Just as evolution is articulation of the biosphere, and development articulation of the body, perception is articulation of the phaneron.
When a fox emerges from its den, it is no longer inside the den. When a part emerges from the whole, it is separated from the whole. But this is not so with emergent phenomena. When something “emerges” from the phaneron, it is thereby included in the phaneron. In perception, figure emerges from ground, and thus the phaneron articulates itself. Likewise continuous practice articulates itself by particular acts.
In the same manner as tonally discrete music, the body-surrounding fit is possible only through discretization of the continuum of possibilities, both in the perception and the action relation. Perception possesses a highly constrained selection of possible environment stimuli – ranging from simple cases like the possibility of sensing only groups of specific chemicals and to more complicated cases like the necessary limit of discrimination ability in any continuous perception spectrum (visual, auditive, tactile, etc.). In short, perception and action both possess a certain granularity which allows them to be pragmatically efficient at the price of a certain imprecision. This imprecision, it is evident, implies certain limitations – larger or lesser – on the perfection of the organism-environment fit. Both more perceptual precision (which is also energetically more expensive), on the one hand, and more perceptual economy (which is also less precise), on the other, may be favored by selection, according to the specific conditions in the single case. In semiotic terms, this implies that in the functional circle, a tension is at stake in embodied semiosis between semiotic complexity on the one hand and semiotic economy on the other.
— Stjernfelt 2007, 262