I develop a theory of what we mean by the 'look' sentences that we use to describe our visual experiences, and on that basis develop a new adverbial theory of what it is to have a visual experience with a certain character.

Blindsight is classically defined as residual visual capacity, e.g., to detect and identify visual stimuli, in the total absence of perceptual awareness following lesions to V1. However, whereas most experiments have investigated what blindsight patients can and cannot do, the literature contains several, often contradictory, remarks about remaining visual experience. This review examines closer these remarks as well as experiments that directly approach the nature of possibly spared visual experiences in blindsight.

This paper defends the Content View: the thesis that all visual experiences have contents.

I argue against a Disjunctive approach to visual experience. I then critique three 'common-factor' views: Qualia Theory, Intentionalism and Sense-Date Theory. The latter two are combined to form Intentional Trope Theory; and that view is defended.

Among the exciting prospects raised by advocates of predictive processing [PP] is the offer of a systematic description of our neural activity suitable for drawing explanatory bridges to the structure of conscious experience. Yet the gulf to cross seems wide. For, as critics of PP have argued, our visual experience certainly doesn’t seem probabilistic.While Clark proposes a means to make PP compatible with the experience of a determinate world, I argue that we should not rush to (...) do so. Two notions of determinacy are conflated in the claim that perception is determinate: ‘univocality’ and ‘full detail’. The former, as Clark argues, is only to be expected in any PP agent that models its world for the purpose of acting on it. But as Husserl argued, and as perceptual psychology has borne out, we significantly overestimate the degree of detail with which we perceive a univocal world.This second form of indeterminacy is due not to the probabilistic nature of PP’s model, but rather to its hierarchical structure, with increasingly coarse-grained representations as we move further from the sensory periphery. A PP system may, or may not, deliver a univocal hypothesis at each of these levels. An action-oriented PP system would only be expected to do so only at the level needed for successful action guidance. A naïve reporter’s overestimation of the degree of determinate detail in their visual experience can thereby be accounted for with a more gradual version of the ‘refrigerator light’ effect: we experience determinate details just to the degree that they’re needed – immediately as they’re needed. (shrink)

According to so-called “thin” views about the content of experience, we can only visually experience low-level features such as colour, shape, texture or motion. According to so-called “rich” views, we can also visually experience some high-level properties, such as being a pine tree or being threatening. One of the standard objections against rich views is that high-level properties can only be represented at the level of judgment. In this paper, I first challenge this objection by relying on (...) some recent studies in social vision. Secondly, I tackle a different but related issue, namely, the idea that, if the content of experience is rich, then perception is cognitively penetrable. Against this thesis, I argue that the very same criteria that help us vindicate the truly sensory nature of our rich experiences speak against their being cognitively penetrable. (shrink)

Alva Noë’s version of the enactive conception in _Action in Perception_ is an important contribution to the study of visual perception. First, I argue, however, that it is unclear (at best) whether, as the enactivists claim, work on change blindness supports the denial of the existence of detailed visual representations. Second, I elaborate on what Noë calls the ‘puzzle of perceptual presence’. Thirdly, I question the enactivist account of perceptual constancy. Finally, I draw attention to the tensions between (...) enactivism and two trends in cognitive neuroscience: the two-visual systems model of human vision and the theory of internal forward models of action. (shrink)

Through extensive training, experts acquire specialized knowledge and abilities. In this paper, I argue that experts also acquire specialized visual experiences. Specifically, I articulate and defend the account that experts enjoy visual experiences that represent gestalt properties through perceptual learning. I survey an array of empirical studies on face perception and perceptual expertise that support this account. I also look at studies on perceptual adaptation that some might argue present a problem for my account. I show how the (...) data are subject to an interpretation that is friendly to it. Last, I address two theoretical objections to the claim that visual experiences represent gestalt properties. (shrink)

In this paper I argue that causal relations between objects are represented in visual experience, and contrast my argument and its conclusion with Michotte's results from the 1960's.

A visual experience, as understood here, is a sensory event that is conscious, or like something to undergo. This chapter focuses on three issues concerning such experiences. The first issue is the so-called ‘transparency’ of experiences. The chapter distinguishes a number of different interpretations of the suggestion that visual experiences are ‘transparent’. It then discusses in what sense, if any, visual experiences are ‘transparent’, and what further conclusions one can draw from that. The second issue is (...) which properties we are presented with in visual experiences. It is widely accepted that we sometimes experience red for example. But exactly which properties do we sometimes visually experience, and which properties do we never visually experience? The third issue is which particulars, if any, we are presented with in visual experiences. Do we for example sometimes visually experience mind-independent particulars like trees? Do we sometimes visually experience mind-dependent, particular ‘sense-data’? (shrink)

Do perceiving subjects represent kind properties in the content of their conscious visual experience when they see and recognize instances of those natural kinds? In Part 1 of my thesis I clarify this question, in Part 2 I answer it, and in Part 3 I raise a problem for previous answers. Part 1 conceives of conscious experience in an internalist way, and the unified conscious episode does not exclude having beliefs about what one sees. Following Siegel and (...) Bayne, Part 2 formulates two arguments in support of representing kind properties in the content of experience. In Part 3, I argue that attempts to distinguish visual experiences from visual beliefs might fail to account for the interplay of sensory and cognitive elements in visual object recognition. I conclude by suggesting it has not been established that visual experiences can be distinguished from visual beliefs. (shrink)

How should we characterize the functional role of conscious visual experience? In particular, how do the conscious contents of visual experience guide, bear upon, or otherwise inform our ongoing motor activities? According to an intuitive and philosophically influential conception, the links are often quite direct. The contents of conscious visual experience, according to this conception, are typically active in the control and guidance of our fine-tuned, real-time engagements with the surrounding three-dimensional world. But this (...) idea is hostage to empirical fortune. It is a hostage, moreover, whose safety is in serious doubt. Thus Milner and Goodale argue for a deep and abiding dissociation between the contents of conscious seeing, on the one hand, and the resources used for the on-line guidance of visuo-motor action, on the other. This ‘dual visual systems’ hypothesis, which finds many echoes in various other bodies of cognitive scientific research, poses a prima facie challenge to the Assumption of Experience-Based Control. More importantly, it provides fuel for an alternative and philosophically suggestive account of the functional role of conscious visual experience. (shrink)

John Campbell argues that visual attention to objects is the means by which we can refer to objects, and that this is so because conscious visual attention enables us to retrieve information about a location. It is argued here that while Campbell is right to think that we visually attend to objects, he does not give us sufficient ground for thinking that consciousness is involved, and is wrong to assign an intermediary role to location. Campbell’s view on sortals (...) is also queried, as is his espousal of the so-called Referential View of Experience. (shrink)

In this report, the phenomenology of two blind users of a sensory substitution device – “The vOICe” – that converts visual images to auditory signals is described. The users both report detailed visual phenomenology that developed within months of immersive use and has continued to evolve over a period of years. This visual phenomenology, although triggered through use of The vOICe, is likely to depend not only on online visualization of the auditory signal but also on the (...) users’ previous (albeit distant) experience of veridical vision (e.g. knowledge of shapes and visual perspective). Once established, the sensory substitution mapping between the auditory and visual domains is not confined to when the device is worn and, thus, may constitute an example of acquired synaesthesia. (shrink)

What do we see? We are visually conscious of colors and shapes, but are we also visually conscious of complex properties such as being John Malkovich? In this book, Susanna Siegel develops a framework for understanding the contents of visual experience, and argues that these contents involve all sorts of complex properties. Siegel starts by analyzing the notion of the contents of experience, and by arguing that theorists of all stripes should accept that experiences have contents. She (...) then introduces a method for discovering the contents of experience: the method of phenomenal contrast. This method relies only minimally on introspection, and allows rigorous support for claims about experience. She then applies the method to make the case that we are conscious of many kinds of properties, of all sorts of causal properties, and of many other complex properties. She goes on to use the method to help analyze difficult questions about our consciousness of objects and their role in the contents of experience, and to reconceptualize the distinction between perception and sensation. Siegel's results are important for many areas of philosophy, including the philosophy of mind, epistemology, and the philosophy of science. They are also important for the psychology and cognitive neuroscience of vision. (shrink)

The transparency of visual experience is a widely held and important thesis in the philosophy of perception. Critical discussion of transparency has focused on visual experiences, such as the experience of visual blur that are taken to be counter examples to transparency. Here, I consider a novel objection to transparency that does not depend on intuitions about examples. The objection is that if transparency is true then we cannot explain our ability to think about our (...) visual experiences as such. In response to this objection, I develop an account of how we are able to think about our own visual experiences as such that is compatible with transparency. (shrink)

Adam Pautz (Pautz, Nanay (ed), Current Controversies in philosophy of perception, Routledge, New York and London, 2017, Pautz, Philosophical Issues 30:257–272, 2020 ) coined the phrase “the Laws of Appearance” for some underappreciated features of perceptual experience. Pautz suggests that the modal status of the Laws presents a puzzle: it is problematic to regard them as necessary, and also problematic to regard them as contingent. This paper presents possible counterexamples to the laws, suggesting that they are contingent as originally (...) stated (Sect. 1 ). But the laws are readily modified so as to express constitutive features of normal human visual experience, and thus understood they are metaphysically necessary (Sect. 2 ). Analogous pictorial laws govern representational painting, and these can be explained by appealing to the representational format of the medium (Sect. 3 ). This invites the question whether there might be format-based explanations of the Laws of Appearance. If so, can the contingency of the format facts be squared with the necessity of the Laws? The paper answers “Yes” to both questions (Sect. 4 ). (shrink)

I raise a problem for common-factor theories of experience concerning the demonstrative thoughts we form on the basis of experience. Building on an insight of Paul Snowdon 1992, I argue that in order to demonstratively refer to an item via conscious awareness of a distinct intermediary the subject must have some understanding that she is aware of a distinct intermediary. This becomes an issue for common-factor theories insofar as it is also widely accepted that the general, pre-philosophical or (...) ‘naïve’ view of experience does not accept that in normal perceptual cases one is consciously aware of non-environmental (inner, mental) features. I argue then that the standard common-factor view of experience should be committed to attributing quite widespread referential errors or failures amongst the general, nonphilosophical populace – which seems an unattractively radical commitment. After clarifying the various assumptions I am making about experience and demonstrative thoughts, I consider a number of possible responses on behalf of the common-factor theorist. I finish by arguing that my argument should apply to any common-factor theory, not just avowedly ‘indirect' theories. (shrink)

Seeing happens effortlessly and yet is endlessly complex. Among the most fascinating aspects of visual perception is its stability and constancy. As we shift our gaze or move about the world, the light projected onto the retinas is constantly changing. Yet the surrounding objects appear stable in their properties. Psychologists have long been interested in the constancies. They have asked questions such as: How good is constancy? Is constancy a fact about how things look, or is it a product (...) of our beliefs and judgments about how things look? How can the contents of visual experience be studied experimentally? Philosophers have long been interested in characterizing visual experience and have become widely interested in the constancies more recently. As psychologists and philosophers have interacted, new questions have arisen: If experience is not as of retinal stimulation (proximal mode), but does not always exhibit constancy (or at least not in all respects), how shall we describe this intermediate state? Also, should we regard any departure from constancy as a failure of the visual system, or might it be a reasonable or adaptive response? In what circumstances is seeing highly conditioned by cognitive factors such as background assumptions, and in what circumstances not? Our volume focuses on size constancy and color constancy. It considers methodologies for studying conscious visual perception, efforts to describe visual experience in relation to constancy, what it means that constancy is not always perfect, and the conceptual resources needed for explaining visual experience. (shrink)

This paper discusses a counterexample to the thesis that visual experience is cognitively impenetrable. My central claim is that sometimes visual experience is influenced by the perceiver’s beliefs, rendering her experience’s representational content indeterminate. After discussing other examples of cognitive penetrability, I focus on a certain kind of visual experience— that is, an experience that occurs under radically nonstandard conditions—and show that it may have indeterminate content, particularly with respect to low-level properties (...) such as colors and shapes. I then explain how this indeterminacy depends on the perceiver’s beliefs or thoughts. Finally, I attempt to generalize the case and show how other sorts of visual experiences can also be penetrated by beliefs and, hence, be indeterminate. (shrink)

My purpose is to take a close look at the nature of visual content. I discuss the view that visual experiences have only existential contents, the view that visual experiences have either singular or gappy contents, and the view that visual experiences have multiple contents. I also consider a proposal about visual content inspired by Kaplan's well known theory of indexicals. I draw out some consequences of my discussion for the thesis of intentionalism with respect (...) to the phenomenal character of visual experience. (shrink)

How is it that we can visually experience complete three-dimensional objects despite being limited, in any given perceptual moment, to perceiving the sides facing us from a specific spatial perspective? To make sense of this, such visual experiences must refer to occluded or presently unseen back-sides which are not sense-perceptually given, and which cannot be sense-perceptually given while the subject is occupying the spatial perspective on the object that they currently are—I call this the horizonality of visual (...) experience. Existing accounts of these horizonal references are unsatisfactory. In providing a satisfactory account, this paper argues that the content and structure of the visual experience of complete three-dimensional objects is as follows: the object is presented as being perceptible from yet-to-be-determined alternative points of view. As part of the content of visual experience, this motivates non-propositional attitudes of anticipation. Explicating this proposal is the central positive aim of this paper. (shrink)

The usual visual experiences possess a perspectival phenomenology as they seem to present objects from a certain perspective. Nevertheless, it is not obvious how to characterise experiential content determining such phenomenology. In particular, while there are many works investigating perspectival properties of experienced objects, a question regarding how subject is represented in visual perspectival experiences attracted less attention. In order to address this problem, I consider four popular phenomenal intuitions regarding perspectival experiences and argue that the major theories (...) of perspectival experiences do not account for all of them. Relying on these observations, I show how a theory which accommodates all these intuitions can be developed by (a) recognising that visual perspectival experiences are, in fact, multimodal visuo-bodily experiences and (b) distinguishing between egocentric and structural contents. (shrink)

red and round. According to common sense, the red, round thing we see is the tomato itself. When we have a hallucinatory vision of a tomato, however, there may be present to us no red and round phys- ical object. Still, we use the words 'red' and 'round' to describe that situation as well, this time applying them to the visual experience itself. We say that we have a red, round visual image, or a visual (...) class='Hi'>experience of a red disk, or some such. Because we see physical objects far more often than we hallucinate, we apply terms for color and shape to physical objects far more often than to visual experiences. Moreover, different theories of perception explain in different ways the applications such terms have to physical objects and to visual experiences. But whatever their frequency and explanation, it seems clear that both sorts of application occur. (shrink)

According to the Self-Location Thesis, certain types of visual experiences have self-locating and so first-person, spatial contents. Such self-locating contents are typically specified in relational egocentric terms. So understood, visual experiences provide support for the claim that there is a kind of self-consciousness found in experiential states. This paper critically examines the Self-Location Thesis with respect to dynamic-reflexive visual experiences, which involve the movement of an object toward the location of the perceiving subject. The main aim of (...) this paper is to offer an alternative interpretation of these cases which resists attributing them self-locating content, arguing for a replacement of the de se component with a non-conceptual equivalent of the indexical ‘here’. In its final section, the paper also considers an extension of the h-replacement account to cases of visual kinesthesis. (shrink)

The human experience is shaped by information from different perceptual channels, but it is still debated whether and how differential experience influences language use. To address this, we compared congenitally blind, blindfolded, and sighted people's descriptions of the same motion events experienced auditorily by all participants (i.e., via sound alone) and conveyed in speech and gesture. Comparison of blind and sighted participants to blindfolded participants helped us disentangle the effects of a lifetime experience of being blind versus (...) the task-specific effects of experiencing a motion event by sound alone. Compared to sighted people, blind people's speech focused more on path and less on manner of motion, and encoded paths in a more segmented fashion using more landmarks and path verbs. Gestures followed the speech, such that blind people pointed to landmarks more and depicted manner less than sighted people. This suggests that visual experience affects how people express spatial events in the multimodal language and that blindness may enhance sensitivity to paths of motion due to changes in event construal. These findings have implications for the claims that language processes are deeply rooted in our sensory experiences. (shrink)

In this paper, I argue that certain perceptual relations are represented in visual experience.

This chapter raises a number of questions, not adequately addressed by any researcher to date, about what we see when our eyes are closed. In the historical literature, the question most frequently discussed was what we see when our eyes are closed in the dark (and so entirely or almost entirely deprived of light). In 1819, Purkinje, who was the first to write extensively about this, says he sees "wandering cloudy stripes" that shrink slowly toward the center of the field. (...) Other later authors also say such stripes are commonly seen, but they differ about their characteristics. In 1897, for example, Scripture describes them as spreading violet rings. After Scripture, the cloudy stripes disappear from psychologists' reports. Other psychologists describe the darkened visual field as typically -- not just idiosyncratically, for themselves -- very nearly black (e.g., Fechner), mostly neutral gray (e.g., Hering), or bursting with color and shape (e.g., Ladd). I loaned beepers to five subjects and collected their reports about randomly sampled moments of experience with their eyes closed. Their reports were highly variable, and one subject denied ever having any visual experience at all (not even of blackness or grayness) in any of his samples. I also briefly discuss a few other issues: whether we can see through our eyelids, whether the closed-eye visual field is "cyclopean", whether the field is flat or has depth or distance, and whether we can control it directly by acts of will. The resolution of such questions, I suggest, will not be straightforward. (shrink)

The on-going debate over the ‘admissible contents of perceptual experience’ concerns the range of properties that human beings are directly acquainted with in perceptual experience. Regarding vision, it is relatively uncontroversial that the following properties can figure in the contents of visual experience: colour, shape, illumination, spatial relations, motion, and texture. The controversy begins when we ask whether any properties besides these figure in visual experience. We argue that ‘ensemble properties’ should be added to (...) the list of visually admissible properties. Ensemble properties are features that belong to a set of perceptible objects as a whole as opposed to the individuals that constitute that set. They include such features as the mean size of an array of shapes or the average emotional expression of an array of faces. Recent work in vision science has yielded compelling evidence that the visual system routinely encodes such properties. We argue that epistemological considerations provide strong reasons to think that these properties figure in visual experience. Judgements about ensemble properties are immediately warranted by our perceptual experience, and the only plausible way that a perceptual experience could confer this warrant is if it confers awareness of ensemble properties. (shrink)

Blindsight is a kind of residual vision found in people with lesions to V1. Subjects with blindsight typically report no visual awareness, but they are nonetheless able to make above-chance guesses about the shape, location, color and movement of visual stimuli presented to them in their blind field. A different kind of blindsight, sometimes called type 2 blindsight, is a kind of residual vision found in patients with V1 lesions in the presence of some residual awareness. Type 2 (...) blindsight differs from ordinary visual experience in lacking the particularity, transparency and fine-grainedness often taken to be essential to visual experience, at least in veridical cases. I argue that the case of type 2 blindsight provides a counterexample to the view that these characteristics are essential to veridical visual experience and that this gives us reason to resist the view that visual experience is essentially a perceptual relation to external objects. In the second part of the paper I argue that the case of type 2 blindsight yields important insights into the effects of attentional modulation on perceptual content and that cases of attentional modulation of appearance are not at odds with the view that the phenomenology of visual experience flows from its content. (shrink)

Standard, linguistic means of specifying the content of mental states do so by expressing the content in question. Such means fail when it comes to capturing non-conceptual aspects of visual experience, since no linguistic expression can adequately express such content. One alternative is to use depictions: images that either evoke (reproduce in the recipient) or refer to the content of the experience. Practical considerations concerning the generation and integration of such depictions argue in favour of a synthetic (...) approach: the generation of depictions through the use of an embodied, perceiving and acting agent, either virtual or real. This paper takes the first steps in an investigation as to how one might use a robot to specify the non-conceptual content of the visual experience of an (hypothetical) organism that the robot models. (shrink)

Not all research in machine consciousness aims to instantiate phenomenal states in artefacts. For example, one can use artefacts that do not themselves have phenomenal states, merely to simulate or model organisms that do. Nevertheless, one might refer to all of these pursuits -- instantiating, simulating or modelling phenomenal states in an artefact -- as 'synthetic phenomenality'. But there is another way in which artificial agents (be they simulated or real) may play a crucial role in understanding or creating consciousness: (...) 'synthetic phenomenology'. Explanations involving specific experiential events require a means of specifying the contents of experience; not all of them can be specified linguistically. One alternative, at least for the case of visual experience, is to use depictions that either evoke or refer to the content of the experience. Practical considerations concerning the generation and integration of such depictions argue in favour of a synthetic approach: the generation of depictions through the use of an embodied, perceiving and acting agent, either virtual or real. Synthetic phenomenology, then, is the attempt to use the states, interactions and capacities of an artificial agent for the purpose of specifying the contents of conscious experience. This paper takes the first steps toward seeing how one might use a robot to specify the non- conceptual content of the visual experience of an (hypothetical) organism that the robot models. (shrink)

Abstract: How is it that we can visually experience complete three-dimensional objects despite being limited, in any given perceptual moment, to perceiving the sides facing us from a specific spatial perspective? To make sense of this, such visual experiences must refer to occluded or presently unseen back-sides which are not sense-perceptually given, and which cannot be sense- perceptually given while the subject is occupying the spatial perspective on the object that they currently are – I call this the (...) horizonality of visual experience. Existing accounts of these horizonal references are unsatisfactory. In providing a satisfactory account, this paper argues that the content and structure of the visual experience of complete three-dimensional objects is as follows: the object is presented as being perceptible from yet-to-be-determined alternative points of view. As part of the content of visual experience, this motivates non-propositional attitudes of anticipation. Explicating this proposal is the central positive aim of this paper. (shrink)