Sense, sensibility and perception

I think a standard sort of definition would be "knowing the world about us through the medium of sense presentations" (Cassell's dictionary)
Again, this is a 'perception-as-reception' paradigm, but it also draws the distinction between sense presentations and 'knowledge'.William James said words to the effect of "we don't perceive sense data, we perceive things, out there, in the world"
This approach has perception as mediated . It also raises the interesting question: could there be more contents in that "knowledge" than there was in the senses? - if so, where does it come from?
Well, of course there is - not because of some spooky extra-sensory perception (or at least, all perception is miraculous without having to invent some other invisible demos)but because knowledge is cumulative - not necessarily in a series of atomistic snapshots, how the world is in one moment followed by how it is in the next. various thinkers have had a go at this, and it depends where you're coming to the problem from.
Helmholz (spelling varies, oddly)being a physical scientist, had the idea of "unconscious inferences" - sort of supplementary knowledge drawn from experience, memory and learning, that could be used to pad out the evidence of the senses. later scientists, whilst resting heavily on the physical characteristics of sense organs and their performance, always had to bring in (sometimes as something of an afterthought) things like "cognitive factors" - but these were more by way of making psychophysical explanations work by having a sort of dustbin concept where all the problems could be dumped, than by the attempt to tackle those cognitive mechanisms/factors head on.
And really, whilst senses are marvellous enough - they are not where perception is to be found - it's actually in there in the dustbin of 'cognitive factors'