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Transparency, representationalism, and visual noise

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Abstract

Those who endorse the twin theses of transparency and representationalism with regard to visual experience hold that the qualities we are aware of in such experience are, all of them, apparently possessed by external objects. They hold, therefore, that we are not introspectively aware of any qualities of visual experience itself. In this paper I argue that attention to visual noise—also known as ‘eigenlicht’ or ‘eigengrau’—puts pressure on both of these theses, though in different ways. Phenomenally, visual noise does not even seem to belong to any external objects, which is a challenge to transparency. Moreover, visual noise is not the normal visual response to any distinctive external property, such as external graininess. Nor is it treated by our visual system as the perception of any such property. Given extant views of visual representation, it is therefore implausible to claim that it is the transparent representation of any such property.

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Notes

  1. Tye (2014, p. 40). See also Harman (1990, p. 39).

  2. See, for example, Tye and Harman. Transparency has also been used to defend naïve realist views of perception. See Allen (2016), Kennedy (2009), and Martin (2004). But a discussion of naïve realism is beyond the scope of this paper.

  3. See Pace (2007) and Smith (2008). Kind (2003) and Siewert (2004) also call Tye’s strong brand of transparency into question, but not on the basis of particular counterexamples such as blur.

  4. See Dretske (2003), Tye (2003) and Schroer (2002). See also Allen (2013) for discussion of these and other interpretations of blur.

  5. Bourget (2015). This particular argument is a defense only of representationalism, not of the transparency thesis. The consistency of representationalism with the denial of transparency is defended in Siewert (2004) and Pace (2007).

  6. Although I do not know of any studies regarding the open-eyed, daylight version of eigenlicht, a surprisingly high proportion of researchers on the Color and Vision Network (CVNet) spontaneously corroborated my own experience.

  7. Schwitzgebel (2011).

  8. Fechner (1860/1966), p. 138.

  9. Volkmann (1846), p. 311.

  10. Ladd (1903), p. 79.

  11. Helmholtz (1856/1909/1962, p. 7).

  12. Interestingly, Helmholtz’s phrase—‘the “luminous dust” of the dark field’—occurs in a quotation offered by Freud (1913, p. 24). In that quotation the dust plays precisely this role of the substrate for various interpretations. Freud attributes the quotation to Wundt (1880), but seems to be in error.

  13. Kind (2003).

  14. In favor of this phenomenological point, consider one’s experience as one opens one’s eyes in a very dimly lit room, facing a blank wall. The noise that characterizes one’s closed-eye experience continues to characterize one’s opened-eye experience, but it does not seem to move to the surface of the wall.

  15. One might suggest that we do not in fact always experience visual noise, but only that it is always there to be experienced, if we direct our attention to it. This may be true, but that only increases the relevant difference with blur. A hallucination we can summon at will is much stranger than an illusion caused by whatever particular circumstances cause blurred vision. And the dependence on attention makes good sense if what we are attending to is a feature of the experience, rather than of the represented world, since there would normally be no reason to attend to features of experience that do not represent anything.

  16. This observation casts doubt even on Charles Siewert’s more careful formulation of transparency: ‘You cannot attend to how it appears to you, by turning your attention away from something that appears to you, and towards your experience’ (2004, p. 35).

  17. See Allen (2011).

  18. For a very nice overview of tracking representationalism more generally, see Bourget and Mendelovici (2014).

  19. Dretske (1988) and Millikan (1989).

  20. Neander (2017), chapter 8.

  21. Tye (2000), pp. 121–122, 136–137.

  22. Pelli (1990).

  23. See Millikan (1989), pp. 283 and 288.

  24. Tye (2000), p. 136.

  25. See Horgan and Tienson (2002), Loar (2003) and Pautz (2013).

  26. Siewert (2004), p. 26.

  27. I should register that I do not find this argument at all persuasive. It seems to take the form of an argument from elimination: nothing else can determine content, so phenomenal character must do so. But the same arguments that eliminate other candidates seem to me to eliminate phenomenal character as well, leaving us with the original puzzle about determinate content.

  28. Loar (2003), Siewert (2004), and Crane (2000).

  29. I do not mean that we see it, as we see external objects. Rather, in noting visual noise, we are aware of a feature of the way in which we see external objects.

  30. Dretske (2003), p. 80. In fact, Dretske’s point concerns representationalism, but it applies equally well to transparency.

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  1. Department of Philosophy, The College of William and Mary, P.O. Box 8795, Williamsburg, VA, 23187-8795, USA

    Joshua Gert

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Gert, J. Transparency, representationalism, and visual noise. Synthese 198, 6615–6629 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-019-02480-7

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