Abstract
This paper considers the claim that perceptual experience is “transparent”, in the sense that nothing other than the apparent public objects of perception are available to introspection by the subject of such experience. I revive and strengthen the objection that blurred vision constitutes an insuperable objection to the claim, and counter recent responses to the general objection. Finally the bearing of this issue on representationalist accounts of the mind is considered.
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Notes
What phenomenology does, rather, is to inform the arguments in question, and to place a constraint on admissible responses to such arguments.
Martin (2002, 417). Elsewhere we find Martin distancing himself from the sort of transparency claimed by classical sense-datum theorists as follows: “Price commits himself to something much stronger in insisting on the diaphanous nature of experience: namely, that sameness and difference of phenomenal properties just are sameness and difference in presented elements. It is doubtful if this claim is true: why cannot the ways in which things are presented in experience make a difference to what the experience is like, in addition to what is presented?” (1998, 174–5). It take, however, if only to render this claim consistent with the one cited in the text, that these ‘ways’ are just those that determine what features, both intrinsic and relational, a perceived object appears to have. A ‘presented element’, such as a circular table-top, gives rise to different experiences depending on how it is oriented in relation to the viewer, for example. Appealing to such ways of appearing can avoid having to say, with sense-datum theorists, that we are aware of something elliptical, or as elliptical, when something circular is seen at an angle.
It may be, however, that the response of such non-representationalists will have to coincide with that of the representionalists. At one point Martin specifies his own form of disjunctivism, which he terms ‘naïve realism’, as follows: “The Naïve Realist... claims that our sense experience of the world is, at least in part, non-representational. Some of the objects of perception—the concrete individuals, their properties, the events they partake in—are constituents of the experience” (2004, 39). Given that blur is hardly to be accounted for simply by some object in the world being a constituent of an experience, perhaps Martin’s statement that perceptual experience is ‘at least in part’ non-representational indicates that he is going to attempt to account for blur in some representationalist way.
It is sometimes claimed, especially by representationalists, that it is a necessary truth that every conscious state is intentional (in the sense of being apparently world-directed). I have argued against that claim elsewhere (2002, 129–30). We need not consider this issue here however, but can concern ourselves just with perceptual experiences that are indeed ostensibly world-directed.
This objection seems first to have surfaced in print in Boghossian and Velleman (1989). Blurred vision—and I have principally in mind that which characterizes short- and long-sightedness—is not the only common perceptual phenomenon that can ground the case against the Transparency Thesis. The related, but distinct, phenomenon involved when one shifts focus from a near to a far object, or conversely, can also serve. So, too, can the figure-ground switches that we can experience when viewing two-dimensional Gestalt pictures. I shall discuss yet another recalcitrant phenomenon later in the paper.
I shall pretend that fuzziness is the best objective feature to compare with blur, though there are disanalogies. Blurred objects, for example, have ‘haloes’ around their edges that one can see through. My remarks about fuzzy objects can, however, easily be adapted to any more complex features that may be proposed. Moreover, I shall later give a general argument against the postulation of any objective feature as being that which blurred vision represents objects as having.
I am not suggesting that we could never mistake the one for the other. Incorrigibility is no part of the present argument. What is part of the argument is the claim that there is an intrinsic difference between these two sorts of experience that is there to be noticed.
I take what holds of objects ‘in and of themselves’ to include relational facts. It even includes such a relational fact as that X partly occludes Y, even though a point of view is implicated in this fact. (X partly occludes Y when seen from here, but not when seen from there.) One can learn that X is occluding Y by attending to the objects themselves (as perceived from some Z), because this fact holds independently of whether there is actually a perceiver at location Z. Such relational facts, even those that conditionally implicate a point of view, harbour no difficulties for the Transparency Thesis. (Relatedly, see note 2 above.) By contrast, if no one is actually seeing anything, nothing is blurred. Facts that concern objects ‘in and of themselves’ therefore contrast with facts that concern actual perceptions.
I do not insist that the term ‘fuzzy’ is wholly unambiguous, and that it cannot be used on occasion to mean ‘blurred’. If it can, then I am commandeering the term for an unambiguous use.
When discussing representationalist responses to the problem of blur, I shall assume, for the sake of argument, that experience is indeed representational in nature.
I focus on photographic images because paintings and drawings involve complex and irrelevant issues having to do with pictorial conventions and artists’ intentions.
I am not suggesting that representational inadequacy in visual experience, even when it is distinguished from misrepresentation, always manifests itself as blur. As we shall see later, it does not.
Tye (2003). Unless otherwise stated, all quotations from Tye are from pp. 18–20 of this article.
I should say that although Tye regards the representational content of perceptual states as nonconceptual, he himself reserves the ‘seeing/representing as’ locution for conceptual presentations. I take it, however, that his present remarks will apply to the purely visual, nonconceptual case of a sharp object illusorily looking fuzzy. (Incidentally, in what follows, I myself employ such ‘as’-locutions not to signify conceptual representation, but merely to express the way an object looks.)
In the passage just quoted Tye characterises the first ‘comment’ as being inaccurate because his example specifically concerns the misperception of a sharp object as fuzzy. We can, however, abstract away from this issue of accuracy of representation, as we have seen we need to be able to do if we are to provide a wholly general account of blur: one, that is to say, that also applies to hallucination. The fundamental contrast that Tye introduces here, one that does apply to hallucinations, is between an experience’s commenting on boundaries and its not commenting at all.
This three-fold distinction would apply, as it should, even to hallucination. Simply substitute ‘visual experience’ for ‘perception’, and ‘as of’ for ‘of’.
Even in the case of photographic images we do not attribute blurredness to the object because we see it blurrily. Moreover, the blur that characterises such objects is not a strictly perceptible quality that visual experience represents the object as having. All that such experience presents us with is a fuzzy object. To take such an object to be blurred, we have to take it to be a representation, such as a photograph, and we have to make reference beyond the fuzzy image to some supposed ‘input’ to the representational process. Here the ‘as’ is conceptual.
Those who think that belief is too sophisticated a mental state to attribute to all perceiving creatures may substitute some more humble form of response for belief.
Moreover, the hesistancy is different from that which we find in a paradoxical percept, such as the waterfall illusion (which is, perhaps, more than merely an unusual phenomenon). In such cases, a phenomenon is, apparently, internally inconsistent. Whatever we may wish to say about blurred vision, it is not that.
The clarity to which I refer here is a phenomenological feature, not merely an informational and relational one defined with respect to an actual object perceived.
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Smith, A.D. Translucent experiences. Philos Stud 140, 197–212 (2008). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-007-9137-5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-007-9137-5