Abstract
Using aspect perception as a point of entry, this chapter argues that the phenomenal world—the world as perceived and responded to prior to being thought, or thought about—is repressed in both Travis’s work on perception and McDowell’s. In focusing exclusively on perception as providing us with objects of judgments, or Fregean thoughts, both Travis and McDowell ignore altogether the world as it presents itself to us apart from any particular judgment or (objective) thought about it. And yet, it is that world that solicits, or elicits, movements and words from us—including what may be called ‘judgments’—and provides the background apart from which they would not have whatever sense they have for us.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution.
Buying options
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Learn about institutional subscriptionsNotes
- 1.
Compare Merleau-Ponty: ‘But it is just as sure that the relation between a thought and its object, between the cogito and the cogitatum, contains neither the whole nor even the essential of our commerce with the world and that we have to situate that relation back within a more muted relationship with the world, within an initiation into the world upon which it rests and which is always already accomplished when the reflective return intervenes’ (The Visible and the Invisible, 35).
- 2.
See also Travis’s ‘The Room in a View’, in Wollheim , Wittgenstein, and Pictorial Representation, Kemp, G. and Mras, G. (eds.) (New York: Routledge, 2016), 5.
- 3.
‘On When Words are Called For—Cavell, McDowell, and the Wording of our World’, Inquiry 46 (2003): 473–500.
- 4.
‘Wittgenstein and the Difficulty of what Normally Goes Without Saying’. Travis mentions Wittgenstein’s mistrust of phenomenology in ‘The Room in a View’, 24.
- 5.
I argue for this in Chapter Four of The Crisis of Method.
- 6.
And compare Merleau-Ponty’s referring to the phenomenal world as ‘the text which our knowledge tries to translate into precise language’ (PP, xviii/lxxxii).
- 7.
I elaborate on the way in which Travis’s ‘context-sensitivity’ underscores the Kantian lesson, in Chapter Four of The Crisis of Method.
- 8.
This is what contemporary Kantian objectors to the empiricist-mechanistic ‘myth of the given’ have been right about; and to them Travis—in his talk of objects of perception that form images on retinas—will seem to be begging the question, or simply succumbing to the myth, or both (see McDowell’s ‘Avoiding the Myth of the Given’, in Having the World in View (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009), 269; and ‘Concepts in Perceptual Experience’, in Reading Putnam , Baghramian, M. (ed.) (New York: Routledge, 2013), 345–6).
- 9.
This last point has affinity with Sellars’s and McDowell’s insistence on the distinction between ‘the space of reasons’ and ‘the realm of (natural) law’, except that the talk about ‘the space of reasons’ is an intellectualization and an abstraction of what we are beholden to, and must therefore in some way perceive, when we (try to) make, and respond to, sense. It seems to me that a better term for it would be ‘the phenomenal world’, understood as it is understood in this chapter.
- 10.
Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenology of Perception opens, precisely, with a sustained argument against the empiricist’s perceptual given (on its most common versions), but then goes on to argue that extant intellectualist, or rationalist, proposals for how to amend the empiricist story cannot do justice to, or so much as make sense of, a whole range of perceptual phenomena. In this way, Merleau-Ponty prepares the ground for the introduction of the phenomenal world, or ‘field’.
- 11.
In ‘Wittgenstein and the Difficulty of what Normally Goes without Saying’, I propose that this background is what Wittgenstein was gesturing at in his invocation of our ‘form of life’.
- 12.
‘A judgment of experience does not introduce a new kind of content, but simply endorses the conceptual content, or some of it, that is already possessed by the experience on which it is grounded’ (McDowell, Mind and World (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996), 49; see also 26). ‘[An] ostensible seeing that there is a red cube in front of one would be an actualization of the same conceptual capacities that would be exercised in judging that there is a red cube in front of one, with the same togetherness. This captures the fact that such an ostensible seeing would “contain” a claim whose content would be the same as that of the corresponding judgment’ (McDowell , ‘Having the World in View’, Journal of Philosophy 95 (1998), 458; see also 459, 461 and 476); and see also Sellars, Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997), 40). In response to pressure from Travis and others, McDowell has since come to reject the view that perceptual experience has propositional content. Later I will argue that McDowell’s recent attempts to hold on to the idea that our perceptual experience is nonetheless ‘conceptual’ are phenomenologically untrue and empirically implausible.
- 13.
See Burge, ‘Disjunctivism and Perceptual Psychology’, Philosophical Topics 33 (2005), 1–78. In attempting to undermine Travis’s account of perception and critique of Burge, Block attributes to him the idea that ‘representations in perception are all sub-personal’, and then claims to have provided empirical evidence that ‘we have visual representations of fearfulness of faces […]’ (‘Seeing-As in the Light of Vision Science’, 570). But this criticism misses its mark. The cognitive psychologist’s talk of sub-personal ‘representations’, whose possible sense and usefulness Travis grants, refers to what Travis calls ‘factive meaning’, or ‘effect-representing’—the kind of relation the width of a ring on a tree trunk may bear to the drought of 1923—which, according to Travis, is not the representing that may (sensibly be said to be) true or false, or correct or incorrect, of its object (cf. Perception, 24). And while it is true, as I will argue below, that Travis seems to overlook altogether the perception of physiognomic sense that is not conceptual—such as the perception of the fearfulness of a face—none of the findings Block cites in his paper support the idea that physiognomic perception consists of (anything sensibly called) representations , of fearfulness or anything else.
- 14.
This, it seems to me, is the fundamental way in which Travis’s view still differs from McDowell’s, even after all of the adjustments McDowell has made to his view since Mind and World. For, even though his current official position seems to commit him otherwise, McDowell still talks of perceptual experience as if it presented things to us (competent speakers and reasoners) as being some particular way, or ways—where the ways are capturable in indicative sentences of the general form ‘this or that is such and such’ (for a fairly recent expression of this idea, see ‘The Myth of the Mind as Detached’, in Mind, Reason, and Being-In-The-World, Schear, J. (ed.) (New York: Routledge, 2013), 43). For Travis, such determinate, propositional content is only brought into the picture by way of human judgments, which in turn are dependent on suitable contexts for the determination of their content. Apart from human judgment, what presents itself to us in perception is, on Travis’s view, indeterminate as far as propositional content goes. And this is crucially different from saying, as McDowell still does, that what presents itself to us in perception ‘includes any particular way it can be truly said to be’ (‘Concepts in Perceptual Experience’, 346, my emphasis).
- 15.
This, in contrast with philosophers such as Jerry Fodor, for example, who take it that thoughts, or representations, are built up of representational elements, or concepts, whose representational ‘content’—what they each contribute to the representational ‘content’, or ‘truth-conditions’, of whole thoughts—is independent of the representational ‘content’ of the whole thoughts to which they may contribute (cf. Perception, 181, and 357–63).
- 16.
As I note in ‘The Sound of Bedrock’, this is arguably also one of the main upshots of Wittgenstein’s remarks on ‘rule-following’ in the Investigations.
- 17.
For an excellent overview of the debate, and further references, see Robert Hannah, ‘The Togetherness Principle, Kant’s Conceptualism, and Kant’s Non-Conceptualism’, in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/kant-judgment/supplement1.html)
- 18.
This forgetfulness, as Merleau-Ponty himself notes (PP, 304/318), is evident throughout the ‘Transcendental Analytic’ of the first Critique, but seems to give way at certain points in the ‘Transcendental Dialectic’, especially in those moments in which reason’s demand for the ‘unconditioned’ or ‘absolute’—the demand that, when combined with the idea of the empirical world as a thing in itself, generates the antinomies—is presented not merely as the demand to transcend the ‘conditions of sensibility’, but also, even primarily, as the demand to transcend the temporal unfolding of empirical investigation, or, as Kant refers to it, ‘the successive synthesis of the manifold of intuition’ (CPR, A417/B444; and see also A493/B521 and A479/B507). As I propose in ‘Wittgenstein and the Difficulty of what Normally Goes without Saying’, Kant thereby acknowledges, in effect, that the natural home of those categories and concepts is a shared practice, or set of inter-related practices, in which we engage in, and against the background of, a world we already share with others.
- 19.
‘What’s the Point of Seeing Aspects?’ and ‘The Sound of Bedrock’.
- 20.
‘Wittgenstein and the Difficulty of What Normally Goes Without Saying’.
- 21.
The grammatical and phenomenological features of aspects that I’ll be appealing to are expounded in some of the other papers in this volume, especially ‘What’s the Point of Seeing Aspects?’ and ‘Aspects of Perception’.
- 22.
See also Travis’s ‘Suffering Intentionally?’, in Wittgenstein and Perception, Campbell, M. and O’Sullivan, M. (eds.) (New York: Routledge, 2015), 47.
- 23.
Cf. ‘Suffering Intentionally?’, 57
- 24.
See also ‘Suffering Intentionally?’, 51.
- 25.
‘Suffering Intentionally?’, 48.
- 26.
See also ‘The Room in a View’, 25–8.
- 27.
‘The Room in a View’, 17.
- 28.
‘Suffering Intentionally?’, 49.
- 29.
It is interesting to note that in setting up his discussion of aspects Travis seems to recognize only objective ‘looks’ (looks that the thing objectively has, and which are there for one to see) and subjective ‘looks’ (as when a pillar ‘looks bulgy’ to someone intoxicated) (see Perception, 101). What he misses is precisely the grammatical possibility of what Kant calls ‘subjective universal communicability’, which is neither objective nor subjective, and which according to Kant characterizes (the expression of the experience of) beauty.
- 30.
‘Suffering Intentionally?’, 53.
- 31.
‘Suffering Intentionally?’, 49.
- 32.
Travis seems to me to fudge the issue by saying that ‘the Necker cube, for example, does depict a cube in one orientation (call this the A cube) and a cube in another (call this the B-cube)’ (‘The Room in a View’, 15–16, emphasis altered), and by suggesting that ‘the Necker’s depiction of the A-cube’ is an ‘object of sight’ on par with Sid, or with a burnt toast (‘The Room in a View’, 18, my emphasis). I can only understand this as meaning that the two-dimensional drawing could serve as—it is such that, given a suitable context, it would be correct to take it to be—a depiction of a cube going this, or that, way (but not both at once). And while it may be that Napoleon liked the drawing better when it served to depict a cube going this way, rather than a cube going that way, or that in general he preferred cubes that (relative to him) went this way, we are now no longer talking about the perception of Wittgensteinian aspects, or about the seeing of something as something.
- 33.
Travis, as I said, is ready to think of some Wittgensteinian aspects—for example, what someone sees when she sees four evenly distributed dots in a straight line as two pairs side by side, or as two dots flanking a pair of others, or when she sees the letter ‘F’ as facing right, or left—as Vorstellungen, ‘things not in view’ (see ‘The Room in a View’, 22ff). He also suggests that when it comes to such aspects, the person has ‘executive authority’ over what aspect she sees (‘The Room in a View’, 25ff). This, it seems to me, misses the crucial importance of such invitations as ‘Try to see these as belonging together’, or ‘See this as facing that way’, in the teaching of mathematics, or architecture, for example, or in the appreciation of art, and in a whole range of other human activities. It also ignores the potentially far reaching consequences of a person’s seeing something one way rather than another (see Cora Diamond , The Realistic Spirit (Cambridge, MA: MIT University Press, 1991), 250). In the Phenomenology of Perception, Merleau-Ponty argues, on the basis of empirical evidence, that people who have a hard time seeing certain things as ‘belonging together’, or as ‘standing out’ from the rest, are significantly impaired in their acquisition and use of the most basic common nouns, or categories. ‘The categorial activity’, he writes, ‘before being a thought or a form of knowledge, is a certain manner of relating oneself to the world, and, accordingly, a style or shape of experience’ (PP, 191/197). This connects with my later argument that, pace Travis, what gets revealed in the dawning of Wittgensteinian aspects is of the essence of human perception.
- 34.
See also ‘Suffering Intentionally?’, 49.
- 35.
For a recent iteration of this basic argument, see Block, ‘Seeing-As in the Light of Vision Science’, 567–9.
- 36.
The Crisis of the European Sciences, 107.
- 37.
Wittgenstein too speaks in one remark of a ‘fusion’ (Verschmelzung) of seeing and thinking (PPF, 144). But, first, he is here talking about the experience, or moment, of recognizing an acquaintance in the crowd, not about the dawning of an aspect; and in recognizing someone, you do come to know something about the objective world. And, second, as is typical of his later remarks on perception, Wittgenstein presents the idea as something he ‘would almost like to say’, and then asks ‘why does one want to say this’ (PPF, 114); so the whole tenor of the remark is more tentative, and less theoretical, than what we find in Travis’s work on perception. Admittedly, it is also more tentative and less theoretical than what we find in Merleau-Ponty’s work on perception.
- 38.
‘Suffering Intentionally?’, 57.
- 39.
‘Suffering Intentionally?’, 57.
- 40.
I note that Travis’s view here, on which aspect dawning combines various sorts of (optional) experiences and an independent empirical judgment, seems very similar to that of the person that in ‘Aspect Perception and Philosophical Difficulty’ I called ‘the aspect denier’.
- 41.
That aspects may be identified with, or in terms of, empirical concepts was first proposed by Strawson (‘Imagination and Perception’, in Kant on Pure Reason , Ralph Charles Sutherland Walker (ed.) (New York: Oxford University Press,1982), 82–99 (Originally in Freedom and Resentment (London: Methuen, 1974)). It has since been proposed by Wollheim (In a supplementary essay to Art and its Objects (second edition) (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1980)); Schroeder (‘A Tale of Two Problems: Wittgenstein’s Discussion of Aspect Perception’, in J. Cottingham & P.M.S. Hacker (eds.), Mind, Method, and Morality: Essays in Honour of Anthony Kenny (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010); and Agam-Segal (‘Reflecting on Language from “Sideways-on”: Preparatory and Non-Preparatory Aspects-Seeing’, Journal for the History of Analytical Philosophy 1 (2012): 0–17).
- 42.
The earliest version of this idea is found in Strawson’s ‘Imagination and Perception’. Later versions may be found in Wollheim’s Art and its Objects (second edition); Mulhall (On Being in the World: Wittgenstein and Heidegger on Seeing Aspects (New York: Routledge, 1990), and ‘Seeing Aspects’, in Wittgenstein: A Critical Reader, Glock, H. J. (ed.) (Oxford: Blackwell, 2001)); Johnston (Wittgenstein: Rethinking the Inner (New York: Routledge, 1993)); and Schroeder (‘A Tale of Two Problems’).
- 43.
A fuller version of the argument for this conclusion may be found in ‘Aspects of Perception’. Here I mostly just rehearse the findings of that argument.
- 44.
McDowell seems to agree (‘Avoiding the Myth of the Given’, 263); but then he goes on to say that this is compatible with thinking that in discursive activity—and so in judgments, which he says can be thought of as ‘inner analogues to assertions’ (‘Avoiding the Myth of the Given’, 262)—‘one puts contents together, in a way that can be modelled on stringing meaningful expressions together in discourse literally so called’ (‘Avoiding the Myth of the Given’, 263). For Travis, this idea that the contents of judgment are put together in the way that words are put together when we talk, spoils the Fregean-contextualist insight of the primacy of whole thoughts (cf. Perception, 223 and 250).
- 45.
‘Suffering Intentionally?’, 55.
- 46.
For this idea, see Wollheim’s Art and its Objects, 220–1. And Travis similarly suggests that our relation to aspects might usefully be thought of as ‘Pyrrhonian’ (Perception, 409–412), where a Pyrrhonian attitude ‘has the content of a belief’, but lacks the commitment to (objective) truth that beliefs require (Perception, 405).
- 47.
This topic was broached in ‘Aspect Perception and Philosophical Difficulty’.
- 48.
The aspect’s combination of inseparability from what “has” it and transcendence of what “has” it, which I’ve tried to bring out, might seem paradoxical. It is therefore worth noting that this combination actually characterizes, as Wittgenstein suggests, our understanding of works of art, or the relation between such works and their sense, or what they express:
Doesn’t the [musical] theme point to anything beyond itself? Oh yes! But this means: the impression it makes on me is connected with things in its environment—for example, with the existence of the German language and its intonation, but that means with the whole range of our language games.
If I say for instance: here it’s as though a conclusion were being drawn, here as though someone were expressing agreement, or as though this were a reply to what came before, —my understanding of it presupposes my familiarity with conclusions, expressions of agreement, replies.
A theme, no less than a face, wears an expression.
“The repeat is necessary”. In what respect is it necessary? Well, sing it, and you will see that only the repeat gives it its tremendous power. –Don’t we have an impression that a model for this theme already exists in reality and the theme only approaches it, corresponds to it, if this section is repeated?… Yet there just is no paradigm apart from the theme itself. And yet again there is a paradigm apart from the theme: namely, the rhythm of our language, of our thinking and feeling (CV, 51-2; and see also PI, 527, 531, and 533).
- 49.
The Realistic Spirit (Cambridge, MA: MIT University Press, 1991), 249; cited by Travis in Perception, 196.
- 50.
The Realistic Spirit, 185.
- 51.
The Realistic Spirit, 249.
- 52.
Diamond later notes the possibility of being struck by the expression of a face without seeing it as the same as that of another face (The Realistic Spirit, 258).
- 53.
The Realistic Spirit, 249.
- 54.
Remarks on the Foundations of Mathematics, I, 116; cited by Diamond in The Realistic Spirit, 251.
- 55.
The Realistic Spirit, 248 and 251, fn. 18.
- 56.
The Realistic Spirit, 250.
- 57.
See The Realistic Spirit, 248 and 251.
- 58.
‘Avoiding the Myth of the Given’, 321.
- 59.
See ‘Avoiding the Myth of the Given’, 260.
- 60.
‘Avoiding the Myth of the Given’, 261.
- 61.
See ‘Avoiding the Myth of the Given’, 269; and ‘Concepts in Perceptual Experience’, 345.
- 62.
‘Avoiding the Myth of the Given’, 261; and ‘What Myth?’, Inquiry 50 (2007), 347.
- 63.
‘Avoiding the Myth of the Given’, 261.
- 64.
Contrast this understanding of perception with the mechanistic-atomistic approach that, according to Ned Block, is characteristic of vision science, on which there are ‘low level’ ‘perceptual attributives’—‘shape, spatial relations (including position and size), geometrical motion, texture, brightness and color’—‘that are the products of sensory transduction and are causally involved in the production of other [“high level”] visual attributives’ (‘Seeing-As in the Light of Vision Science’, Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 89 (2014), 560).
- 65.
Merleau-Ponty suggests that the same similarity and difference hold between human perception and the perception of insects (PP, 77–8/80–1).
- 66.
For plenty of empirical evidence, see Vasudevi Reddy’s How Infants Know Minds (Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 2008), especially chapters 8–10.
- 67.
I therefore agree with Dreyfus that an important task facing ‘existential-phenomenologists’ is to ‘spell out in much greater detail how conceptuality arises on the basis of being-in-the-world’ (‘The Myth of the Pervasiveness of the Mental’, 31). The chapter on speech and expression in the Phenomenology of Perception would be a good beginning for that work.
- 68.
The Gibsonian notion of ‘affordances’, commonly used in these debates, seems to me much too narrow for capturing the variety of affective and motor values perceived things can present themselves as having.
- 69.
I discuss the internal relation between figure and background in ‘Motivational Indeterminacy ’ and in ‘Wittgenstein and the Difficulty of What Normally Goes Without Saying’. I say ‘normal human perception’, because in some people—for example, some people on the autistic spectrum—the ability to effect the figure-background structure, to focus one’s attention on something and push other things to the background, is severely impaired.
- 70.
See ‘What Myth’, 346; and ‘The Myth of the Mind as Detached’, 43, 48, and 53.
- 71.
‘Avoiding the Myth of the Given’, 264; see also ‘What Myth?’, 347–8.
- 72.
‘What Myth?’, 347–8, my emphasis.
- 73.
‘Avoiding the Myth of the Given’, 265.
- 74.
‘Avoiding the Myth of the Given’, 270.
- 75.
‘What Myth?’, 347.
- 76.
‘Avoiding the Myth of the Given’, 263.
- 77.
See ‘Avoiding the Myth of the Given’, 260.
- 78.
‘Avoiding the Myth of the Given’, 261.
- 79.
See ‘Avoiding the Myth of the Given’, 261.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2020 Springer Nature Switzerland AG
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Baz, A. (2020). Bringing the Phenomenal World into View. In: The Significance of Aspect Perception . Nordic Wittgenstein Studies, vol 5. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-38625-2_9
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-38625-2_9
Published:
Publisher Name: Springer, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-030-38624-5
Online ISBN: 978-3-030-38625-2
eBook Packages: Religion and PhilosophyPhilosophy and Religion (R0)