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Seeing-as, seeing-o, and seeing-that

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Abstract

Philosophers tend to assume a close logical connection between seeing-as reports and seeing-that reports. But the proposals they have made have one striking feature in common: they are demonstrably false. Going against the trend, I suggest we stop trying to lump together seeing-as and seeing-that. Instead, we need to realize that there is a deep logical kinship between seeing-as reports and seeing-objects reports.

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Notes

  1. Where ‘o’ is a name or a definite description that refers to some particular (object, event, or property instantiation)—e.g., ‘the dog’, ‘Rover’. As these examples indicate, I shall exclusively be concerned with objects. For some of the complexities surrounding reports where ‘o’ refers to events and property instantiations (tropes)—e.g., ‘S saw John jumping’, ‘S saw John jump’, ‘S saw John’s jumping’—see Mulligan (1999).

  2. Where ‘F’ is an adjective or noun designating some feature or property (e.g., colour, shape, kind property)—being large, being a dog, etc. So the schema ‘S sees that o is F’ is supposed to encompass both ‘S sees that the dog is large’ and ‘S sees that Rover is a dog’.

  3. See Travis (2013a) for a T-theorist firmly opposed to the view that perception has content. Brogaard (2014) is a recent collection of essays on the content debate.

  4. See e.g. McGinn (1997, 49), and Tye (2007, 603) for arguments of this sort.

  5. I am grateful to Xing Liu for this example.

  6. For seeing-in, cf. Wollheim (2005). Audi (2003, ch. 1; 2013, ch. 1) suggests that seeing-to-be is distinct from seeing-that. Jackson (1977, 157–9) also distinguishes ordinary (non-transparent) seeing-that from the notion of seeing, of something, that it is F. For all I will say in this paper, it is quite possible that there are interesting and important affinities between seeing-as and seeing-to-be.

  7. For a recent collection of papers, see Harrington et al. (2018).

  8. At least he is sometimes interpreted in this way (e.g. Wilkerson 1973; Grice 1991, 5; Prinz 2006, 436). Mulhall (2001) offers a different interpretation.

  9. For reasons Grice (1991, especially Chaps. 1, 2, and 15) has spelled out at length.

  10. A striking case of visual agnosia is described in the title essay of Sacks (1986).

  11. It is true, of course, that we sometimes say that someone ‘sees ghosts’. Most philosophers would take this to be a special use of ‘see’ that we can set aside (e.g. Dretske 1969, 48; Audi 2013, 11). But see Brogaard (2015) and Bourget (2017) for an opposing view.

  12. Putting (i) and (ii) together, we can say that seeing-o reports are ‘extensional’.

  13. Statements (i)-(iii) are accepted by, among many others, Chisholm (1957, ch. 10); Warnock (1965); Dretske (1969); Jackson (1977, ch. 7); Searle (1983, ch. 2); Armstrong (1993, ch. 10); Audi (2003, ch. 1); Cassam (2007, ch. 1); Travis (2013, esp. ch. 7).

  14. They also underscore a point I alluded to in the introduction: Seeing-that is not exclusively a matter of perceptual experience (since it implies believing-that).

  15. See the references in footnote 13 as well as Stroud (2002), McNeill (2010), and many others. However, (iv) has been disputed, e.g. by McDowell (2002, 277–8) and Pritchard (2012, 26 − 7). This minority view is typically justified by reference to the following sort of possibility: I see a barn on a hillside in circumstances that are epistemically impeccable. However, I have been told by an otherwise reliable source that there are no actual barns about—they are all mere facades. And thus I do not believe that there is a barn on the hillside. Subsequently, I find out that the information I had been given was false—there was an actual barn on the hillside. Would I not be justified in saying now that I had seen that there was a barn on the hillside (Pritchard 2012, 26)? I think not. What I can truthfully say in retrospect is that I saw a barn on a hillside. I wouldn’t have said so at the time. But even in retrospect it remains the case that I did not see that there was a barn there, for the simple reason that I did not then realize that there was. Consider a case in which more is at stake. You and your friend are enjoying the view from the vertical cliffs at Flamborough Head in Yorkshire. Then, with that look on her face that indicates she is only joking, your friend adopts a posture that suggests she is going to jump. You do not believe for a second she will jump, but then she does, plunging to her death. Later you have to explain why you did not do anything to prevent the tragedy. ‘Did you see that she was going to jump?’ The correct answer is ‘No’.

  16. This is accepted by many, including Dretske (1969), Kvart (1993), Williamson (2000, ch. 1), and Cassam (2007, ch. 1). For opposition, see Pritchard (2012).

  17. Exactly what those conditions are is a matter of some dispute. See Warnock (1965) and Dretske (1969) for two classical accounts, and Jackson (1977) for criticism and an alternative proposal.

  18. Some philosophers dispute this. See, e.g., Chisholm (1957, 164) and Kvart (1993, 286).

  19. That there is such secondary ‘seeing-that’ is emphasized by, among many others, Warnock (1965), Dretske (1969, ch. 4), Jackson (1977, ch. 7), Cassam (2007, ch. 1), and Travis (2013a, 238).

  20. To some extent, this is dialectically permissible, though, since many of the T-theorists discussed in this paper accept the majority view. But any reader who has doubts about any of these claims can think of my argument as a conditional one: If one accepts certain widespread views about seeing-o and seeing-that, then one should not be a T-theorist. Having noted this alternative, conditional rendering of my argument, I shall continue to present it in categorical form.

  21. I will come back to this point, as it needs to be qualified to come out true.

  22. I am assuming that the fact Hartnack alludes to is the fact that the thing is a car.

  23. See, among many others, Fleming (1957, 173-4), Wilkerson (1973, 482), Dretske (2004, 285-6), and Prinz (2006, 437).

  24. Kvart is an extreme T-theorist in that he believes not only seeing-as, but even seeing-o can be ‘reduced’ to seeing-that. The next section makes it clear that—as less extreme T-theorists such as Dretske and Travis correctly insist—no such reduction is possible.

  25. As I do not assume that seeing-that entails knowing-that, it is only the factivity condition that is important here.

  26. While Smith thinks this is a simple and natural thought, he stops short of advocating it outright. Unfortunately, I was less cautious in Overgaard (2017).

  27. Pace Chisholm (1957, 122). (Indeed, according to Wittgenstein, as he is standardly interpreted, it would not be far from the truth to say that S can only see o as F if she does not believe o is F. But I was not going to talk about Wittgenstein.)

  28. See, e.g., Pitcher (1971, ch. 2) and Armstrong (1993, ch. 10).

  29. See Gregory (1998, 185–8) for a dramatic illustration.

  30. A referee points out that if S were to form a belief on the basis of her experience alone, she most likely would believe (or be inclined to believe) that the person was shrinking. This is true, I think, but seeing-that p (or zeeing-that p) implies that one actually believes that p, or is actually inclined to do so. My point is that S may not be so inclined in the situation described. Whether she would have had such an inclination had the situation been different in certain ways is another matter, which does not affect my argument.

  31. As emphasized by Dretske and Travis, among many others.

  32. The following argument is due to Frank Jackson (1977, 155).

  33. As Dretske (2000, ch. 7; 2007) has argued. See also A. D. Smith (2001) and Tye (2006), both of whom refer to the experiments I am about to mention.

  34. See Block (2011) for discussion of more recent experiments employing Sperling’s paradigm.

  35. The example is Jackson’s (1977, 165).

  36. And it is of course because of this specification that the seeing-as reports capture something about what the situation is like from the subject’s point of view.

  37. See also Dretske’s (1969, 24) example of a brick (in a brick wall) that looks some way to S although the brick is not seen, as well as the discussion in French (2018, 140).

  38. It follows from this that Austin is wrong to think seeing-as only applies in special cases. Does it also follow that all seeing is seeing-as? It does if every case of seeing that o is F is a case of seeing some particular (though not necessarily o). That antecedent seems to me overwhelmingly plausible, and so I do think all seeing is seeing-as. But does seeing o as F involve wielding the concept f, then? That depends on what ‘concepts’ are, and on the constraints that govern their possession and application. This is deeply controversial territory (see Margolis & Laurence 2021 for an up-to-date overview). If only linguistic creatures have the ability to apply concepts, then I am committed to the view that not all seeing-as involves the application of concepts. However, if concept possession is not necessarily tied to the possession of language, there may be a way of understanding conceptual capacities such that even simple animals can have them. Still, even if that is so, it does not follow that all seeing-as must involve the application of concepts. These are deep and difficult issues, which I cannot even begin to resolve within the confines of this paper.

  39. As Ody Stone has pointed out to me, to have something look to one like ‘somebody doing something’ is already a very sophisticated achievement—presumably well beyond the visual capacities of most animals, for instance. Thus, the example is unfortunate, given that Vesey wants to argue that all seeing is seeing-as.

  40. For others who make similar points, see Searle (2015, 74 − 5), McGinn (1997, 49), and Tye (2007, 603). Incidentally, McGinn and Tye make these points as part of arguments to the effect that perceptual experience has (a certain kind of) representational content. Very roughly, the arguments proceed as follows: whenever we see something, it looks some way to us. Whenever something looks some way to us, we see it as (being) that way. Whenever we see something as being some way, our visual experience represents it as being that way. The existence of arguments of this sort illustrates what might be at stake in the discussion of seeing-as for someone like Travis, whose position is that there is no such thing as perceptual representational content. If one can show (i) that seeing-that is not perceptual and (ii) seeing-as logically behaves like seeing-that, then there is no good reason to think that whatever representational content we can derive from seeing-as must be perceptual content. But if the T-theorist’s case cannot be made, Travis cannot deflect the argument in this way.

  41. Predecessors of this paper were presented at conferences and workshops at the University of Copenhagen (2017), Ludwig-Maximilians-University Munich (2017), Katholieke Universiteit Leuven (2018), and the University of Gdansk (2018). I thank all organizers and participants for stimulating discussion. I am especially indebted to Tom Roberts, Ody Stone, and two anonymous referees, for insightful and helpful comments on previous drafts of the paper.

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    Søren Overgaard

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Overgaard, S. Seeing-as, seeing-o, and seeing-that. Philos Stud 179, 2973–2992 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-022-01810-9

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