Abstract
Let us call ‘veridicalism’ the view that perceptual beliefs and observational reports are largely truthful. This paper aims to make a case for veridicalism by, among other things, examining in detail and ultimately deflating in import what many consider to be the view’s greatest threat, the so-called ‘theory-ladenness’ of perception and/or observation. In what follows, it is argued that to the extent that theoretical factors influence the formation of perceptual beliefs and observational reports, as theory-ladenness demands, that influence is typically not detrimental to their veridicality or at least not irreversibly so. Central to the defence of veridicalism are two principles: that of internal similarities and that of internal dissimilarities.
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Notes
The answer to the question whether observation is distinct from, though of course related to, perception is a topic of contention. I do not take a stance on this issue, though I do stick to the convention of branding beliefs ‘perceptual’ and reports ‘observational’.
Contrary to popular belief, the term ‘theory-ladenness’ seems to have originated with Ryle ( [1954] 1960, pp. 90–91), not Hanson.
A useful taxonomy of different types of theory-ladenness can be found in Brewer and Lambert (2001). Following others in the debate, including Brewer and Lambert, I label all such factors ‘theoretical’, knowing full well the differences that exist between them.
Having said this, not much later stage perception/observation would presumably be veridical if earlier stage perception were not. Thus, studies like Raftopoulos (2001), where it is argued that early vision perception is impermeable to prior knowledge about specific events and objects, are still useful in deflecting some objections to the potential veridicality of perception.
See Brewer and Lambert (2001, pp. S180–181) for more details on attention and theory-ladenness.
I’m quite sympathetic to the general spirit of this article. Notably, Dilworth and I share a fondness for representationalism, though I will not argue for it here.
Injective mappings are functions that preserve the distinctness or difference of elements. That is to say, different elements in the domain (in this case E) are mapped to different elements in the co-domain (in this case I).
For example, he asserts that “[t]his consideration makes all physical inference more or less precarious” (p. 255). But, at the same time, he seems willing to entertain methods through which external differences can be made discernible—see discussion below.
The sensory system consists, roughly speaking, of all those parts of the body that play a role in the processing of stimuli into perceptions, including the sensory receptors, various neural pathways and parts of the brain.
The well-delimited range includes much of what we call ‘macroscopic’ objects at an appropriate size and distance as well as their associated stimuli.
Indeed, the foregoing quotations betray some of these qualifications. Hume talks about likeness or similarity instead of sameness. Russell worries about diachronicity and thus stipulates, in at least some formulations, that the percepts in question must be simultaneous. For the record, I do not subscribe to this stipulation as it is plainly too strong.
The same stimulus supposition was chosen to simplify the example. The point I am about to make holds even when we suppose that the stimuli are merely similar.
In such cases, some form of the causal (or a hybrid causal) theory of reference must hold true, at least in the sense that in the absence of a common language repeated pointing and uttering is necessary if individuals are to stand any chance of establishing agreement about the denotation of terms. Having said this, I do not wish to claim that all cases of successful reference must be subject to one particular theory of reference, causal or other. See Votsis (2011) for a pluralist approach to reference.
Notice that if this second type of transplantation were true, it could no longer be true that a 1 -like perceptions are dissimilar to b 1 -like perceptions and a 2 -like perceptions are dissimilar to b 2 -like perceptions, i.e. each pair would of necessity be similar.
The source of the susceptibility to the various illusions is often contested by further studies. For example, a comparison of the potential sources of susceptibility to the Müller-Lyer illusion can be found in Berry (1971).
Ironically, anti-veridicalists fail to recognise that to get real traction from these experiments and studies one needs to endorse their veridicality.
Normal perception requires sensory systems that satisfy the principles of internal similarities and of internal dissimilarities for a specific range of stimuli. That range depends on the particular species under consideration. On a different note, Hanson (1958) briefly considers such a drawing test but surprisingly fails to properly evaluate its importance in solving the theory-ladenness problem at hand.
To make things harder, we may even ask that which drawing goes into which pile should also be determined by which drawings are similar to which other drawings so long as there are 2n drawings in 10 piles. This is harder because similarity is an intransitive relation. That is, two drawings that are judged to be similar to an image may not be similar to one another. Note that intransitivity does not mean anti-transitivity! The stronger the notion of similarity employed the less likely that two things that are similar to a third are not also similar to each other.
By divergent conceptual resources I do not, of course, mean individuals with significant intelligence handicaps.
Needless to say, laypersons in relation to a scientific field will not be in possession of bridge principles associated with that field.
Having said this, it must be granted that it is usually more convenient for scientists to formulate their observation reports in a way that talks directly about entities and their properties. For example, it is more expedient for an observation report to assert that the nucleus of a cell is undergoing mitosis instead of asserting that the blob in the image splits into two blobs, etc.
I do not expect scientists to adopt this form of expressing what is evidentially of merit for it is obviously too cumbersome to explicitly split observations sentences into two parts. As I already mentioned, I don’t think scientists have to worry about theory-ladenness in most situations so there is generally no harm in continuing to express themselves the way they do so now.
Kepler’s bridge principle is strictly speaking false. We know since Newton’s time that the sun is not static as, among other things, it not only pulls other planets with its gravitational field but also gets pulled by their own gravitational fields.
Let me stress that the inter-individual and inter-cultural convergence mentioned here is about judgements of similarity and dissimilarity not about perceptions themselves. As we saw earlier, perceptions are allowed to vary considerably between individuals.
Incidentally, this is the way van Fraassen defends his notion of observability against accusations of vagueness.
Inter-individual and inter-cultural convergence do not require a universal similarity measure for all domains of inquiry. Such convergences would hold even if each domain of inquiry necessitated its own similarity measure so long as the totality of those measures were shared by the different individuals and cultures.
This kind of emphasis on locality has been promoted, quite correctly in my view, by Norton (2003), who argues that the problem of induction arises out of an unreasonable expectation to find a universal schema of induction.
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Acknowledgments
In the process of writing this paper I benefited from discussions with, and I am therefore thankful to, a number of people at various universities, including research seminars at LSE, Bristol, Leeds, Oxford, Rotterdam, Duesseldorf and Pittsburgh, where I presented related material. Particular thanks are due also to an anonymous referee for their detailed and useful feedback. I gratefully acknowledge the German Research Foundation (Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft) for funding my research under project B4 of Collaborative Research Centre 991: The Structure of Representations in Language, Cognition, and Science. Part of this paper has been written while working on the project ‘Aspects and Prospects of Realism in the Philosophy of Science and Mathematics’ (APRePoSMa) during a visiting fellowship at the University of Athens. The project and my visits are co-financed by the European Union (European Social Fund—ESF) and Greek national funds through the Operational Program ‘Education and Lifelong Learning’ of the National Strategic Reference Framework (NSRF)—Research Funding Program: THALIS—UOA.
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Votsis, I. Perception and observation unladened. Philos Stud 172, 563–585 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-014-0319-7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-014-0319-7