Abstract
Some people have stressed that there is a close analogy between meaning experiences, i.e., experiences as of understanding concerning linguistic expressions, and seeing-in experiences, i.e., pictorial experiences of discerning a certain item – what a certain picture presents, viz. the picture’s subject – in another item – the picture’s vehicle, the picture’s physical basis. Both can be seen as fusion experiences, in the minimal sense that they are experiential wholes made up of different aspects. Actually, two important similarities between such experiences may lead one to think that they are experiences of the same type. In this paper, however, I will try to show that notwithstanding such similarities, these experiences are typologically different. For there are two dissimilarities between such experiences that are more relevant on this typological concern than their similarities. Indeed, unlike meaning experiences, seeing-in experiences are first of all recognitional experiences of a sort that makes them perceptual experiences (though sui generis) as well. Moreover, again unlike meaning experiences, seeing-in experiences are fusion experiences in the substantial sense that the experiential whole is more than the sum of its experiential parts taken in isolation, for when such parts figure in that whole, they interact with each other. In a nutshell, unlike meaning experiences, seeing-in experiences are proper fusion experiences.
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Notes
In this paper, I will assume that what the picture presents coincides with its subject, taken as what the picture is about. Actually, this assumption is rightly controversial. See fn. 9.
Husserl (2006) holds a similar idea as regards the relationship in pictorial experience between its experiential component that concerns what he calls the image-object – again, what the picture presents (which for him differs from the picture’s subject, taken as what the picture is about) – and the experiential component concerning the picture’s vehicle (cf. Eldridge 2018).
I do not want to deny that grasping a certain morphosyntactic structure in a (meaningless) expression goes along with grasping a structural form of meaning for it, as all philosophers of language endorsing a Chomskyan attitude as to meaning matters maintained. By hearing the meaningless Jabberwocky-like sentence “the mome raths the borogrove”, someone competent in English certainly grasps that something did something to something else. Yet she grasps neither the lexical meaning of its constituent expressions nor their truthconditional contribution, for there is none.
One might remark that this argument is simply based on introspective evidence. In one sense, this remark is correct. The argument is based on two cases of phenomenal contrast – the contrast between the auditory experience of a meaningless yet morphosyntactically articulated expression and the experience of that expression as endowed with a certain meaning, and the contrast between an expression in a certain morphosyntactic articulation and that expression in another such articulation – and sometimes at least, phenomenal contrast cases rely on introspection (Chudnoff 2015:56). Yet in another sense, the remark is incorrect. For the second case of phenomenal contrast simply serves to show that, as regards a meaning experience, its first aspect is identical to the auditory experience of an expression in a certain morphosyntactic articulation taken in isolation; in other words, that such an experience is unaltered by figuring as an aspect of a meaning experience. As we will immediately see, this is not the case with the perception of a picture’s vehicle qua mere physical object and the perception of it qua pictorial vehicle, i.e., the CF of a seeing-in experience.
Clearly enough, in order to so see the vehicle pictorially as it were, one must take a certain vantage point, as anamorphoses clearly show. But this is another issue.
One might legitimately wonder whether this is always the case. What about sculptorial seeing-in, in which since the vehicle is already 3D one must not project depth on it? One might say that one threedimensionally organizes the sculture’s vehicle without seeing anything in it. Yet even in that case, the proper visual grouping affecting the 3D elements of the vehicle as a sculpture’s vehicle in the CF of the relevant seeing-in experience enables the vision of that vehicle to be suitably modified, so that another 3D scene emerges in it as grasped in the RF of that seeing-in experience. This may be easily captured in Luca Patella’s Vasa physiognomica, a 3D sculptorial instance of the Rubin’s vase. In order for one to see a 3D ‘facial’ organization as protruding out of a receding 3D background organization, so that in a 3D vase and its surrounding space one sees two faces in profile as standing out of a background, one must suitably rearrange visually that vase and that space.
On this difference between the Kanizsa case and the Dalmatian case (and the fact that cognitive penetration is necessary for the nonpictorial and the pictorial reading respectively), cf. Zeimbekis 2015.
Pace Wittgenstein, who once said that meaning is a physiognomy (Wittgenstein 2009:§ 568).
If one distinguishes what a picture presents from its subject, once this is taken as what a picture is about (Husserl 2006, Nanay 2016, 2018; Voltolini 2015, 2018), one cannot read off from the picture’s vehicle properly threedimensionally organized what that picture is about, even if this is constrained by what the picture presents. Indeed, a picture may present the same scene, hence its seeing-in experience still mobilizes the same RF (and also the same CF), and yet be possibly or actually about different things compatible with that scene. This makes the picture not perceptually, but merely representationally ambiguous (Wiesing 2010; Voltolini 2015). For example, by still seeing in it the very same serious man in a hieratic pose, an incompetent audience may take Piero’s fresco of St. Louis de Toulouse as being about Michael Schumacher, the former F1 pilot, instead as being about St. Louis. Or a snapshot of Alan Parker’s Evita, in which one sees an elegant lady on a certain background, may count both as a picture of Madonna, the actress playing the role of Evita Peron in that movie, and as a picture of Evita herself. But for the purposes of this paper I leave this point aside.
Granted, one might wonder whether there is a sui generis cognitive phenomenology, or whether that phenomenology can be reduced to a kind of sensuous phenomenology (Carruthers and Vellet 2011; Prinz 2011; Tye and Wright 2011). If this were the case, one might surmise that the phenomenology of a meaning experience remains perceptual. Yet, there may be different meaning experiences of one and the same lexically ambiguous expression such that not only that expression remains auditorily experienced in the same way as far as its morphosyntactic identity is concerned, as we saw before, but also it involves the same mental imagery. For more on this, cf. Martina and Voltolini (2017).
I owe this example to an anonymous referee.
In Voltolini (2015), I provide an argument as to why this is the case. Only in the RF, but not in the face-to-face vision of the picture’s subject, one needs a conceptual content. For one needs to perceptually distinguish that subject from a different item, i.e., the picture’s vehicle, which in the CF of the relevant seeing-in experience one co-locates where, in the RF, one knowingly illusorily sees that subject.
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Acknowledgements
This paper has been originally presented in a seminar at Institut Jean Nicod, April 4 2018, Paris, and in two other conferences: The Borders of Perception, The Van Leer Jerusalem Institute and the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, January 16-17 2018, Jerusalem; Themes from Aesthetics and Phenomenology, Department of Philosophy and Education Sciences, University of Turin, June 7 2018, Turin. I thank all the participants for their stimulating remarks. I warmly thank Giulia Martina and Elisabetta Sacchi for their detailed comments on previous version of the paper, as well as two anonymous reviewers of this Review for their helpful criticisms.
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Voltolini, A. Different Kinds of Fusion Experiences. Rev.Phil.Psych. 11, 203–222 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s13164-019-00456-7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s13164-019-00456-7