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)

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The Percept is primarily perceived form of external stimuli or their absence. Arguably, vivid dreams are also a form perception without a clear source of external stimuli. The term is primarily used in philosophy and psychology 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.

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)