Abstract
Two questions are addressed in this paper. First, what is it to see? I argue that it is veridical experience of things outside the perceiver brought about by looking. Second, what is it to see a material object? I argue that it is experience of an occupant of a spatial region that is a logical subject for other visual features, able to move to another spatial region, to change intrinsically, and to interact with other material objects. I show how this theory is different from the idea that object-seeing is merely the visual segregation of a region of the visual field. Finally, I argue that we do not object-see objects reflected in mirrors, surfaces of back-lit objects, and depictions of objects.
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Notes
Crowther (2018) discusses a closely related topic, the visual appearance of solidity.
Many authors (for example, Fish 2010) take the notion of a visual impression for granted and are happy simply to stipulate that CTP applies only to these. There is nothing wrong with this; elucidating vision is not the purpose of CTP. Nevertheless, an adequate elucidation of visual impressions, and particularly of object-impressions, provides a fuller understanding of the phenomena mentioned at the beginning of this paper and helps scotch some wildly counter-intuitive applications of the theory.
Despite his title, “The Causal Theory of Perception,” Grice was not primarily interested in perception. His aim, and his great achievement in this paper, was to distinguish between semantical and pragmatic explanations of everyday language implications. The main example, made relevant by the then unpublished views of Austin (1962) and of others listed by Alan White (1961, p. 158), was the idea that ‘X looks red’ implies either that somebody has denied that it is red, or that there is cause for doubt that it is. Grice transformed philosophy of language with his argument that this is a pragmatic, not a semantic, implication.
Snowdon (1980–1981) says that ‘looks’ should be understood “phenomenologically” in Grice’s CTP. I assume he is alluding to Frank Jackson (1977), who defines this as ‘looks F’ where F is a term for a colour, shape, or distance. This overlaps with the proposal considered in section III, and I’ll discuss it there.
To conform to Grice’s formulation, I have substituted ‘looks a certain way’ for ‘sees’ in this definition. As well, I have not (as Dretske does) insisted on logical necessity, which cannot, by its nature, apply to some but not all statements of the same logical form, and cannot therefore distinguish between ‘My hand looks this way’ and ‘His finances look this way.’ I have substituted the vaguer term, ‘analytically.’.
Such looks are a problem for artificial intelligence recognition-modules: the reason why it takes advanced computational techniques to recognize faces is that the look of a face is not reducible to low-level visual properties (see Martin 2010 for an explication of looks).
This is what Brogaard (2018, pp. 14–22) does, supplementing her view with an argument against top-down influences.
Snowdon (1980–1981, p. 176) incorporates visual phenomenology in his formulation of CTP, but he retains the tie to reports of the form, “It looks to me as if…” This reluctance to talk directly of visual experience is now passé: see, for example, Fish (2010), chapter 7. But it needs to be clarified that not every experience characteristic of seeing counts in this context: being dazzled by a flash bulb and having an after-image of it are effects of seeing the light, but do not constitute seeing it. For this reason, I have specified that it is an experience as of things outside the perceiving subject.
The same goes for the expectations that go with active looking. Suppose that the content of seeing something as a 3D object includes the expectation that if you move to the left, you will see parts of it that were theretofore hidden from sight; suppose the content of seeing something as a shadow or stain similarly includes the expectation that you will not. Then, the content of imagining that you see such objects includes the same expectations.
I should say here, for the sake of clarity, that attentive looking at an object is not necessary in order to see that object. You may look at a scene, or at one object in a scene, and thereby see (other) objects that you are not directly looking at.
Sensory substitution is an interesting case. TVSS-stimulated blind people who are tactually stimulated do report visual-like experiences of depth and perspective produced by an activity that resembles looking in relevant ways. I won’t pursue this discussion here, but see Macpherson (forthcoming), especially the Introduction.
Embarrassingly for Grice, he would have to say that the colour-blind person does see the same ‘5’ as the colour-sighted person.
Grice writes, “If someone has seen a speck on the horizon, which is in fact a battleship, we should in some contexts be willing to say that he has seen a battleship” (147). True: a lookout would get credit for having spotted it. But it’s hard to extend the same courtesy to a spotter who failed to discern a camouflaged moth right before his eyes.
Many thanks to Maarten Steenhagen who showed me some astonishing drawings of migraine auras, showing striking similarities between different subjects.
It’s not clear to me how his account would work in olfaction, gustation, and touch.
In a clever and instructive paper, Yetter-Chappell (2018) explicitly reverses this methodology, arguing (see her note 3) for an approach in which examples drive theory, rather than the other way around. I agree with many of the conclusions that she arrives at, but my aim to show how things go wrong or are different in certain examples, and here the theory of object-seeing helps.
There is a distant ancestor of this argument in Maxwell (1962), who asks whether we see “corporeal organisms” through microscopes, observing that there is a continuum (of unspecified dimensionality) between seeing through a vacuum and seeing through a microscope. It’s unclear, though, why either Yetter-Chappell or Maxwell before her, take the similarity of the external process to be the sole determinant of whether or not we see an object. Why don’t they allow that the dissimilarity of the resultant visual impression is relevant?
If we did not see the material object to which S belongs, there would be no difference between visually segregating S and seeing it as a material surface.
I was privileged to present versions of this paper at Oberlin College, New York University (Abu Dhabi), and Durham University. I am very grateful to Todd Ganson, Gabe Rabin, and Clare Mac Cumhaill for these opportunities and I thank my audiences for discussion, particularly my commentator in Abu Dhabi, Phillip Meadows. Two anonymous referees for this journal read the paper thrice each with amazing care and intelligence. They made a big difference.
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Matthen, M. Objects, seeing, and object-seeing. Synthese 198, 3265–3288 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-019-02279-6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-019-02279-6