sweets, not as a collection of angles, colours and shadows that must be decoded and identified. The people we see running around in a field are a soccer team. This is why we fall for optical illusions: we have already seen a diagram as some expected shape, before looking again to realise that we have been fooled. It is also why a Rorschach blot comes to us as a picture of something, rather than as a meaningless design. — Sarah Bakewell, At the Existentialist Café, 729 (#corroborates, via linked claim)

As Sartre argued in his 1943 review of The Stranger, basic phenomenological principles show that experience comes to us already charged with significance. A piano sonata is a melancholy evocation of longing. If I watch a soccer match, I see it as a soccer match, not as a meaningless scene in which a number of people run around taking turns to apply their lower limbs to a spherical object. If the latter is what I’m seeing, then I am not watching some more essential, truer version of soccer; I am failing to watch it properly as soccer at all. — Sarah Bakewell, At the Existentialist Café, 490 (#corroborates, via linked claim)

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: Perception arrives pre-shaped by expectations and context, never raw — Sarah Bakewell, At the Existentialist Café: Freedom,…, 729; Concepts are reflections that explain things through context beyond immediate experience — Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man: Studies in the…, 423; Experience arrives pre-charged with meaning rather than as raw sense data — Sarah Bakewell, At the Existentialist Café: Freedom,…, 490 (+4 more)

Broader Connections

• Perception arrives pre-shaped by expectations and context, never raw #corroborates (0.95) — Sarah Bakewell, At the Existentialist Café, 729
• Experience arrives pre-charged with meaning rather than as raw sense data #corroborates (0.92) — Sarah Bakewell, At the Existentialist Café, 490
• Unconsciously primed concepts trigger corresponding behaviors in people #expands (0.72)
• Concepts are reflections that explain things through context beyond immediate experience #complicates (0.70) — Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man, 423