Abstract
In this paper I consider the relationship between the spatial properties of visual perceptual experience and the sense-datum inference. I argue that the sense datum inference should be accepted if spatial properties are not merely intentionally present in such experiences. This result serves to underline the seriousness of the difficulties that are presented to direct realism by a particular class of illusory spatial experiences based on the geometry of visual perceptual experience. In light of these considerations I argue that it is a constraint on direct realism that the underlying spatial character of visual perceptual experiences must be the same as that of the physical world.
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Notes
See, for example, Peacocke (1983).
See, for example, Boghossian and Velleman (1989).
There is a tendency among even the most scrupulously thorough philosophers to betray some confusion about spatial properties in this regard. Peacocke, for instance, writes, “… we are not saying that experiences have colour properties or spatial properties.”, but on the next page goes on the say, “… the fact that an object does subtend a large visual angle does causally explain its presentation in a large region of the visual field” (Peacocke 1983). The question naturally arises: what is the ‘region of the visual field’ a region of, if not a region of space?
Compare also what we should say about other properties that can be instantiated by objects belonging to very different ontological categories, e.g. number properties (if numbers be properties): it would not be right to say that a material object is one, whereas the corresponding element of a perceptual experience of it is one’.
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Meadows, P.J. Space and the Sense Datum Inference. Topoi 35, 601–609 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11245-015-9331-6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11245-015-9331-6