Abstract

Some philosophers claim that to see something, you must discriminate it from other things, as opposed to merely seeing it as being some way or another. These philosophers often do not clarify what they mean by 'discrimination.' I distinguish five types of discrimination and argue that the plausibility of the claim that seeing something requires discriminating it, as opposed to simply attributing some properties to it, hinges on the type of discrimination under consideration. A weak form of discrimination trivializes the debate, while stronger notions of discrimination cannot be understood without attribution (i.e., representation-as). Attribution appears to form the fundamental level of personal-level representation. Therefore, the claim that seeing requires discrimination is either false or equivalent to the claim that seeing requires seeing-as.