It matters for clear communication. It is not relevant to the things the communication is about.
So there is the world in itself out there, the causal effects it has on our sense organs, the processing in the nervous system of the signals from those organs, various aspects of the subjective experiences that (somehow) result; there are also imagined experiences and witting or unwitting hallucinations. These are all different things. But in everyday life these distinctions generally make little practical difference, and words such as “perception” and “see” can be used indifferently to sprawl over different parts of that whole domain. There is no such thing as the “strict meaning” of such words, the ways they “should” be used.
One can say, here [lengthy description] is one phenomenon, and here [another lengthy description] is another: I will for this conversation use [some word] to refer to the first and [some other word] to refer to the second. It is nonsense to say “strictly, [some word] means only the first of these” when in everyday talk it straddles both.
It does not matter what it is called, and it does not matter how Searle or anyone else thinks the word “see” should properly be used.
As soon as you say something to someone else, the usage of words matters.
It matters for clear communication. It is not relevant to the things the communication is about.
So there is the world in itself out there, the causal effects it has on our sense organs, the processing in the nervous system of the signals from those organs, various aspects of the subjective experiences that (somehow) result; there are also imagined experiences and witting or unwitting hallucinations. These are all different things. But in everyday life these distinctions generally make little practical difference, and words such as “perception” and “see” can be used indifferently to sprawl over different parts of that whole domain. There is no such thing as the “strict meaning” of such words, the ways they “should” be used.
One can say, here [lengthy description] is one phenomenon, and here [another lengthy description] is another: I will for this conversation use [some word] to refer to the first and [some other word] to refer to the second. It is nonsense to say “strictly, [some word] means only the first of these” when in everyday talk it straddles both.