Abstract
I first present three philosophical theories on blurriness. The first theory says that seeing x blurrily is unlike seeing x as fuzzy; the second theory says that seeing x blurrily is seeing x as fuzzy; the third theory says that seeing x blurrily is seeing x without sufficient information on some of its surface visual details. I endorse the third theory. Then, I address the question whether blurriness can be considered a perceptual illusion. I argue that it can be a perceptual illusion and hence can involve some kind of perceptual error, without being a case of mismatch between perceptual content and things out there. In fact, I believe that the popular idea that illusions are mismatches between perceptual content and things out there is seriously flawed. In defending my claims, I rely on Kevin Mulligan’s theory on visual awareness and primitive certainty.
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Notes
- 1.
“[…] in the case of seeing sharp objects as fuzzy [‘blurry’ in the text], one’s experience comments innacurately on boundaries. It ‘says’ that the boundaries themselves are fuzzy when they are not. The the case of seeing blurrily, one’s visual experience does not do this. It makes no comment one where exactly the boundaries are. Here there is no inaccuracy” (Tye 2003, p. 81).
- 2.
Of course, it is also possible to have a blurry representation of something with fuzzy edges, that is, to see blurrily a fuzzy thing. Tye remarks that the difference between this experience and seeing clearly a fuzzy thing “has to do with the degree of representational indeterminacy in the experience. If the thing we see is an image (for example a painting), in seeing the image blurrily, one’s experience is less definite about boundaries and surface details than the fuzziness [‛blurriness’ in the text] of the image warrants. In seeing the same image clearly, one’s experience accurately captures the image fuzziness [‛blurriness’ in the text]” (Tye 2003, p. 82).
- 3.
Tye remarks that “in principle an experimental setup could be devised that would leave one without any way of telling from the phenomenal character of one’s experience (without any additional cues) whether one has shifted from seeing a sharp screen image through a blur to seeing a suitably blurred version of the same screen image in at least some cases” (Tye 2003, p. 82). This is precisely the situation for Sam, Nora and Sara: for them no phenomenal difference occurs (without additional cues). In fact, if there were such difference, they would not be so ambivalent between the two options or even mistake the one for the other. Curiously, Tye thinks that at least in the watercolour and other similar cases, a phenomenal difference can be detected even in the absence of other cues. I do not see how the watercolour case is in any sense different from these other cases (but I do not want to question him on these grounds).
- 4.
- 5.
Notice too that given the definition of illusion as a discrepancy, the blurred hen would be an illusion only if we endorse Dretske’s account of blurriness. I have said, however, that his account requires a solution to the difficult absence problem.
- 6.
In considering change of focus, Tim Crane suggests that “if you didn’t have the appropriate background belief you might think that you have magical powers and that the world is always bending to your intentions, becoming more or less blurred [fuzzy].” Crane’s further remarks that: “It is certainly true that subjects need not to take the world to have changed, in the sense that they would judge it to have changed or believe that it has changed. But all this shows, again, is the difference between perception and judgement/belief. So removing your glasses does not change the way you would judge the world to be, in normal cases. But there is still a change in the content of the experience, in what you would put into words. You might say ‘things look blurry now, even though I know they are not.’ And it makes sense to suppose that someone might come to believe, because of some strange background belief, that things were actually that way […]. There is, then, change in the intentional properties of the experience, despite the fact that normal subjects would not judge the world to have changed” (Crane 2001, pp. 143–144).
References
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Acknowledgments
I presented versions of this chapter at workshops in the philosophy departments of Parma and Bergamo. Thanks to the audiences in these workshops and particularly to Andrea Bianchi, Bill Brewer, Tim Crane, Jerome Dokic, Wolfgang Huemer, David Hughes and Alberto Voltolini. Special thanks to Marco Santambrogio.
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Calabi, C. (2014). The Blurred Hen. In: Reboul, A. (eds) Mind, Values, and Metaphysics. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-05146-8_14
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