Abstract
How does perceptual experience disclose the world to our view? In the first introductory section, I set up a contrast between the representational and the purely relational conception of perceptual experience. In the second section, I discuss an argument given by Charles Travis (Mind 113: 57–94, 2004) against perceptual content. The third section is devoted to the phenomenon of perceptual constancy: in 3.1 I describe the phenomenon. In 3.2 I argue that the description given suggests a phenomenological distinction that can be deployed for a defence of content. In 3.3 I compare and contrast my view of perceptual content with that of Susanna Schellenberg (The Journal of Philosophy 105(02): 55–84, 2008). Finally (3.4), I support my conception of content by means of an argument that links content to the way in which the mind-independent nature of material objects is manifest in perceptual experience.
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Notes
These terms are often used as differing from one another in meaning: representationalism is often associated with the project of reducing phenomenal character to the supposedly more tractable notion of representation (Dretske 1995); intentionalism is associated with the thesis that intentionality is the mark of the mental (Crane 2009); the content view is often spelled out as the thesis that the very structure of perceptual consciousness entails perceptual content (Byrne 2001; Siegel 2010; Siewert 1998). The approach that comes closest to my view is that exemplified by the content view, but for present purposes I ignore these otherwise important differences and treat the terms in question as synonyms. The justification for this approach is that the representationalist, the intentionalist and the content view theorist all claim that perception has representational content – this minimal claim is the one that interests me; thus, whenever I speak of the representationalist conception of perceptual experience, I simply refer to the idea that perceptual experience has content.
As per Logue’s careful formulation, the resistance is rooted in Martin’s argument concerning hallucination, but Martin has not presented his own argument as an argument against content; in fact, Martin is strictly neutral concerning the issue of whether perception has content – this is why Martin doesn’t count as a pure relationalist according to my definition.
The second is an epistemic notion, on which things looking some way is “very much a matter of what can be gathered from, or what is suggested by, facts at hand, or those visibly (audibly, etc.) on hand” Travis (2004: 76). Thus, if your neighbours’ curtains are drawn and there is no sign of their car, it might look to you as though they have left. Crucially though, that they have left is not the kind of thing that your perceptual experience represents to you – it is rather something that you represent to yourself on the basis of what perception affords you; in Travis’s terms, it is autorepresentation, not allorepresentation.
For more on the topic of the admissible contents of experience, see Hawley and Macpherson (2011).
This raises the question of how one gets from representation of certain colours and shapes to, say, perceptual knowledge that there is a cardinal in front of one. McDowell (2009) has sketched a promising account based on recognitional capacities, on which perceiving, say, a cardinal, puts one “in a position to know non-inferentially that [the perceived object] is a cardinal” (258).
There is an additional reason why I’m not persuaded that the problem can be solved simply by incorporating a reference to angles and distance in perceptual content: even if the glass seen at an angle looks circular from here, in looking that way, it also looks elliptical from here; if someone said “Look, seen from here the glass appears elliptical”, I don’t think that we should respond that that is flatly wrong. Thus, we still have two looks, and as long as it is not clear if and why they have a different role to play, I don’t think that the representationalist is off the hook (arguing that the looks have indeed a different role will be the whole point of subsections 3.2 and 3.4).
Restricting the range of represented properties to shape, size and colour reduces, of course, the magnitude of the problem, for one doesn’t have to explain why the thing is represented as a glass rather than, say, an unusual cover for an abat-jour. Since my reply to Travis is based on constancy, I focus on basic properties to which constancy applies.
If hard-pressed to say what is a look, I would say that looks are objective, relational properties of objects. Take an object o: o’s looking F is a function that takes as arguments an appropriate subset of o’s properties, a spatiotemporal point of view, certain circumstances such as light conditions, and returns the value looking F.
Generally speaking, if a perception is veridical, the ground look corresponds to the actual shape, size or colour of the object. More precisely: if the experience is veridical and an F-look is the ground look, then the object is F (the glass looks to be circular and is circular). Of course, things can go wrong in perception, and if that happens the ground look will not correspond to the relevant shape-property of the object (the glass looks to be elliptical but is not elliptical).
What should we say about the content of static experiences? There are at least two options that are compatible with my account: one is to say that static content is in effect underdetermined – for example, that neither the circular nor the elliptical look have the “right” to be the ground look.
Another option, which I favour, is that static content is partly determined by the fact that the subject implicitly anticipates how the object would look and her experience would change if she were to see it from different angles; further, these anticipations are grounded in dynamic perception (I develop more fully this point in Giananti, A. What philosophers of perception can learn from Husserl, (unpublished manuscript b); see also Hopp (2011: 76–80; 146–148) for a discussion of the role of anticipations in Husserl’s theory of perception).
The are some similarities that the present view has to that developed in Noë (2004, 2012), insofar as both Noë and I attribute a pivotal role to constancy and duality in perception. I can’t discuss in detail here the relationship between my view and Noë’s, but it is perhaps worth pointing out three differences: first, there is a significant difference between our respective ways of setting up the puzzle of constancy, insofar as Noë’s declares as “inacceptable” to describe the question of constancy as the question of how experience can “continue to present things as unchanged when the character of our experience is continuously changing” (2012: 55) (which is more or less the way I set up the question), for he thinks that the question of constancy should be “how can our experience present things as unchanged when it manifestly presents them as changing” (55) (more constancy-related differences between Noë and I are evident in Noë’s discussion of constancy as amodal perception; 2012: 55–58).
Second, my aim is to develop the idea of duality in perception so as to respond to pure relationalists’ worries.
Third, as far as I know, Noë does not give an argument for relating constancy to mind-independence, which I do in 3.4.
Schellenberg says en passant that situation-dependent properties can be evidence for intrinsic properties even if a subject is not even aware of those situation-dependent properties, because “a subject can have evidence without being aware of this evidence” (78). Clearly, this is coherent with the proposed separation between the phenomenology and the epistemology of perception. However, it still leaves the main question unanswered: how is it that the subject can know that two objects are the same (intrinsic) size on the basis of the evidence that they are presented as different in size given the situational features, if the subject is left in the dark as to which properties are intrinsic and which are situation-dependent?
It might be that colour partly depends on perceiving subjects in a way that does not apply to shape and size. However, there is a sense in which mind-independence also applies to colour, insofar as colour, just as shape and size, does not change as we change perspective on coloured objects; furthermore, it appears not to change (provided the perspectival changes fall within the boundary of perceptual constancy).
Siegel (2010, chapter 7) puts forward a similar claim with respect to both properties and existence – for example: “The objects we seem to see are presented to us as subject-independent” (176).
Thanks to an anonymous referee for pressing these cases.
One might find weird the idea that some items are represented as mind-independent via perceptual constancy, whereas others are represented as mind-independent in some other way. However, the differences in the representation of mind-independence are not random, but grounded in important differences in the kinds of perceived items or in the conditions of perception. First, take the case of a ray of light of variable intensity. Lights, just as rainbows, shadows, clouds and the sky, belong to that group of entities often called perceptual ephemera (Martin 2010, Crowther & Mac Cumhaill (2018, forthcoming)), namely entities which neither are nor look fully material. Given the substantially different nature of perceptual ephemera, it is not exceedingly surprising that different mechanisms should be at work and a different phenomenology exemplified. Further, insofar as we want to accept that the perceptual ephemera listed above are represented as mind-independent, we are not completely in the dark as to how that could come about: presumably, to the extent that a ray of light seems to exist independently of our perception of it, that is at least partly due to the fact that we have the possibility of changing our position relative to it. But I would still insist that there are more demanding conditions for the apparent independence of ordinary material objects. Other cases are to be explained at least partly by reference to the conditions of perception: it is not uncommon in psychology to assume that there is a maximal perceptible distance beyond which any object is perceived as being at a constant distance (Gilinsky 1951; Indow 1991), and that size constancy does not hold for very far objects (Higashiyama 1992). Thus, objects such as stars, or persons seen from an airplane high in the sky, fall well beyond maximal perceptible distance and size constancy. They might still be perceived as mind-independent insofar as we perceive them from different perspectives, but they are also perceived as merely having some size and being at some unspecified distance, so this marks a striking difference with more ordinary cases of perception; if a glass on the table in front of one in ordinary circumstances were perceived in the same way as stars normally are, as being of some determinable size at some unspecified distance, I doubt that we would get the same sense of it being mind-independent that we actually do.
A different suggestion on how to treat the case of seeing the stars comes from Noë, who also treats it as an example of constancy breakdown. According to Noë, we don’t actually see stars: “you don’t actually visually experience the stars; what you see, rather, are points of light in the night sky, points of light you reasonably take to be stars (or to be marks or signs or traces of stars)” (2012: 70).
During its long gestation, this paper has been presented at a number of conferences and workshops, and I wish to thank those audiences for their questions. For their comments on earlier drafts, I would especially like to thank Philipp Blum, Bill Brewer, Arnaud Dewalque, Jorgen Dyrstad, Filipe Herkenhoff Carijò, Ivan Ivanov, Heather Logue, Fiona Macpherson, Martine Nida-Rümelin, Donnchadh O'Conaill, Gianfranco Soldati, Michael Sollberger and two anonymous referees. This paper has been generously supported by the Swiss National Science Foundation (grants Nos. 100012M_173159 and P2FRP1_148549).
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Giananti, A. The Way Things Look: a Defence of Content. Rev.Phil.Psych. 10, 541–562 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s13164-018-0393-4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s13164-018-0393-4