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A puzzle about seeing for representationalism

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Abstract

When characterizing the content of a subject’s perceptual experience, does their seeing an object entail that their visual experience represents it as being a certain way? If it does, are they thereby in a position to have perceptually-based thoughts about it? On one hand, representationalists are under pressure to answer these questions in the affirmative. On the other hand, it seems they cannot. This paper presents a puzzle to illustrate this tension within orthodox representationalism. We identify several interesting morals which may be drawn in response, each of which teaches us something interesting and important about perceptual experience and its interface with cognition and related phenomena.

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Notes

  1. See also Chalmers (2010: 376). As McDowell has put it: “That things are thus and so is the content of the experience, and it can be the content of a judgment […] if the subject decides to take the experience at face value” (1994: 26).

  2. By ‘otherwise about’, we mean to leave open whether perceptual experiences have non-propositional contents or are non-discursive in format. For instance, Block (ms.) claims that their iconic format means that perceptual experiences are non-propositional. Nonetheless, “[t]here are many cases in which an iconic representation singles something out and in which there is demonstration at the level of content” (ms.). We discuss format further in Sect. 4.2.

  3. We note here that Burge’s views on the format-content distinction are subtle (see 2009: 248; 2010a: 95, n. 45).

  4. By ‘applications’, Burge means token acts of demonstration (2007: 76), since demonstrative types depend for their reference on features of the context of their use—in particular, on causal relations to the objects which trigger their tokening (2010a: 451).

  5. Roberts et al.’s (2016) results show that this conclusion about seeing is consistently drawn by non-philosophers.

  6. Unlike the ‘austere’ views targeted by this line of argument, descriptivists like Searle (1983)—for whom perceptual experiences are about objects by virtue of their satisfying the condition that they have been an appropriate cause of the experience (or bear some other relevant relation to it)—are not compelled to divorce facts about what a subject sees from matters of content. They build causal (or other relational) conditions into the content itself.

  7. Cases of blindsight provide an orthogonal and isolated counterexample. If there is a sense of ‘sees’ in which blindsighters see objects in the affected part of their visual field, it is not one with which we will be concerned.

  8. For some endorsements see Dretske (1969: 9), Schellenberg (2010: 21–22), Soteriou (2000: 184), and Tye (2009: 77). Burge (2009: 308) even implies that visual-perceptual reference is equivalent to seeing.

  9. We need not deny that Sadie may be able to achieve singular thoughts about either matchbox by non-perceptual means, for example by using reference-fixing descriptions.

  10. It is no good claiming that the fusion of the two matchboxes figures in the content of Sadie’s perceptual experience. Even if that hypothesis were true, what Sadie sees are two, not one.

  11. Of course, if the stimuli in each eye comes from a plurality, e.g. ten circles, then the output might be a representation of mean depth. But in Case 3 each eye receives stimuli from one object.

  12. Those who remain sceptical of (3) may like to reflect on Sect. 4.3 below.

  13. Others, such as Lande (2018a) and Quilty-Dunn (2019), offer additional constraints, having to do with the holistic nature of iconic representation, feature-binding and configural-binding. They, too, do not appear to entail constraints on number.

  14. As Quilty-Dunn notes, iconicity “is a natural psychological kind, and thus cannot be defined a priori. A full characterization of iconicity will instead emerge from empirically grounded theorizing” (2019: 4).

  15. A reply questioning this assumption is explored in Sect. 4.4.

  16. Note that this does not mean we must give up on finding some philosophically interesting border between perception and cognition. Such a border might instead be grounded in non-representational, architectural features, such as perception being modular unlike cognition (Mandelbaum 2018).

  17. For recent criticism of the slot-model and the difficulty of describing overflow without it, see Gross (2018).

  18. For a precedent of this claim see Block (2012).

  19. This example is based on Dretske (2007: 229, n. 9).

  20. Burge (2010a) sometimes appears to use ‘single out’ as a synonym for ‘refer’ (83). It is at least clear he does not have in mind some distinctive and exclusively perceptual capacity (see 2010a: 176).

  21. Burge elaborates his apparent demand by claiming that for perceptual reference to an object the visual system “must isolate it by perceiving and perceptually attributing some aspect of it that distinguishes it from other elements in the environment” (2010a: 455, n. 39). Is Elizabeth in a position to do this? Not if one reads ‘all other’ here for ‘other’. But then this requirement looks rather strong in the face of the Ganzfeld example. On the weaker reading, Elizabeth is able to categorize B and C as boxes, distinguished from their backgrounds.

  22. This outline owes much to Jones (2010: 81–8).

  23. Elsewhere: “languages themselves are free of vagueness but […] the linguistic conventions of a population […] select not a point but a fuzzy region in the space of precise languages” (Lewis 1970: 228).

  24. For some further discussion of this kind of view see Dorr (2014) and Dorr and Hawthorne (2014: 333–6).

  25. For more on the notion of uniformity of interpretation within the many contents picture, see Dorr (2014).

  26. Dickie (2015) has claimed that to make a singular perceptual judgment about an object one must bear a relation to it which enables one to reliably get its observational properties right (at worlds where error would amount to irrationality). She appeals to this constraint in suggesting that only attentional perception is sufficiently reliable. If Dickie were right, perhaps we should expect attentional seeing to be required for the truth of seeing. However, even granting her constraint, it is far from clear that Elizabeth fails to meet it. As we said, were B and C not a sufficiently similar colour or shape, binocular rivalry would make her judgments reliable during each interval, and were they sufficiently similar in colour or shape her experience would faithfully represent them.

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Acknowledgements

We would like to thank everyone who attended a departmental colloquium at the University of Haifa for their helpful questions on this material. Special thanks also to Jonathan Berg, David Jenkins, Arnon Keren, and Samuel Lebens for their comments.

Funding

Funding was provided by the Israel Science Foundation (Project No. 1220/17) and The Humanities Fund.

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  1. Department of Philosophy, University of Haifa, Eshkol Tower, 199 Aba Khoushy Avenue, Haifa, 3498838, Israel

    James Openshaw & Assaf Weksler

  2. Psyphas Program in Psychology and Philosophy, University of Haifa, 199 Aba Khoushy Avenue, Haifa, 3498838, Israel

    Assaf Weksler

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  1. James Openshaw
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Correspondence to James Openshaw.

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Openshaw, J., Weksler, A. A puzzle about seeing for representationalism. Philos Stud 177, 2625–2646 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-019-01331-y

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