Abstract
Do we directly perceive physical objects? What is the significance of the qualification ‘directly’ here? Austin famously denied that there was a unique interpretation by which we could make sense of the traditional debate in the philosophy of perception. I look here at Thompson Clarke’s discussion of G. E. Moore and surface perception to answer Austin’s scepticism.
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Notes
The discussion Clarke himself focuses on which expresses this view is from Chisholm (1957). While Chisholm does offer this picture of what is at issue in Moore, he doesn’t actually endorse this gloss on the distinction between direct and indirect since he thinks it is in fact false that seeing a part suffices for seeing a whole (thereby agreeing in part with Moore himself, who denied that the relation expressed by ‘see’ is automatically inherited over the part–whole relation).
A more subtle fallacy is the following:
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(1)
You do not see the backside of the tomato.
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(2)
If you do not see the backside of the tomato, then you do not see every part of the tomato.
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(3)
If you do not see every part of the tomato, then you do not see the whole tomato.
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(4)
The whole tomato is identical with the tomato.
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(5)
If you do not see every part of the tomato, then you do not see the tomato.
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(6)
You do not see the tomato.
The argument certainly sounds fishy, but it is not straightforward to tie down exactly where it goes wrong. The most salient controversy here concerns (4): one might suppose that on the construal of ‘whole tomato’ required to validate (3), (4) should be counted false. While according to a pure mereology, a continuant such as a tomato may be no more than the sum of its parts, many suppose that there is more to an integral object than just that, since objects can persist through loss or substitution of parts. But consider
(4*) The whole class is identical with the class.
If we accept that ‘the class’ is a plural term which picks out the plurality of members of the class, and allows us to speak severally or collectively of that plurality, then presumably we are inclined to accept this as true, whatever we think of (4) itself. Nonetheless we might grant
(3*) If you do not fail every member of the class, then you do not fail the whole class
as true even in circumstances in which
(5*) If you do not fail every member of the class, then you do not fail the class is false—perhaps because we think avoiding failing the class requires that a significant proportion actually passes. So despite the equivalence in entity between the class and the several individuals considered together, ‘whole’ interacts with other elements of the sentence in a way which prevents substitution salva veritate—an observation which might encourage one to exploit an event-based ontology in one’s semantics. Note, again, that this is certainly not an argument that Clarke invites us to endorse, but it helps underline that there is something complex in our thought about parts and wholes beyond the concerns he raises with unit concepts and arbitrary parts. (Thanks in particular to Sven Rozencranz for discussion of these issues.)
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(1)
Likewise, a possible block to Clarke here is to note that his explicit discussion implicitly rests on an assumption about the ranking of one’s perceptual position in a situation. He reasons from the fact that one is much better placed in ST than (b), and only somewhat better placed in (a) than (b), to being better placed in ST than (a). But it would be consistent with the ranking of ST as much better than (b) (for example that there is some situation ST* which is worse than ST but better than (b)), and (a) as only a bit better than (b), that ST and (a) are simply incommensurable: neither equal with each other, nor better or worse than the other.
Clarke’s hypothesis about the genesis of direct/indirect talk does fit Moore’s own discussion, though, in ‘Some Judgements of Perception’ on which Clarke is commenting.
In context, it is clear that Jackson assumes that ‘in virtue of’ is both asymmetric and transitive, so it could only be the case that one sees all objects mediately if, whenever one sees, one sees an infinite number of objects. So it is not surprising that Jackson should assume that there at least some immediate objects of perception. No such simple cardinality assumption explains why there must be mediate objects of perception.
Goodman defines ‘dissective’ so: ‘A one-place predicate is said to be dissective if it is satisfied by every part of every individual that satisfies it’. He defines ‘expansive’ correlatively so: ‘A one-place predicate is expansive if it is satisfied by everything that has a part satisfying it—or in other words, if it is satisfied by every whole consisting of anything satisfying it added to anything else’. See Goodman (1977, pp. 53–54).
Whether all sense-datum theorists would exploit this response is another matter. H. H. Price, who was for a time a student of Moore, insisted that all mental acts differ solely in terms of their objects; see Price (1932, p. 5). Likewise, Bertrand Russell in The Theory of Knowledge manuscript opposes a content view for all mental acts, associating this position with Meinong, and champions what he calls a dual-relation account for imagination and memory no less than sensation (Russell 1992).
I relegate to a footnote a question of comparison. In his ‘How to Interpret “Direct Perception”’, Paul Snowdon offers an account of direct perceiving, or ‘d-perceiving’, as he dubs it, which focuses on the connection between direct perception and demonstrative judgement:
x d-perceives y iff x stands, in virtue of x’s perceptual experience, in such a relation to y that, if x could make demonstrative judgements, then it would be possible for x to make the true demonstrative judgement ‘That is y’. (Snowdon 1992, p. 56)
Snowdon does not offer this exactly as an analysis of direct perception (he does not assume that the notion of demonstrative judgement is more primitive than that of sense perception itself), but rather as a criterion for determining which objects are directly perceived. So it is possible that the connotations associated here with direct or immediate perception would coincide with Snowdon’s account.
But there are problems with Snowdon’s proposal: as he is well aware, there are seeming examples of demonstrative judgements in examples which are nonetheless intuitively not cases of direct perception. Spying what looks to you to be Tom Cruise in mid distance, you might judge, ‘That man is one unpopular celebrity!’. As it turns out, you have pointed in the direction not of Cruise himself, holed up as he is in LA, but a life-size cut-out image of him carried by a fan. Many will come to the verdict in this situation that you have both made a demonstrative judgement about Tom Cruise and yet are not in a position to see him. So we have demonstrative judgement without direct perception.
Anticipating such worries, Snowdon attempts to define a contrast between derivative and non-derivative demonstration: he suggests that one can demonstrate someone via an image of that person only derivatively, and that involves knowing that one confronts an image, and singles Cruise out only as the object represented by that image. In the kind of case sketched here, Snowdon seems committed to claiming that one succeeds only in demonstrating the cut-out, and that one makes the strange mistake of confusing a piece of cardboard for a Hollywood celebrity.
This verdict is surely driven only by Snowdon’s account of direct perception. No doubt our judge has made a mistake: at the very least they are mistaken about how things stand in relation to Cruise; they are not in his presence, merely related through an image. But that doesn’t support the verdict that they cannot single Cruise out, or that it is unclear who they would be picking on.
Moreover, we might rather demand that there should be some explanatory connection between direct perception and demonstrative judgement: what explains why one can single out one object rather than another is precisely that one can perceive it. This explanatory connection allows for the possibility that other relations to an object, such as one provided through images or other reproductions, allow for demonstration too.
Note that there is no temptation to suppose that Cruise, as opposed to the cardboard print of his visage, gets to fix the way our subject’s experience is. So to the extent that the two accounts coincide, we might suggest this is because we are inclined to take direct or immediate awareness to be explanatory of, and so sufficient for, demonstrative judgement.
See Sorensen (1999) and Sorensen (2008). Sorensen, like Jackson, assumes that we see objects through seeing their surfaces (although in the case of shadowed objects, the surface is the further and not facing surface). Although he exploits explanatory competition considerations, Sorensen does not appeal to the conditions we highlighted above concerning their role in experience. Rather, Sorensen appeals to a simple causal theory of perception, and appeals to considerations of causal competition among parts of objects.
See, for example, McGinn (1982) and Davies (1992), and more recently Schellenberg (2010) and Montague (2011). In a more restricted vein, Mark Johnston claims that the character of hallucinatory experiences can be understood in terms of a sensible profile without reference to any entity which instantiates the universals that make up the profile (Johnston 2004).
See various of the papers collected in Davidson (1985).
One might look to the work of Daniel Dennett, and in particular Dennett (1991), for an example of a position which treats experience and consciousness as indeterminate. Dennett, like Davidson, is wary of privileging a first person perspective. Many of his critics interpret his position in this book as endorsing a form of anti-realism about sense experience and consciousness. It is more difficult to force such an interpretation on Clarke’s discussion.
Most notably, D. M. Armstrong offers a belief theory of perception in order to avoid any appeal to a notion of awareness (Armstrong 1968). In recent discussion, Tyler Burge is most notable for arguing for the centrality of a notion of perceptual representation entirely independently of any concern with sensory consciousness (Burge 2010).
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Acknowledgments
This paper derives from a series of talks over the years about Thompson Clarke’s discussion of surface seeing, and lectures on perception in Berkeley, Milan and Barcelona. In particular, versions of part of this material were presented at conferences in Paris, Dublin, and in Bordeaux at an occasion in honour of Clarke. I’m grateful to the audiences of these presentations for their questions. And in particular to John Campbell, Hannah Ginsborg, Véronique Munoz-Dardé, Sven Rosenkranz, Marco Santambrogio, Paul Snowdon, Barry Stroud and Charles Travis for comments and questions. Thanks are also due to the patience of the editors, and useful comments and corrections from anonymous referees.
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Martin, M.G.F. Elusive Objects. Topoi 36, 247–271 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11245-016-9389-9
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11245-016-9389-9