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Perception and Judgement Peebles, Graham (2012) Perception and judgement. PhD thesis. http://theses.gla.ac.uk/5080/ Copyright and moral rights for this work are retained by the author A copy can be downloaded for personal non-commercial research or study, without prior permission or charge This work cannot be reproduced or quoted extensively from without first obtaining permission in writing from the author The content must not be changed in any way or sold commercially in any format or medium without the formal permission of the author When referring to this work, full bibliographic details including the author, title, awarding institution and date of the thesis must be given Enlighten:Theses http://theses.gla.ac.uk/ [email protected] Perception and Judgement Graham Peebles Submitted in fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of PhD Department of Philosophy School of Humanities College of Arts University of Glasgow January, 2012 Abstract In this thesis, I am arguing for a single claim, namely that perceptual experiences are judgements, and I am arguing for it in a very specific way. This has not been a popular theory, although some have defended similar theories. One main reason that this has been a historically unpopular theory is to do with the problems of conflicting beliefs. I can see (strictly speaking, experience) the Müller-Lyer lines as being of different lengths, they look different lengths, and yet I know that they are the same length. Hence, I have explicit contradictory judgements on a judgement-theory of experiences. However, despite this being the major historical obstacle, two widely held theses in the philosophy of perception in recent times also stand as an impediment to this theory, namely the theses that experiences have a phenomenal character which individuates them from judgements, and that experiences, unlike judgements or beliefs, have non-conceptual content. I seek to offer an ''incremental defence'' of the judgement-theory of experiences by arguing in stages against the competing theories, and defending the judgement-theory from the objections that arise from the motivations for these other theories. As regards the phenomenal character of experience, I argue that once the representational theory is accepted, the path is open, should a range of individuating conceptual contents for experiences be found, to analyse the psychology of experience in terms of this content. I define this conceptual content, and then I motivate and defend the theory that experiences are judgements. Contents Acknowledgements Chapter 1 Background: The Sense-Data Theory Introduction 1 Sense-Data and the Phenomenal Principle 5 The Argument From Perspectival Change and the Visual Field 9 The Argument From Illusion 14 Adverbialism 20 Direct and Indirect Perception 21 The Theory of Appearing 25 Representationalism 30 Conclusion 32 Chapter 2 Transparency and Representationalism Introduction 35 Representationalism and Qualia 35 Moore and The Transparency Argument 49 Transparency and Representationalism 54 Conclusion 59 Chapter 3 Defending Representationalism: More on Qualia Introduction 60 Blurry Vision and other “Standard” Arguments 60 Representationalism, Modality, and Attitudes 67 The Inverted Spectrum and Mental Paint 70 Conclusion 84 Chapter 4 “What it is Like” Introduction 85 The Intuition 88 Leaving Something Out? 93 Experiences and Thoughts 97 Conclusion 106 Chapter 5 Concepts and Experience Introduction 108 The State and Content Views 108 Individuating Contents of Experience 113 Demonstratives and the Role of Experience 115 Perceptual Demonstratives and the Articulation of Perceptual Contents 121 The Richness and Fineness of Grain Arguments 124 Experiences, Demonstrative Concepts, and Acquisition 128 Concept Acquisition and Conceptual Nativism 130 Demonstrative Concepts and Attention 134 The Motion Aftereffect 136 The Continuity argument 138 Conclusion 139 Chapter 6 Perception and Judgement Introduction 140 Davidsons’s Claim 141 McDowell 143 Non-Conceptual reasons 147 Experiences as Judgements 153 Conclusion 158 References 159 Acknowledgements I would like to thank my main supervisor for the writing of this thesis - Professor Alan Weir - and in addition those who supervised me previously - Dr. David Bain, Dr. Gary Kemp, and Professor Bob Hale. I would also like to thank Akiko Frischhut and all of the members of staff and graduate students in Glasgow (as well as those in Geneva) with whom I had many extremely useful and important discussions. 1 Chapter 1 Background: The Sense-Data Theory 1 Introduction The theory that I am defending is an analysis of perception in terms of judgement. Perceptions are, according to this analysis, a class of judgements. The initial analysandum is ''s perceives y'', where s is the subject and y the object perceived. In ''looks'' terms, the analysandum can be stated as ''y looks some way to s''. ''Some way'' is a property, F. In the most simple of cases, this ''some way'' will concern at least, e.g., "yellow", "red, "over there".1 The basic analysandum with respect to vision is (1).2 (1) y looks F to s.3 ''Perception'' is often taken to be a success notion, and I will adopt this terminology: a perception is a successful experience in that in undergoing the experience, s is perceptually related to an external object which is the way that it looks.4 If y is an external object, or something ''real'' or ''actual'', then (1) reports an aspect of a perception, the aspect whereby s sees the F of y.5 The experience merely as-of something F (''it looks to me as though”, or “as if there is an F'') may or may not be veridical.6 Illusion is only partially successful, and hallucination is fully unsuccessful. If there is a y which looks some way to s and is, actually is, this way, then the experience is veridical in this respect; if it is all of the ways that it looks, then it is fully veridical (and, of course, it will be some ways that it does not look). If y is only partially the way that it looks to s, the experience is an illusion. If there is no external y, then the experience is a hallucination, and, I argue, the object which looks some way is a merely intentional object. Whether one is really entitled to say that anything looks this way if there is only a merely intentional object is an interesting question. Compare this to a child afraid of the monster under 1 I am not enquiring here into which properties can be represented in perception, whether they are ''low'' or ''high'' level as discussed in, e.g., Siegel (2005). 2 As is standard in the literature, I treat vision as the central case. 3 For example, y looks red to s. This is a simple case of a monadic property, but whatever is said of this will generalise to properties of any adicity. 4 I do not enquire in detail as to whether, say, an after-image is ''external'' or not. I think that it probably is, but I do not argue for this. 5 If one wishes, one could read “F-ness” instead of “F” here, should one worry about a slight hint of grammatical awkwardness. 6 Y may be, say, green, and yet look blue to s. Does s see y, i.e. does the green object look blue to s? This depends. If an object has no properties which are said to be of an object which looks some way to s, then s is not seeing that object. See below. 2 their bed. They are afraid of something, namely ''the monster'', but there is no monster. There is nothing that is responsible in any way for frightening them.7 Likewise, if the child hallucinates the monster, then it feels natural to say that nothing actually looked like a monster, because there is no monster, nor anything else, that appeared as a monster. And yet the child had an experience as of a monster. This is something that is common to hallucinations of a monster and, if there could be such things, perceptions of a monster. It is also common to having an illusory experience of, say, a sheet on the floor as a monster. In each case, the child could describe and identify what they took to be ''the monster'', even though there is nothing to identify in the success-sense of identify. Nothing exemplifies the property monster, despite the fact that the experience is as-of a monster. Relatedly, as thoughts are like this in that ''s thinks that there is a monster'' does not entail that there is a monster even though s is taking there to be a monster, I am arguing that experiences are also propositional as in: it looks to s that p.8 This is also an intensional context.9 p is the completion of a looks-report, how s would propositionally report how things look. On the theory I am defending this is the subjective element of the experience, the psychology of the experience, and not a mere description of it. Consider a perceptual experience of a red square, and consider everything that one automatically comes to judge about the red square. Let the propositional content that one can glean from the experience of the red square be the content of a judgement. The standard view is that the difference between these two mental acts resides in the way that the experience but not the judgement is sensational, qualitative, or phenomenal in some sense. I am denying this, and defending the position that the look of the red square in the psychological sense, i.e. what is subjective, is the propositional content. Further, I am arguing that the experience is a judgement. According to the theories I will discuss in chapter 1, experience has no propositional component to it, no representational component at all.
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