Abstract
I defend indirect perceptual realism against two recent and related charges to it offered by A. D. Smith and P. Snowdon, both stemming from demonstrative reference involving indirect perception. The needed aspects of the theory of demonstratives are not terribly new, but their connection to these objections has not been discussed. The groundwork for my solution emerges from considering normal cases of indirect perception (e.g., seeing something depicted on a television) and examining the role this indirectness plays in demonstrative assertions. I argue that indirectness routinely if not typically plays a justificatory role in such judgements, and not a semantic one, and that the same can be said of such judgements when considered within the indirect realist framework. The denial of this, on my analysis, is essential to the criticisms of Snowdon and Smith. The discussion is extended to include scenarios involving the sorts of misconceptions Smith employs.
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Notes
All references to Smith are to his 2002, and all references to Snowdon are to his 1992. Snowdon (1980–1981) makes some similar points in his 1980–1981, but I focus on his 1992.
Sample colour subjectivists are Russell (1912), Boghossian and Velleman (1989), and McGilvray (1994). Objectivists include Dawes Hicks (1912, 1913/1914) and Byrne and Hilbert (2003). Some of the dual referent theorists are Frege (1884, Sect. 26), Peacocke (1984), Maund (1981), Rosenthal (1999), Georgalis (2005), and Brown (2006). Another notable alternative that an indirect realist can endorse is colour relationalism (e.g., Cohen 2004).
“Now it is perfectly true that when an observer looks at a painting, photograph, sculpture, or model, he gets an indirect visual perception, a mediated experience, an awareness at second hand, of whatever is represented” (Gibson 2004, p. 170).
Snowdon sketches an account of perceptual dependence but none of its subtleties affect the present work. As a result a detailed discussion of it has been removed due to considerations of length. Note also that I am not implying that the direct/indirect division and the dependent/nondependent division are the same. However, given the similarities between the objections to indirect realism of Smith and Snowdon, and that Smith employs the indirect/direct division and Snowdon the dependent/nondependent division, we can assume that our discussion concerns overlapping aspects of the contents of these distinctions.
There are different ways of giving perceptual dependence semantic status. The one focused on here is somewhat abstract but metaphysically and logically straightforward, insofar as these things ever are. Some might prefer to appeal, for example, to a perceptual analogue of Frege’s mode of presentation, so that for Daniel the violin is being presented in a different ‘perceptual mode’ than it is for Chloe. In this case the logic and the nature of such ‘modes’ would need development (e.g., Peacocke (1986), has suggested something along these lines for perception generally, and calls such perceptual modes ‘manners’, although makes no mention of its application to the division between direct/indirect perception). Not much will hinge on this issue, as I will try to make apparent below (see footnote 12).
Of course one can construct scenarios in which Chloe’s remark should be interpreted as being about the television screen instead of what it depicts. For example, if Chloe were watching a fuzzy television picture get clearer and clearer while being asked ‘Do you see a violin yet?’ she may, once the picture is sufficiently clear, say ‘Now that is a violin’ and mean by this ‘Now that is a depiction of a violin’. In this case she is plausibly talking about the television screen, but again perceptual dependence is not given semantic status, for she is not talking about what she is dependently perceiving (the violin).
I wish to thank Phil Corkum for making me see this point.
The alternative is that Snowdon’s point is that his Gettier solution is the solution, and indirect realism cannot countenance it and thus should be rejected. I take this gloss to be implausible given the variety of available Gettier ‘solutions’.
To make the television analogy work the indirect realist has to maintain that our sensations are more like live television than pictures in Gettier scenarios. I take the idea that the sensations of perception are representational to be a familiar tenet of indirect realism that has well-known difficulties. I also take Snowdon to be seeking to make a novel point, and thus to not simply be claiming that this tenet is problematic.
The argument just given can be reconstructed using perceptual modes of presentation (see note 7) instead of the property 〈x is nondependently perceiving y〉. Some technicalities would arise but the same conclusion could be reached. At bottom this is because, regardless of how one explicates one’s semantics for nondependency, Snowdon has given no reason to hold that ‘That is a flower’ in general expresses the proposition 〈that is a flower I am nondependently perceiving〉. And without such a reason, indirect realists are not prevented from evaluating ‘That is a flower’ as true.
In this and the next section I employ the perceptual ‘directness’ terminology instead of the perceptual ‘dependency’ terminology because, unlike Snowdon, Smith prefers it. As I already stated, I see no reason to prefer one over the other in the present context.
Although I cannot attribute this point to Smith, for he does not explicitly make it, I believe that something like this is part of what motivates his criticism of indirect realism. And, for better or for worse, I certainly formulated this point by reflecting on Smith’s provocative remarks, some of which will be quoted shortly.
Camp’s (2002) worthwhile book is devoted to exploring referential issues like this. A discussion of it unfortunately is not possible here.
Perceivers get the slightest clue that this is happening when they experience halluncinations such as afterimages, where, according to projectivism, a perceiver sees something in front of him (e.g., a blotch of red), but knows that this thing is not physically in front of him, but is somehow in his mind.
A third difference between our scenarios is that what is depicted on a television is by its nature public and the content of one’s perceived sensation is seemingly private. A staunch adherent of Wittgensteinian arguments against the possibility of private languages may thus find the television analogy of little use. I unfortunately cannot discuss this matter here.
Perhaps the reader will find it helpful to consider an example I owe to Adam Morton. Our televisions could depict a parallel universe that we cannot more directly perceive. This, it seems, would not prevent us from demonstratively referring to items in the depicted world.
A draft of this paper was delivered at a colloquium at the University of Alberta Philosophy Department in March 2007. I learned much from the audience reactions. I would also like to thank William Demopoulos for reading an early draft of this paper, Cara Spencer for many helpful comments, and an anonymous Philosophical Studies referee for suggestions. Finally, I wish to thank Julie Ho for allowing me to begin work on this paper on our ‘vacation’ in Thailand in May 2006.
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Brown, D.H. Indirect perceptual realism and demonstratives. Philos Stud 145, 377–394 (2009). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-008-9237-x
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-008-9237-x