Talk:Percept

Should this be disambiguated? An article that begins "A percept is a philosophical term..." then leads on to add IT uses doesn't strike me as sensible. Additionally, the article has no mention of the programming context of the word. BlueNovember 17:27, 20 January 2007 (UTC)

A Suggestion to Rewrite the Article
Dear all,

I believe that this article needs to be more in line with the Perception article and explain the concept better. I also agree with Blue that IT related paragraph seems odd here and would like to see it removed or replaced with disambiguation page. I would also like to see Distal and Proximal Stimulus pages deleted since the distinction only confuses the matter.

My proposal for the body of the article is below. Feel free to correct my grammar and propose your own changes.

If there are no other suggestions or objections, I'll implement the changes in four or more weeks.

Kind regards, Damir Ibrisimovic (talk) 00:44, 15 February 2009 (UTC)

The percept is a perceived form of external stimuli or their absence. Vivid dreams could also be considered as a form of perception without a clear source of external stimuli. The term is primarily used in philosophy and psychology as sense-datum to explain perception.



It is important to discern percept from stimuli or their absence. Stimuli are not necessarily translated into a percept and rarely a single stimulus translates in a percept. Also, absence of stimuli may be translated in a percept, as in some sensory illusions. And the same stimuli, or absence of them, may result in different percepts depending on subject’s culture and previous experiences.

Examples on the left illustrate how the same stimuli or absence of them could give rise to more than one percept. The same lines on the left of the image can be translated into a percept of transparent cube viewed from above or into a percept of transparent cube viewed from below. The shape on the right could be interpreted as a vase while absence of stimuli around it could be interpreted as two faces facing each other.

The percept also binds sensations from all of the senses in a whole. A picture of a talking person on a TV screen, for example, is bound to the sound of speech from speakers to form a percept of a talking person.

The example of transparent cube could also be used to illustrate the difference between cognition and recognition. If we are used to seeing a cube from above much more than from below, we will recognise the transparent cube viewed from above much faster and easier. The view from below would then need a significant cognitive effort that will take a noticeable moment.

In philosophy, ambiguity of stimuli is commented upon by Ludwig Wittgenstein in his Philosophical Investigations (1953), and Rudolf Arnheim in Art and Visual Perception (1954). It is also a term used in Rudolf Steiner's theory of knowledge, which treats the relation of percept and concept.

Marshall McLuhan declared that he was more interested in percepts than concepts.

Percept is also a term used by Bergson and Deleuze to define perception gone independent from their authors. According to Deleuze, science uses percepts, while art works with affects and philosophy creates concepts.

The term percept is also gaining use in the information technology industry in how to price data transfer. For example, rather than charging an individual (who is remotely retrieving data from say a weather sensor or a GPS device) by the size of the data, a company would charge that individual by the percept. Here a percept would constitute a statistical data point, as a GPS location. Pricing per percept would mean that a customer or individual using that GPS device would actually be charged per unit of true economic value to him/her, a GPS location datapoint, rather than on the size of that datapoint in bits/bytes/kilobytes etc.


 * Looks like a decent start. Lacks some citations ("According to Deleuze,") and some questionable tone ("Arguably,") but it's far less blubbery than the current article. You did an especially good job on the opening.
 * I still feel the IT related uses should be disambiguated though. Thanks for the talk-page notice. I'll see if I can find enough referenceable material to warrant such a split. --BlueNovember (talk) 11:05, 15 February 2009 (UTC)

Thanks Blue. I have removed “arguably”. I also added examples of ambiguous images and how they translate into percepts.

As for philosophical part, I would like somebody better versed in philosophy to amend it. At the moment it seems a bit disjointed. We might need a disambiguation here also.

I would suggest that we use the above text as a work in progress. Significant changes should be proposed separately, but minor edits could be implemented directly. Significant changes can be discussed and agreed upon. Hopefully, we can have the final version within four weeks.

Kind regards, Damir Ibrisimovic (talk) 22:02, 15 February 2009 (UTC)


 * I have found a sense data article, but given up referring to it. It seems to be confusing the issue just like distal and proximal stimulus articles do. Should we delete it?


 * Kind regards, Damir Ibrisimovic (talk) 03:09, 26 February 2009 (UTC)

Etymology; questionable section
As per wp:dictionary. It's (imo) unencyclopaedic, contains large quotes from other sources without much justification, and uses first person pronouns. --BlueNovember (talk) 13:35, 17 February 2009 (UTC)


 * Agree Blue. Etymology should state linguistic history only and there’s not much of it. I intend to delete the section.


 * I would also like to keep things simple and factual. If we do not get a philosophically oriented Wikipedian, I’ll leave the philosophical part as it is and rewrite the article in three weeks.


 * Kind regards, Damir Ibrisimovic (talk) 22:31, 17 February 2009 (UTC)