Abstract
Is there a difference between visual experience and visual judgement? According to Daniel C. Dennett there is not: visual experience has no content over and above the content of the visual judgements we are disposed to make. As he puts it in his book Consciousness Explained: “There is no such phenomenon as really seeming — over and above the phenomenon of judging in one way or another that something is the case” (1991, p. 364). I think that this is wrong: there is a difference between presentational content and judgemental content in visual perception, between “seeing as” and “visually judging that.” To get at the difference I will focus on the phenomena collectively known as visual filling-in.1
The ideas discussed in this paper are treated at much greater length in Pessoa, Thompson & Noe (1999). This essay is greatly indebted to my collaboration with Luiz Pessoa. For helpful remarks I also wish to thank Daniel Dennett, Stephen Grossberg, Jim McGilvray, and Francisco Varela.
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Notes
The term “filling-in” is used in many ways in visual secience. There is not space to go into all the senses here. For further discussion, including a taxonomy of the various “perceptual completion” phenomena, see Pessoa, Thompson & Noe (1999).
See Todorovic’ (1987) for a good treatment of this debate.
There are at least two ways to interpret Dennett’s claim, however. See the critical discussion below.
Cf. Creutzfeldt (1990, p. 460): “a temporary interruption of neuronal activity, such as during saccades, is not perceived as a gap, and absent signals can be interpreted as positive percepts such as in the filling-in across the optic disk or a cortical scotoma. The assumption then that the correlation of activities of certain groups of neurons may represent essential information about stimuli... would have to include the registration of negative correlations or absence of correlations as well, each of them resulting in a different percept.”
In visual science the term “filling-in” often has the sense of providing a roughly continuous spatial representation of a visual region. But the difference between Dennett’s two stories enables us to see how there could be a purely symbolicinferential version of the filling-in debate (compare Nakayama & Shimojo 1990). Here the issue would be: how many of the premises need to be “filled-in” in inferential processing? How often can one simply “jump to the conclusion” without bothering to fill-in the premises? Cf. Dennett (1993, p. 208): “The difference I am after is the difference between jumping to a conclusion and stepping to a conclusion by making some bogus steps on which to rest the conclusion (e.g., paint in the region, and then use that painted-in region as one’s ‘evidence’ for the conclusion subsequently drawn.” Notice how this runs together the things I am trying to disentangle.
Dennett’s position on filling-in has provoked a critical response from Churchland and Ramachandran (1993). They disagree with Dennett because they think that the brain isn’t merely “finding out” in the perceptual filling-in of the blind spot and artificial scotomata. They also disagree with Dennett’s claim that there are no neural responses devoted to the blind spot, citing Gattass’s work (Fiorani et al. 1992) as showing the contrary. As far as I can see, however, Churchland and Ramachandran don’t think the brain fills-in in the sense of providing a roughly continuous spatial representation. In fact, on the basis of Ramachandran’s other writings (Ramachandran 1992a, 1992b, 1993a; Ramachandran & Gregory 1991), it seems to me that they might be prepared to accept some variant of the second story I attribute to Dennett — the one where the brain attaches a label. In any case, I think the debate would be better conducted in relation to issues in visual science about isomorphic models and linking propositions. This is what I go on to discuss.
For recent statements of this idea see Varela et al. (1991) and Flanagan (1992).
In using the term “non-judgemental qualitative content” I should not be understood as defending “qualia” as typically understood in Anglo-American philosophy of mind. Qualia are usually understood as purely phenomenal properties of experience. I agree with Merleau-Ponty, however, that all experienced qualities are inherently intentional though not necessarily judgemental. See especially his critique of the idea of sensation in his Phenomenology of Perception (Merleau-Ponty 1945/1962). For further discussion, see Thompson (1992, 1995).
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© 1999 Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht
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Thompson, E. (1999). Filling-In : Visual Science and the Philosophy of Perception. In: Fisette, D. (eds) Consciousness and Intentionality: Models and Modalities of Attribution. The Western Ontario Series in Philosophy of Science, vol 62. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-015-9193-5_7
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