Abstract
Experience, it is widely agreed, constrains our thinking and is also thoroughly theory-laden. But how can it constrain our thinking while depending on what it purports to constrain? To address this issue, I revisit and carefully analyze the account of (scientific) observation provided by Norwood Russell Hanson, who introduced the term ‘theory-ladenness of observation’ in the first place. I show that Hanson’s account provides an original and coherent response to the initial question and argue that, if suitably developed, his account provides a distinctive, powerful, and attractive alternative to relationalist and standard representationalist conceptions of experience.
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Notes
Cf. Hanson (1958) [henceforth: PoD], chapter 1; Hanson (1969) [henceforth: PD]. Hanson’s view is seldom discussed. Radder (2006), Lund (2010), and Hickey (2016) are rare exceptions. However, these authors do not distinguish the various forms of theory-ladenness I discuss below. Also, none emphasize the necessary relation that Hanson thinks obtains between seeing as and seeing that nor do they relate his account to the contemporary debate.
To affirm that theory-ladenness is an essential feature of scientific observation is to oppose a common preconception. According to it, theory-ladenness is a problematic feature—something to be minimized and, ideally, eliminated as it is seen as detracting from the objectivity of our observations.
Hanson’s arguments may apply to other modalities, too, but I will not argue the point here.
There is of course a perfectly ordinary sense in which, as they visually relate to the same mind-independent item, both see it. But as they do, there may also be a sense in which they see different things. The latter is what Hanson is after.
The expression goes back at least to Wittgenstein’s Remarks on the Philosophy of Psychology (Wittgenstein 1991). It famously figures in Nagel’s (1974) characterization of conscious states as states there is something it is like to be in (cf. ibid., p. 519) and is widely used. For references and a recent discussion on the semantics of ‘what it’s like’ sentences see Stoljar (2016).
Why seeing as? Hanson rejects sense-datum views, on which sense-data are associated with unique meanings that they carry on their sleeves, as it were. Such views are incompatible with what Hanson took to be a fact: identical items, looked at in identical settings, can be seen as different things. I return to the issue in Sect. 4.1.
At times we wince while knowing that the charging tiger we face is but a computer-generated 3D simulation.
Presumably, Hanson uses the term ‘linguistic’ because like Wittgenstein, he takes thinking to depend on language. For the purposes of this paper, nothing hinges on that assumption. On my reading of Hanson’s view, having determinate concepts requires the presence of beliefs involving them that are related to other beliefs in various ways. Accordingly, if the relevant belief contexts can be had independently of language, then so can concepts.
McDowell (1994) argues roughly for a similar claim: in experience, spontaneity, rather than operating on receptivity, is operative in receptivity itself.
As in much of his discussion, here too, Hanson draws on Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations (Wittgenstein 2009).
I thank an anonymous reviewer for pressing me to emphasize this point. The same reviewer helpfully points out that experimental results seem to indicate that infants may possess concepts long before they are able to speak. The notion of concept such studies rely on is less demanding than the notion implicit in Hanson’s discussion. I cannot here investigate the differences between various conceptions of concepts. But I take it to be a challenge for the proponent of any such conception that they give a story of how, in the course of our upbringing, we transition from having concepts of the less demanding to having concepts of the more demanding sort.
“The appropriate aspect of [an] illustration is brought out by the verbal context in which it appears. It is not an illustration of anything determinate unless it appears in some such context. […] The context is part of the illustration itself.” (PoD, p. 14, emphasis added.) This, Hanson claims, obtains not just in illustrations, but “in all seeing.” (PoD, p. 17).
The meaning of concepts need not be exhausted by their conceptual role. Tycho and Kepler see the sun as different kinds of thing, though they visually relate to, and refer to, the same physical object. If e.g. reference is partly constitutive of a concept’s meaning, Tycho and Kepler’s concepts differ in conceptual role, not in reference.
This is too strong. We cannot expect things to behave in ways that go beyond what we know or believe. Thus, expressions of expectations, if they complement the seeing that locution, must be constrained by what we believe.
PoD, p. 21: “To see Fig. 1 as a transparent box, an ice-cube, or a block of glass is to see that it is six-faced, twelve-edged, eight-cornered;” PoD, p. 18: “The schoolboy and the physicist both see that the X-ray tube will smash if dropped;” for a probabilistic qualification, see e.g. PD, p. 112. See also PoD, p. 20f.: “What is it to see boxes, staircases, birds, antelopes, bears, goblets, X-ray tubes? It is (at least) to have knowledge of certain sorts. […] It is to see that, were certain things done to objects before our eyes, other things would result” (emphases added). Note also PoD, p. 24, where he claims that seeing something as something is to see that certain further observations are (im)possible. As these passages indicate, Hanson holds that the intelligibility of concepts operative in seeing as is partly spelled out in terms of (at least implicit commitments to) subjunctive claims. Though I cannot pursue this here, this position puts Hanson in a camp with Kant and Sellars, who, according to Robert Brandom, subscribed to what Brandom dubs the modal Kant Sellars-thesis. On one rough formulation of it, “[t]he ability to use ordinary empirical descriptive terms such as ‘green’, ‘rigid’, and ‘mass’ already presupposes [implicit] grasp of the kinds of properties and relations made explicit by modal vocabulary.” (Brandom 2008, p. 96f.).
Suppose that upon seeing an unfamiliar kind of object, you decide to call it F. Pace Hanson, couldn’t you now see it as F, even though you lack the (allegedly) requisite belief context concerning Fs? “New visual phenomena,” Hanson responds, “are noteworthy only against our accepted knowledge of the observable world.” (PD, p. 109) The ability to single out unfamiliar objects is intelligible only in the context of the ability to distinguish them from familiar ones. This in turn requires (in concept users) that one attribute properties to them that one believes they share with other objects, or, in contrast, lack. Thus, where ‘F’ is a newly coined term, the context such beliefs constitute and the ability to make or withhold attributions to observable items of the properties referred to in them must be presupposed if both one’s ostensive definition and one’s subsequent seeing the relevant items as F are to be intelligible.
Hanson explicitly allows that meaning-conferring contexts can remain implicit, “‘built into’ thinking, imagining and picturing.” (PoD, p. 14) The passage continues (with a nod to the Gestalt psychologists in a footnote): “We are set to appreciate the visual aspect of things in certain ways.” Also: “Such “contexts” are very often carried around with us in our heads, having been put there by intuition, experience, and reasoning.” PD, p. 100. It thus must be acknowledged that at least in part, the requisite context may depend on commitments that remain implicit and may be present in form of dispositions to apply concepts in certain ways, or in certain contexts, but not in others.
In some cases one may, in a sense, see that if x happened, y would, too. “If I moved my hand a little closer to this rabid dog’s snarling muzzle, I would surely lose a finger or two, don’t you see?” In contrast, seeing a certain mark on a black board as a 3 may involve, inter alia, seeing that adding 1 to it would yield 4. Lest we uncharitably think that Hanson credits us with perceptual access to modal contexts, what seeing that threads into seeing need not itself pertain to something visible, but can comprise beliefs, including knowledgeable ones, that the seeing subject would readily affirm if prompted. Indeed, ‘seeing that’, in such contexts, will often be best understood not as referring to a specific kind of seeing, but as introducing a belief that the subject (or the one attributing seeing as) takes to be knowledgeable.
See again footnote 16. Sometimes, how concepts operative in seeing differ comes out not in what one would or could say about them, but in their application. Suppose you are looking at an eye chart through a manual refractor, while the oculist who assesses your eye-sight keeps exchanging the lenses. In the course of your subsequent experiences your experience differs in terms of blurriness. Generally, Hanson will hold that seeing things as (more or less) blurry, or self-consciously seeing them more or less blurrily, is intelligible only against the backdrop of belief contexts in which ‘blurry’ is related in various ways to further beliefs, and that, presumably, imply that blurriness comes in degrees. Self-consciously seeing the chart more or less blurrily can be an epistemically significant experience, may even involve attributing ‘blurriness’ to something—e.g. the object seen or one’s experience. Also, one can issue judgments based on subsequent visual experiences due to how blurrily one sees things while undergoing them. At the same time, there may not be much one is able to say about what is distinctive of these various experiences. I thank Alessandra Buccella for urging me to comment on such cases.
Also, the extent to which Tycho and Kepler share theories is the extent to which they see the same. (Cf. PoD, p. 18.).
Two clarifications: First, some (e.g. van Fraassen 1980) characterize theories not as sets of beliefs, but as families of models. Still, if proponents of such views grant that proponents of different theories hold different beliefs, Hanson’s point can be easily restated. Second, what makes seeing epistemically significant in general need not be theory-ladenness. For many ordinary concepts—e.g. sister, pain, or rose garden – it would be absurd to hold that such concepts cannot be intelligibly operative in seeing unless a corresponding theory were held. If taken to entail that we need to hold e.g. some theory of pain to intelligibly attribute pain to others or express that we are in pain, such a view might imply a dubious conception of psychological and other ordinary concepts (for discussion, see Hacker and Bennett 2010, ch. 13). Hanson’s claim, I think, is that epistemically significant seeing must be concept-laden, and that only scientific observation must be theory-laden proper. For simplicity, I will stick with the term ‘theory-ladenness’ and add that whether a given concept is observational or theoretical and whether what is required for its mastery (and for one to be knowledgeable) includes that one hold a theory proper will vary with concepts, contexts of use, and linguistic communities.
Taking attributions of seeing that to be governed by what we take to be facts is more plausible than imposing a stronger factivity requirement on such attributions, one met only if the complements express facts that actually obtain.
Hanson observes that some of the knowledge seeing as requires is “of a rather more logical nature […]. [W]e should not say of anything that it was a physical object […], were it not locatable in space or itself a tangible, space-occupying entity; nor should we say of any physical object that it is a cube unless it is six-faced, twelve-edged, and eight-cornered. On the other hand, that liquids and gases (per se) are not suitable for the formation of boxes and cubes and rigid frames is something we must learn from experience in a way rather different from the ways in which we gain our knowledge about what objects and cubes are.” (PD, p. 113) If Hanson is right, then some beliefs regarding physical objects are not only more modally robust than others, but express facts concerning what something must be to be a physical object at all. Though I cannot pursue this here, it may be that for many concepts, there are beliefs one must have or to which one must at least implicitly be committed to have the concept at all. It may also be that certain kinds of such commitments must be in place for one to count as having any concept at all. Arguably, these are questions any account of concepts faces and Hanson is under no special obligation to address them. Yet his remarks indicate that he is well-aware of them.
Two remarks: first, ‘seeing that’, in this context, is not to be understood as introducing a specific kind of seeing (see also footnote 18). Second, note that here again, what complements the seeing that locution is a subjunctive conditional. As e.g. Sellars 1948 and following him Brandom (e.g. in Brandom 2015) have argued, such conditionals express modally robust commitments. Construed as complements of ‘seeing that,’ they tie the concepts operative in seeing to modally robust commitments explicitly or implicitly contained in the subject’s belief context. These may include, inter alia, commitments to what the subject takes to be laws and lawlike generalizations governing the things she thinks she sees.
The plausible assumption that visual hallucinations involve a visual aspect is not universally shared. However, Fish (Fish 2009) takes hallucination to lack phenomenal character and thus rejects it.
Consider the Müller–Lyer. Upon first exposure, we typically see it as featuring two unequal lines. Doing so will involve seeing that, if things were the way we see them as, we would be able to measure a difference in their length. But seeing what we know to be an instance of the Müller–Lyer illusion as featuring two apparently unequal lines is compatible both with seeing that if we were to measure the lines, we would discover that they are equal in length and with seeing that we would detect a difference in length if the lines were the way we see them as. We may be unable to see the lines of the Müller-Lyer as anything but unequal in length, while we typically do not find it difficult to stop seeing a cloud as a horse, or to see it as not horse-like, e.g. by focusing on relevant dissimilarities. Perhaps there are limits to the extent to which the ways we are set to see things as can be modified (relatedly, see footnote 7 above).
Again, the required commitments may be partly implicit, perhaps even entirely. Depending on the expressive power of their language, subjects may be unable to thematize commitments to the material or subjunctive conditionals that would serve to articulate the role their concepts play. Material conditionals, incidentally, encode commitments to inference rules that allow transition from ‘is F’ to ‘is G’, ‘is not J’, etc. Subjunctive conditionals, in contrast, encode commitments to rules that are modally robust across a range of contexts. For an investigation into the expressive role of material and subjunctive conditionals see e.g. Brandom (2008, 2015). Note that such commitments come in different modal flavors and may include commitments to laws of nature, a priori principles, moral, aesthetic, epistemic, or semantic norms. An interesting question, albeit one that I cannot here address, is whether there are some commitments that must implicitly govern anything that can count as a linguistic and perceptual practice.
About congenitally blind patients who post-surgically learn to see, Hanson asks: “Of course, these people can see in the sense-datum sense [sic!] of “see,” but can they see anything?” (PD, p. 151) Clearly, he wants to elicit agreement with the first, disagreement with the second half. Such patients have visual experiences, but it takes a long time for them to see objects as anything. Hooking up the visual aspect of seeing with our knowledge is a complex and arduous process.
See also PoD, 20, and PD, p. 150: “It [phenomenal observation] is something we must develop from our ordinary sorts of seeing, and not that from which our ordinary sort of seeing is developed.” Like Bacon, who advocated freeing the mind from the Idols of the Tribe, Hanson holds that phenomenal seeing, while atypical, can be useful for getting rid of preconceptions or for arriving, ultimately, at new ways of seeing. Cf. also PD, p. 109, pp. 111–112. For Bacon on idols of the mind, cf. Klein (2015), esp. Sect. 4.1.
Hanson focuses on seeing objects as things of some kind or other. But complements of ‘seeing as’ need not be limited to names of things. We can see something as e.g. red, blobby, flashlike, x-shaped, as instantiating or involving certain processes or relations, as beautiful, or wrong.
Searle (2015) argues that only real world objects can be proper objects of one’s experience, ontologically subjective entities, however, cannot. This view, too, is compatible with the idea that both seeing real world objects and hallucinating are conscious experiences that consist in having one’s visual field be populated with elements.
See PoD, p. 15: “Elements in our experience do not cluster at random” (emphasis added).
What counts as salient or significant may change along with one’s theories and the development of new technologies. A well-known example concerns the Golgi apparatus. Although discovered by Camillo Golgi as early as 1898, for more than 50 years, many scientists suspected that what we now take to be a bona fide cell organelle was a mere artefact of staining techniques. Only after the introduction of the electron microscope the controversy abated. See Farquhar and Palade (1981) for details and further references.
Since on Hanson’s account, such differences will partly rest on differences in subjects’ belief contexts, psychologists may furnish explanations why people hold certain beliefs and explore whether, and how, holding certain beliefs, having undergone certain kinds of experiences, or kinds of training, may dispose subjects to single out certain objects or features as significant—in short: why subjects are set to see things in certain ways.
Many of Hanson’s remarks on this issue are guarded. Recall e.g. passage (8): it is only perhaps that the elements in the visitor’s field are similar or identical to those populating the physicist’s. But cf. PoD, p. 17, where Hanson seems to grant that the elements of their visual fields are identical.
Note that the idea that cognitive states can serve to generate experience is not as uncommon as one might suspect. Indeed, the idea is central to an influential set of contemporary accounts within the cognitive neurosciences that are typically subsumed under the label predictive coding. For discussion and further references see e.g. Hohwy (2014), Lupyan (2015), and Macpherson (2015, 2017) for critical discussion.
Cf. Payne (2001). There is a large body of psychological literature and a lively philosophical debate about whether such cases, often subsumed under the label ‘cognitive penetration’, do in fact occur. For discussion, see e.g. Siegel (2012, 2013, 2015, 2017), Stokes (2013), Raftopoulos and Zeimbekis (2015). For criticism, see Scholl and Firestone (2016).
In such a case, correcting one’s view is triggered by the realization that one did not in fact see what one thought one did, but that one was mistakenly taking oneself to see that certain things could or could not follow.
The idea that our visual field is fully determined by our explicit and implicit beliefs, while highly counterintuitive, is not logically defective. However, motivating and defending an account of experience that incorporates it, while retaining the idea that experience plays a vital role in our epistemic endeavors, or alternatively, an account that shows why the latter idea is mistaken, is a daunting task and I think that there is no particular onus on Hanson to show that it is impossible. It is, incidentally, compatible with Hanson’s view that some aspects of our visual life are systematically determined by what we believe. But to entertain this possibility is neither to say that we could not find out that it is actual, nor to deny that visual experience itself could play an important role in doing so.
Correcting our flawed views is hard to do solo. Even as a social task it can be laborious and time-consuming.
The term ‘acquaintance’ goes back at least to Bertrand Russell. Whereas Russell maintained that experience acquaints us with sense-data, relationalists think that it acquaints us with mind-independent items. Relationalists disagree on what these items are. Fish, for instance, takes them to be objects-property couples (Fish 2009), Brewer objects (see Brewer 2011, 2018), and Genone mind-independent appearance properties (Genone 2014).
For this way of expressing things, see Campbell and Cassam (2014, ch. 1).
Recall that we can see things as what we know and believe they are not.
Alternatively, it may be that we see these items as red and that in the belief context we inhabit, seeing something as red comes to be what makes it rational for us to transition to the perceptual judgment that we face something green. Associations between phenomenology and concepts may well vary in how robust or malleable they are.
As mentioned before, some relationalists simply deny that total hallucinations have a phenomenal character (e.g. Fish 2009). Others claim that we can only characterize the phenomenology of hallucinatory experiences epistemically, i.e. by way of insisting that all we can say about the phenomenology of total hallucinations is that for subjects undergoing such experiences, they are indistinguishable from cases in which subjects actually do perceive what they think they see (see e.g. Martin (2004), and e.g. Siegel (2004, 2010) for discussion).
If the relationalist allows for there to be a different kind of phenomenology, an account is needed as to how it interacts with the phenomenology constituted by being related to mind-independent items. Note also that regardless of which strategy the relationalist pursues, she will need to ensure that the resulting account does not undermine whatever justificatory role she may take experiential phenomenology to play.
An example is Fish (2009). He suggests that getting acquainted with various features of mind-independent items requires corresponding conceptual-recognitional capacities on the part of the subject (cf. ibid., chapter 3). Getting acquainted with such items is in part a matter of having an experience with a distinctive phenomenology. On Fish’s view, two subjects who look at the same items in otherwise identical circumstances can therefore have experiences with differing phenomenal characters—namely if they differ in what conceptual capacities they possess and actualize in their respective experiences. As I argue elsewhere, Fish’s suggestion is in tension with his commitment to the idea that acquaintance is irreducibly primitive (cf. Rosenhagen 2018). For our purposes, what matters is this: for Fish, actualizing certain conceptual capacities is not sufficient for generating a corresponding phenomenal character. For the latter to be generated, a suitable mind-independent item actually needs to be presented to the subject. Since such an object is absent in the banana case, it is, accordingly, not open to Fish to suggest that the banana effect could be due to an inappropriate actualization of the conceptual capacity to recognize yellowish things. This need not be the end for Fish’s view, for he could suggest that in the banana case, the subjects’ background beliefs modify not the subject’s experiential phenomenology, but rather what judgments get to be associated with that phenomenology. If so, the challenge Fish has to address is that of developing an account of the relation between judgments and experiential phenomenology that is powerful enough to accommodate the specifics of the case.
Similar challenges are sometimes raised in the literature. Under the heading of what he dubs problems of infusion, Quassim Cassam has challenged the relationalist John Campbell to allow that the phenomenal character of one’s experience changes once what is seen is recognized (cf. Campbell and Cassam 2014, pp. 141–142)—i.e. to allow for effects related to expert vision. Unfortunately, in his response to Cassam, Campbell does not address the issue.
Bill Brewer is one of the few relationalists who tries to accommodate such effects. In Brewer (2011, 2018), he distinguishes thin looks from thick looks. Thin looks are looks objects are said to have due to being relevantly similar, relative to a point of view and circumstances of perception, to paradigm examples of certain kind of objects. Thick looks, on the other hand, are thin looks that are registered by the subject. Now, Brewer suggests that such recognition may in turn give rise to a specific phenomenology (cf. Brewer 2011, esp. pp. 120–124). However, he remains silent on what exactly these effects are and how the phenomenology they give rise to interacts with the phenomenology of thin looks. Moreover, Brewer insists that objects can only thickly look F if they also thinly look F. And since he explicitly maintains that how things thinly look is completely belief-independent, the way things can look thickly must likewise remain insulated from the subject’s beliefs. Accordingly, it is not open to Brewer to suggest that a subject’s recognition of the grey banana image as depicting a banana could bring about a phenomenology associated with yellow. For a more detailed discussion of Brewer’s proposal, see Rosenhagen (2018).
For a discussion on degrees of veridicality, see Siegel (2010). In the present context, only the general idea matters.
Siegel also argues for the fairly revisionary claim that experiences can be the result of (bad) inferences (cf. Siegel 2017). For present purposes, nothing turns on this specific aspect of her proposal.
See Siegel’s discussion of Vivek’s case in Siegel (2017), p. 14.
Whether one shares such intuitions is likely to depend in part on how exactly one thinks rationality, and which kind thereof, we should draw on as we explicate the rational role of experience. Such questions depend in part on where one stands with respect to the debate between externalism and various forms of internalism with respect to reasons, a debate which in this paper, I must set to one side. If we bracket intuitions, we can thus observe that Siegel’s view and the Hansonian view sketched below diverge on that very issue and that one’s reasons for favoring one of them over the other may in part derive from one’s reasons for taking a particular stance in the internalism–externalism debate.
Experience may serve various further important functions, e.g. that of providing candidates for reference or, in creatures lacking conceptual capacities, that of bringing environing features into their subjective lives to make them available for further processing. The characterization of the rational role of experience I support is due to Anil Gupta, who first presented the core idea, in Gupta (2006), under the label of the hypothetical given (for a much more developed version of his view, see Gupta 2019). Unlike Hanson, Gupta does not focus on effects of theory-ladenness, though—as I argue elsewhere—his view is well-suited to accommodate them (Rosenhagen 2018). Note also that in contrast to Hanson, Gupta eschews the idea that experience has conceptual content entirely.
Such actions may include that of withholding judgment. Incidentally, note that more specific versions of the view can be generated if we provide more specific interpretations of ‘rational’ in ‘are made rational’. Some of these versions may yield views that are somewhat similar to a Siegelian view, others will differ markedly in that they require that subjects must have internal access to what makes such transitions rational. Hanson’s own view, I take it, falls squarely into the latter camp.
This is compatible with the idea that S may be deemed blameworthy, even irrational, if she fails to acquire all the relevant and pertinent evidence.
One reviewer worried that this might be too strong. Note, however, that it may well be rational to respond to one’s experience by withholding judgment, by transitioning to the judgment that one is having an experience, or by transitioning to the judgment that one needs to engage in further observation before taking on any commitments as to what one may be facing.
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Rosenhagen, R. Norwood Russell Hanson’s account of experience: an untimely defense. Synthese 198, 5179–5204 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-019-02395-3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-019-02395-3