Empiricist philosophers have supposed that the primitives of experience that underpin our mature ways of thinking are but simple awarenesses of simple properties. Phenomenologists, on the other hand, have taken the manifold of experience as what is primitive. Neither approach can best account for experimental findings about infant experience. It is argued that our mature ordering of experience in terms of objects and their properties does not have its origins in a crude infant version of the same ordering, but instead develops out of infant experiences that consist of noticings of differences. It is not that neonates see objects as objects and properties as properties, but less effectively than do adults; what initially captures their attention is differences, particularly changes, in what is presented to them, rather than things and their sensible properties. It is suggested that an infant’s perceptual development proceeds from awareness of individual differences to that of patterns of differences incorporating Gibsonian invariants, before, finally, it comes to perceive objects as objects.
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