Abstract
Naïve realism is the view according to which perception is a non-representational relation of conscious awareness to mind-independent objects and properties. According to this approach, the phenomenal character of experience is constituted by just the objects, properties, or facts presented to the senses. In this article, I argue that such a conception of the phenomenology of experience faces a clear counter-example, i.e., the experience of seeing aspects. The discussion suggests that, to accommodating such a kind of experience, it must be acknowledged that perception is, at least in part, representational.
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Notes
Advocates of (NR) offer several arguments against (CV). A consideration of them, even superficial, is out of the scope of this paper. The original arguments can be found in Campbell (2002), Travis (2004), Brewer (2006, 2011), and Johnston (2006). For responses, see Byrne (2009), Siegel (2010), McDowell (2013), and Schellenberg (2011, 2013, 2018). Johnston (2014) extensively argues against (CV). However, at some point, regarding his conception of experience, he speaks of sensory episodes as having conditions of veridicality (Johnston, 2014, p. 108, 129, and 130). This notion naturally suggests the idea of content. It is unclear how it is supposed that he can reconcile the idea that experience is contentless with the one that it has conditions of veridicality.
Another source of trouble comes from cases that involve cognitive penetrability. See Cavedon-Taylor (2018).
Wittgenstein speaks here of “an aspect’s lighting up.” See Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, xi, § 118)
There are, of course, other cases of seeing-as: for example, seeing a similarity between two faces. I focus on ambiguous figures because they are paradigmatic cases of seeing aspects and have been considered by some (NR) advocates.
There are many examples of ambiguous figures, and not all of them raise the same issues. However, the duck-rabbit example is sufficient and suitable for the present purposes.
Notice that this is true even when both people pay attention to the same parts of the drawing.
In such a case, it would be very difficult to specify what the subjects are aware of by looking at Jastrow’s figure, because to say that they are perceptually conscious of the figure as a set of lines is to specify how they take the perceived item to be.
I further develop this argument in Kalpokas (2015). Of course, to speak of how the figure looks like refers to how it visually appears. This way of talking is committed to the idea that aspects can, in effect, be experienced.
Wittgenstein envisages this possibility in PI, xi, § 257. Strawson (1974, p. 63) conceives a similar situation. I develop this line of thought in Kalpokas (2015). It might be questioned that aspect-blindness is a visual condition. But this would be desperate: the subject’s incapacity does not lie in the judgments she can make but, rather, in her inability to see the relevant aspects.
Just like Brewer, other advocates of (NR) hold that concepts feature experience. For example, Johnston claims that conceptual sophistication “helps us to search and mine a sensed field for exemplifications” (Johnston, 2006, p. 284). However, Johnston does not explain to what mining for exemplifications amounts. Since sensing does not involve classification or conceptualization of the perceived exemplifications (Johnston, 2006, p. 283), it remains unexplained how concepts work in experience and how it is that they help us see different aspects in ambiguous figures. Likewise, Fish acknowledges that the phenomenal character of experience not only depends on the current layout of our surroundings but also, crucially, on the subject’s conceptual capacities. In looking at an object, it is by possessing the relevant concept that a scientist can see a particular fact about it, e.g., being a cathode ray tube (Fish’s example). What is at play here is “a capacity to recognize, through vision, certain features in the world; it is a conceptual capacity because possession of the capacity requires the subject to possess the relevant concept” (Fish, 2009, p. 69). However, Fish does not explain how the subject’s conceptual capacities get integrated into perception (see Cavedon-Taylor, 2018, p. 407) nor how it is supposed that concepts determine phenomenology if it is not by representing some way the perceived object.
The use of “look” in Brewer’s works is inconveniently ambiguous. There is no problem with thick looks because they are, necessarily, the kind of looks of which subjects are perceptually conscious. But an object o can also thinly look F to S even when S does not notice or recognize such a look. It is hard to fit this with Brewer’s idea that perception, at that level, is “a relation of conscious acquaintance between perceiving subjects and the particular mind-independent physical objects that are presented to them” (Brewer 2011, p. 94, emphasis added). If thin looks do not necessarily have to be noticed, how is it that one is in a relation of conscious acquaintance with them? In what sense can they be part of the phenomenology of experience?
Brewer (2006, p. 174, 2008, p. 177) believes, then, that, for (CV), perception does not consist in the presentation to a subject of the constituents of the physical world.
Supposedly, that was the point of the disjunctivist reaction to the conceptions of the highest common factor. Experience is an “unmediated openness” (McDowell, 1998, p. 392) to external reality; it is “openness to the layout of reality” (McDowell, 1996, p. 26); it makes an object “present to one” (McDowell, 2009, p. 265).
Cognitive penetrability is commonly said to be a kind of causal influence on perceptual experience. The idea is that some mental states (e.g., beliefs, concepts, emotions, desires, traits, etc.) “penetrate” experience and modify the content or the phenomenology of experience. Thus, if experience is cognitively penetrated, then it is possible for two subjects, or for a single subject at different times, to have perceptual experiences with different phenomenal characters while perceiving and attending to the same distal stimuli under the same external conditions, as a result of differences in other cognitive states. The thesis of the cognitive penetrability of experience can nicely account for the phenomenon of seeing aspects. Discussing the thesis of cognitive penetration would require another paper. For discussion, see Pylyshyn (1999), Siegel (2006, 2012), Bayne (2009), MacPherson (2012), Stokes (2013), and Vance (2014).
Let me insist on the point that, as far as I have argued here, the problem with Brewer’s proposal regarding seeing aspects is that it cannot be successful without lapsing into (CV). I do not question his thesis according to which experience is relational (indeed, in suggesting below a conciliatory approach to seeing aspects, I happily acknowledge the relational character of that sort of experience).
Thanks to an anonymous reviewer of PCS for suggesting to me this possible reply on Brewer’s behalf.
For this reading of Brewer’s texts, see Locatelli & Wilson (2017).
French & Philips (2020), in explaining illusions from (NR)’s point of view, interestingly argue that the ways in which things are perceptually presented can determine differences in the character of experience. For example, in daylight, a red car looks red, while under streetlights looks orange. Despite this, nothing other than the car and its redness need to be presented in experience. Could this proposal be applied to the case of seeing aspects? I doubt it. It is true that, in one sense, nothing else than the figure appears in experience. However, it is also true that it appears in different ways (duck-like and rabbit-like). As I argue, these ways depend, in part but crucially, on how one thinks of the figure. Here, facts about perspective and environmental conditions are not enough.
For instance, let us consider Martin’s approach to looks (Martin 1998, 2010). According to Martin, to talk about the look of an object is to talk about some (visible) way the object objectively is, a property that it has anyway. But as I have argued against Brewer, even if it were conceded that Jastrow’s picture looks both duck-like and rabbit-like, this would not suffice to explain the experience of seeing those aspects. In order to see a duck in the figure, one has to notice it.
Arguably, similar considerations may apply to Brewer’s account of illusions. In effect, Brewer explains visual illusions by appealing to the visually relevant similarities that an object, o, which is not F, can have with paradigm exemplars of F. See Brewer (2011, p. 101 and ff). But, how could the illusion arise if one does not notice that similarity at all? I cannot pursue this topic here.
As Wittgenstein claims: “We can also see the illustration now as one thing, now as another. So, we interpret it, and see it as we interpret it” (2009/1953, xi, § 116).
It might be thought, perhaps, that, given the relevance of concepts and imagination for seeing aspects, the experience of seeing something as something else is not strictly perceptual. “Strictly perceptual” might refer here to experience excluding its representational content. Such content may be located, then, in the non-perceptual part of the phenomenon. However, the problem with that suggestion is that such content determines the phenomenal character of experience (e.g., via cognitive penetrability). Indeed, Jastrow’s figure visually appears as a duck or a rabbit. This is consistent with what Wittgenstein says about seeing aspects. He claims: “We can also see the illustration now as one thing, now as another. So, we interpret it, and see it as we interpret it” (2009/1953, xi, § 116). For Wittgenstein, seeing aspects is not a matter of adding different interpretations to an experience that supposedly remains unchanged under each new understanding of it. Rather, the interpretation is in the seeing itself; it arranges the lines and colors of the seen figure one way or another. This is what explains, exactly, the phenomenal change in the experience.
As it happens, seeing-as presupposes that subjects make some effort to find the relevant aspects. They have to use their imagination, organize the perceived lines someway, and compare the figure with something else. It is, then, intrinsically active. Though Crowther (2010) does not consider the case of seeing aspects, this fits well with his idea that perception is an agentive activity.
Someone may wonder whether, according to what I have said so far, all perceptual experience involves seeing aspects or whether this is only a subset of perceptual experience. Indeed, there is discussion among the scholars of Wittgenstein’s work about whether seeing-as is a general or a local phenomenon. See, for example, Strawson (1974), Mulhall (1990), Schroeder (2010), Ahmed (2017), Glock (2016), and Miguens (2019). From what I have said here can only be drawn that the experience of seeing aspects is contentful. I think that if one pursued the line of thought suggested in the text, one would encounter that all perception is perceiving something “as.” However, this is not to say that all experience is seeing aspects in Wittgenstein’s sense. Cases of seeing ambiguous pictures or similarities between two objects essentially are transitory occurrences, which involve a contrast or difference between the noticed aspects. Notwithstanding all this, for my arguments to work, I do not need to take a stance on whether seeing aspects is general or local. My point is that the phenomenal character of the experience of seeing aspects cannot be explained without crediting experience with content.
I am grateful to two anonymous reviewers of PCS for their helpful comments on a previous version of this paper.
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Kalpokas, D.E. Naïve realism and seeing aspects. Phenom Cogn Sci (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11097-022-09809-7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11097-022-09809-7