Abstract
I argue that some perceptual experiences are vague. To do so, I identify a characteristic feature of vagueness and show that some perceptual experiences have this feature. These include blurry experiences, experiences of color under low lighting, and experiences of number, as in the case of the speckled hen. The conclusion that these experiences are vague has two noteworthy consequences. First, it presses us to see whether and how existing theories of vagueness can be extended to perceptual experience. Second, it sheds light on several puzzles in the philosophy of perception.
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Notes
Although I will assume it, I do not take it to be a necessary condition for vagueness. By comparison, moral vagueness might be compatible with the non-cognitivist view that moral sentences don’t have accuracy-conditions.
For example, if an act-object theory of perception is true, in the object of the experience. Of course, it’s hard to see how an object could have a determinable property without having any full determination thereof. For this reason, Price (1941) takes Determinable Perception to be inconsistent with the sense-datum theory (pp. 285–286), and Armstrong (1968) takes it to tell against the existence of mental qualities (pp. 219–221).
Block (2015, p. 4) notes this distinction in the perceptual setting, using ‘intervalic’ to mean determinable.
He might also conflate vagueness with ambiguity: a vague word, says Russell, is one with multiple meanings.
Stazicker (2018) gives a different argument for Determinable Perception.
Dorr (2003) also makes this point. But he draws a different lesson from it: he concludes that vagueness is a matter of linguistic convention. This is one view about vagueness that won’t translate easily to perceptual experience.
Munton defends a premise similar to this one (2016, pp. 306–307), which I’ll discuss in Sect. 3.2.
I can also imagine the following objection: since the concept of evidence is normatively laden, the argument moves from normative premises to a non-normative conclusion. One might doubt whether that’s an acceptable way to learn non-normative facts.
I believe the representationalist can accept this argument without undermining her representationalism, because Perkins and Bayne’s objection to representationalism is unsound. The objection equivocates between using ∇ and Δ, the borderlineness and definiteness operators, as operators on sentences vs. as operators on propositions. Perkins and Bayne deny that there are vague properties, or, I take it, vague propositions. So they ought to use ∇ and Δ as operators on sentences. But their objection to representationalism relies on substituting properties, rather than predicates, within the scope of ∇ and Δ. Such substitutions require that ∇ and Δ be operators on propositions.
Pp. 80–81. Perkins and Bayne’s example concerns color rather than number, but the idea is the same.
Williamson considers a cursory argument for Vague Perception. Adapting a point from Friedrich Waismann, Williamson writes: “I saw that there were many stars in the sky. If the content of my visual impression is what I saw in that sense, visual impressions themselves—not just our descriptions of them—can be vague” (p. 93). Williamson doesn’t evaluate the argument. See also his fn. 39 (p. 287).
See Williamson (1994, pp. 230–234).
I prefer to talk about vague sentences, rather than vague predicates, because it’s natural to talk about the accuracy of both sentences and experiences. The discussion could be reformulated in terms of vague predicates. Then the issue would be whether a predicate accurately applies to (or represents) an object, but it’s not quite so natural to talk about whether a perceptual experience accurately applies to (or represents) an object.
It may be worth noting two other possible differences between truth and accuracy. First, a sentence might be accurate or inaccurate with respect to a given level of generality. For example, ‘Venus has about fifty spots’ might be accurate with respect to the order of magnitude of Venus’s spots, but not with respect to the exact number of her spots. Nevertheless, it seems coherent to ask whether it is accurate simpliciter. The same goes for perceptual experiences. I thank an anonymous referee for raising this point. Second, truth, unlike accuracy, might be disquotational. But I do not see why our ability to disquote a representation should be required for the representation to be vague. Indeed, McGee and McLaughlin explain borderlineness by appealing to a correspondence theory of truth (1994, pp. 208–219).
I also suppose that S is not an evaluative sentence, in order to avoid complications about whether empirical investigation suffices to discover evaluative facts.
I thank an anonymous referee for this point.
Could infants or non-human animals investigate whether an experience is accurate? If not—for example, if doing so requires the concept of accuracy—then these creatures can’t have experiences that satisfy part (b) of the Borderline Perception Condition. But, since the Borderline Perception Condition is a sufficient condition, this doesn’t preclude them from having borderline experiences. I think the three kinds of experience I discuss below are vague no matter what kind of creature has them. Thanks to Chris Hill for pressing me on this.
Admittedly, the schemas won’t always be useful. They will tell us whether the proposition that Venus has about fifty spots is vague, but they won’t tell us whether there is any such proposition.
Which is not necessarily to say that it’s fully accurate. Perhaps, as an anonymous referee suggests, an experience must be fully determinate to be fully accurate. If this so, then it seems to me that an experience like that in Fig. 1 would be accurate simpliciter without being fully accurate. By comparison, if Venus has fifty spots, then ‘Venus has about fifty spots’ would be accurate simpliciter without being fully accurate.
To be clear, on my view, the blurriness around the edges of the range is first-order vagueness, not higher-order vagueness. I suppose it’s possible that the blur could have sharp borders, and thus represent a precise determinable range, but my blurry experiences at least aren’t like that.
P. 16. The case originally comes from Jeffrey (1965, p. 154).
As an anonymous referee points out, there is a different view on which every experience of color is inaccurate. It is the view that objects in the world aren’t really colored. If this is so—and if every visual experience is an experience of color—then every visual experience is inaccurate. That would undermine my argument for Vague Perception. That said, I still think there will be something vague about visual experiences. By comparison, there is something vague about the sentence ‘there are about fifty round squares here’. I could, more cumbersomely, reframe the argument in terms of whether part of the experience is accurate, or whether the experience is accurate with respect to a certain matter, like the location of an edge. For simplicity, I will assume in the main text that some visual experiences are accurate.
Munton (2021) summarizes the result as follows: “the visual system does not need to represent or count the individual members of a set to arrive at an impression of its numerosity” (p. 653). See also Clarke and Beck (2021), who complain that researchers tend to use the term ‘numerosity’ without explaining what numerosity is, if it’s something other than number. What I am arguing, in effect, is that representations of numerosity are vague representations of number.
See Pautz (2007, p. 508).
I’ve discussed only visual experiences, but experiences in other modalities will also qualify. For example, imagine hearing a drumroll and wondering how many beats it had or from which direction exactly it came.
See the “forced-march sorites” of Horgan (1994) for a paradox that mentions, rather than uses, vague terms (pp. 173–176).
Unlike the sorites series that gives rise to worries about observational predicates and indiscriminability (see fn. 14), the series here is one in which the world varies while the experience itself is held constant. Perkins and Bayne (2013) use a series of this sort to motivate the claim that it can be borderline whether an experience is accurate (pp. 79–80).
These theories might extend to other representations that are linguistic in nature, like concepts or Fregean propositions. But perceptual experiences are not linguistic in nature: non-linguistic animals can have them.
The term ‘semantic indecision’ comes from Lewis (1986, p. 212).
See Williams (2014).
Representationalists about perceptual experience hold that perceptual experience consists in representation. If vagueness consists in the failure of metarepresentational facts to fully settle content, representationalists will have to accept that some experiences consist in representations whose content is not fully settled.
See Tye (2000, p. 138).
I thank two anonymous referees for helping me to see how Williamson’s view might be adapted to perceptual experience.
Graff Fara (2000) gives a contextualist account emphasizing that the speaker’s interests are part of the relevant context. However, Graff Fara takes the sorites paradox, rather than borderline cases, to be characteristic of vagueness, and explicitly refrains from giving an account of borderline cases. It might be worth exploring whether the perceiver’s interests are relevant to the accuracy-conditions of a perceptual experience.
It is consistent with their view, however, that your experience provides more evidence than just its content. For example, it might provide evidence of the fact that you are having that experience (though see Bacon [2018], p. 109), or of the fact that you are having an experience that is characteristically associated with certain noise. It is consistent with their view that it is rational to update your credences by Bayesian conditioning on all this evidence.
I’m using scare quotes here so as not to assume that their usage of ‘imprecise’ matches up to mine (on my usage, ‘imprecise’ just means vague).
Thanks to an anonymous referee for pressing me on this point.
Morrison takes ‘veridical’ to mean not illusory. It’s not clear to me whether he thinks (or whether we should think) that veridicality is accuracy.
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Thanks to Chris Hill, Elizabeth Miller, Adam Pautz, Jack Spencer, and two anonymous referees for this journal for generous feedback and discussion.
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McKee, P. Vague perception. Philos Stud (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-024-02130-w
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-024-02130-w