Abstract
Early modern empiricists thought that the nature of perceptual experience is given by citing the object presented to the mind in that experience. Hallucination and illusion suggest that this requires untenable mind-dependent objects. Current orthodoxy replaces the appeal to direct objects with the claim that perceptual experience is characterized instead by its representational content. This paper argues that the move to content is problematic, and reclaims the early modern empiricist insight as perfectly consistent, even in cases of illusion, with the realist contention that these direct objects of perception are the persisting mind-independent physical objects we all know and love.
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Notes
I concentrate throughout on the case of vision. I believe that much of what I say applies equally to the other modalities, although I do not address this here. There are plausible counterexamples to the sufficiency of this characterization of visual illusion; but it is adequate for present purposes. My forthcoming ‘How to Account for Illusion’, and Perception and its Objects, contain further discussion.
Things are of course more complicated in case of secondary qualities, according to Locke. For, in one sense, all secondary quality perception is illusory: nothing in the mind-independent physical world is red, in the basic sense in which mind-dependent ideas are red. Still, in having such an idea before the mind, a physical thing may be said to look red*, that is, either disposed to produce red ideas in normal observers in normal conditions, or microscopically constituted in whichever way actually grounds that disposition. Some, but not all, such perceptions may then be illusory in a derived sense, in which something looks red* which is not. None of these details are relevant for present purposes.
See Stoneham (2002) for a compelling presentation of this account of Berkeley. Note, as with Locke’s account of the secondary qualities, predicates apply to persisting physical objects, according to Berkeley, in a way which is derivative of their more basic application to our fleeting ideas, which are their temporal, and ‘personal’, parts.
Having said that, I believe that there are significant, and illuminating, structural similarities between the latter Berkeleyian view, and Lewis’ (1998) account of the metaphysics of persisting (that is, in his view, perduring, rather than enduring) macroscopic physical objects, especially in the presence of his Ramseyian humility (2002). My forthcoming ‘Berkeley and Modern Metaphysics’, and Perception and its Objects, contain detailed development of this suggestion.
My forthcoming ‘Perception and Content’, and Perception and its Objects, contain extended critical investigation of (CV), in which the following difficulties are developed at length.
I entirely acknowledge that this is a very rough placeholder for what must in the end by a far more developed account of visually relevant similarities.
This idea is clearly in need of far more extended discussion. It also involves a controversial account of concepts and their possession. To make progress here I will have to leave further elucidation and defence for another occasion; but see Fodor (1998) for strong opposition.
I rely heavily here upon Martin (2004).
Thanks to Ian Phillips (draft) for pressing this objection very forcefully in his paper at the 2005 Warwick University Mindgrad conference.
Many thanks to Anil Gupta, who raised this line of objection in his wonderful comments at the Pacific APA, 2006, in Portland.
A second question from Gupta.
The first of these engages a third issues raised by Gupta in Portland; the second was raised by Nicolas Bullot’s very helpful comments at the Pacific APA.
See Campbell (2002), for a sustained and detailed development of this fundamental empiricist conviction.
Many thanks to Justin Broackes, Nicolas Bullot, Steve Butterfill, John Campbell, David Charles, Bill Child, Tim Crane, Imogen Dickie, Naomi Eilan, Anil Gupta, John Hawthorne, Christoph Hoerl, Hemdat Lerman, John McDowell, Jennifer Nagel, Johannes Roessler, Nick Shea, Alison Simmons, Paul Snowdon, Matt Soteriou, Helen Steward, Charles Travis, Ralph Wedgwood, Michael Williams, and Tim Williamson, for helpful comments on previous versions of this material.
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Brewer, B. Perception and its objects. Philos Stud 132, 87–97 (2007). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-006-9051-2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-006-9051-2