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Contextualism about object-seeing

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Abstract

When is seeing part of an object enough to qualify as seeing the object itself? For instance, is seeing a cat’s tail enough to qualify as seeing the cat itself? I argue that whether a subject qualifies as seeing a given object varies with the context of the ascriber. Having made an initial case for the context-sensitivity of object-seeing, I then address the contention that it is merely a feature of the ordinary notion. I argue that the notions of object-seeing that earn their explanatory keep in both vision science and the philosophy of perception are context-sensitive as well.

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Notes

  1. For some similar cases, see Dretske (1969, 27) and Neta (2007).

  2. Dretske (1969, 28) seems to suggest a view along these lines, although he merely suggests it in passing without defending or clarifying the view in any detail. More recently, Neta (2007) has also defended a view along the lines of (CS); he too does not go beyond cases. Clarke (1965) defends a view that departs from (CS) in one important way. According to him, sees is a “unit concept.” A unit concept F only applies to O in a given context if O is the unit determined by that context, and it only applies to a certain amount of O (e.g. its facing surface) if that amount is the unit determined by the given context. It follows that if F applies to O in context C, then it does not apply to any part of O; whereas, if it applies to part of O then it does not apply to O itself. Thus, in the case of seeing, Clarke’s view is that if O has been singled out as “the relevant unit” then the subject counts as seeing O; whereas, if the facing surface of O, say P, has been singled out then the subject only counts as seeing P (not O). The problem with Clarke’s view is that it just does not fit the linguistic data. Seeing-ascriptions of the following sort are commonplace: “I see Bill and all of his toes”; “She saw the house and its beautiful façade.”

  3. See Kennedy (1999) for a detailed discussion of scalar analyses.

  4. It is for this reason that Stanley’s (2004, 2005) arguments against the view that ‘knows’ exhibits the same kind of context-sensitivity as gradable terms such as ‘tall’ do not threaten the contextualist account of ‘sees’ that I’m defending here.

  5. See Phillips (2014) for a more detailed discussion of the notion of high integration, as well as the way in which Kriegel deploys it.

  6. See DeRose (2009, 112–17) for a similar point in defense of the claim that the apparent context-sensitivity of ‘knows’ cannot be explained away in terms of implicatures.

  7. See Strawson (1959) for a version of this view.

  8. There may well be reasons for thinking that which properties one represents (in thought or perception) is a context-sensitive affair. However, it is extremely plausible that the demonstrative element of Roger’s thought refers to the crocodile, not its tail. Claiming that which property his thought counts as representing is a context-sensitive affair does nothing to alter that point. Thus, in order to avoid the worries mentioned above we still need to posit a context-invariant reference-fixing mechanism for his thought’s demonstrative element.

  9. For some non-descriptivist reference-fixing mechanisms that are compatible with the claim that we refer, in thought, to the objects we perceive in a context-invariant fashion, see Campbell (2002) and Dickie (2011).

  10. Once again, I will not argue for the view that which properties are represented in perception (or thought) is a context-invariant affair. In brief, though, one reason for denying that which properties are represented in perception is a context-sensitive affair is that the phenomenal character of a perceptual experience is plausibly constituted by those facts concerning which properties it represents. Given that the phenomenal character of my experience does not seem to vary with the interests of ascribers, this suggests that which properties my experience represents does not vary in this way either. But that is a topic for another paper.

  11. This appears to be Burge’s view of seeing (2009, 31, 2010, 456).

  12. See Putnam (1975) and Kripke (1980).

  13. See Nanay (2010, 2011, 2012, 2015) for a defense of this view.

  14. Grice (1961) is the locus classicus of causal theories of perception. See Gates (1996) for a compelling argument that that no purely informational-causal account of reference (be it perceptual or cognitive) can avoid the kind of indeterminacy described above.

  15. See Clark (2006) and Dickie (2010) for similar points.

  16. It is well known that top-down attention can drive the selection of targets. See Pylyshyn and Annan (2006) for a discussion.

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Acknowledgments

I would like to thank the following people for useful input on earlier versions of this paper: Jacob Berger, Tony Dardis, Ryan DeChant, Jørgen Dyrstad, Nemira Gasiunas, Grace Helton, Zoe Jenkin, Uriah Kriegel, Laura Larocca, Myrto Mylopoulus, David Neely, Gary Ostertag, Jesse Prinz, Jake Quilty-Dunn, David Rosenthal, Jonathan Schaffer, and Elmar Geir Unnsteinsson. I’m also grateful to audiences at the CUNY Cognitive Science Speaker Series, L’Institut Jean Nicod, and the University of Toronto.

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    Ben Phillips

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Phillips, B. Contextualism about object-seeing. Philos Stud 173, 2377–2396 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-015-0619-6

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