Aspect-Switching and Visual Phenomenal Character
Published in Philosophical Quarterly July 2009
John Searle and Susanna Siegel have argued that cases of aspect-switching show that visual experience represents a richer range of properties than colours, shapes, positions and sizes. I argue that cases of aspect-switching can be explained without holding that visual experience represents rich properties. I also provide an argument that, even if Searle and Siegel are right, and aspect-switching does require visual experience to represent rich properties, there is reason to think those properties do not include natural kind properties, such as being a tomato.
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Volume 59 • Number 236 • July 2009
CONTENTS
SYMPOSIUM ON THE ADMISSIBLE CONTENTS OF PERCEPTION
Perception and the Reach of Phenomenal Content Seeing Causings and Hearing Gestures Experience and Content Is Perception a Propositional Attitude? Conscious Reference What are the Contents of Experiences? Aspect-Switching and Visual Phenomenal Character The Visual Experience of Causation The Admissible Contents of Visual Experience Tim Bayne S. Butterfill Alex Byrne Tim Crane Alva Noë Adam Pautz Richard Price Susanna Siegel Michael Tye 385 405 429 452 470 483 508 519 541 563
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ASPECT-SWITCHING AND VISUAL PHENOMENAL CHARACTER
B R P
John Searle and Susanna Siegel have argued that cases of aspect-switching show that visual experience represents a richer range of properties than colours, shapes, positions and sizes. I respond that cases of aspect-switching can be explained without holding that visual experience represents rich properties. I also argue that even if Searle and Siegel are right, and aspect-switching does require visual experience to represent rich properties, there is reason to think those properties do not include natural-kind properties, such as being a tomato.
I. INTRODUCTION Philosophers have often asked what kind of information is available to vision. For instance, Berkeley argued that one cannot see depth, and Hume that one cannot see necessary connections. Recently philosophers have asked what kinds of properties visual experience ‘represents’. According to sparse views, visual experience represents a sparse range of properties, for instance, just colours, shapes, positions and sizes.1 According to rich views, visual experience represents a rich range of properties, for instance, properties such as being a tomato and being sad.2 Siegel and Searle have used cases of ‘aspect-switching’ to support the view that visual experience represents a rich range of properties. Roughly, their arguments are that when one aspect-switches on an object, the object comes to look different, but looks to have the same colour and shape properties. Therefore, so the arguments go, one’s visual experiences represent these objects as having a richer set of properties than simply colour and shape properties.
1 See C. McGinn, The Character of Mind (Oxford UP, ); T. Burge, ‘Perceptual Entitlement’, Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, (), pp. –; A. Millar, ‘The Scope of Perceptual Knowledge’, Philosophy, (), pp. –. 2 See C. Peacocke, The Realm of Reason (Oxford: Clarendon Press, ); S. Siegel, ‘Which Properties are Represented in Perception?’, in T. Gendler and J. Hawthorne (eds), Perceptual Experience (Oxford UP, ), pp. –; J. Searle, Intentionality (Cambridge UP, ); J. McDowell, Meaning, Knowledge, and Reality (Harvard UP, ).
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ASPECT-SWITCHING AND VISUAL PHENOMENAL CHARACTER
In this paper, I argue that one can explain well known cases of aspectswitching without having to assume that visual experience represents rich properties (i.e., properties other than colour, shape, position and size). Furthermore, I shall argue that even if my arguments are unsound, and cases of aspect-switching do require that visual experience represents rich properties, there is a reason to think that these rich properties do not include natural-kind properties such as the property of being a tomato. In this paper, instead of using the terminology of what properties visual experience represents, I define a kind of looking, phenomenal looking, which is individuated in terms of differences in visual phenomenal character. I identify phenomenal looking by arguing for a constraint on it, that is, a condition necessary for a kind of looking. My methodology is similar to that of someone who wishes to identify, say, a particular kind of justification, and does so by identifying a constraint on a particular kind of justification. The following principle is a preliminary formulation of the constraint: Restricted phenomenal character principle. Necessarily, for all objects x, y and z and all properties F and G, if x looks F to z, y does not look F to z, and y looks G to z, then there is a visual phenomenal difference between the ways x and y look to z. I intend to apply the constraint diachronically and across worlds. Therefore the full constraint, the phenomenal character principle, quantifies over times and worlds, and is as follows: Phenomenal character principle. Necessarily, for all objects x, y and z, all properties F and G, all times t1 and t2 and all worlds w1 and w2, if x looks F to z at t1 at w1, y does not look F to z at t2 at w2, and y looks G to z at t2 at w2, then there is a visual phenomenal difference between the way x looks to z at t1 at w1 and the way y looks to z at t2 at w2. I assume that only one kind of looking satisfies the phenomenal character principle, and I call it phenomenal looking. What it means to say that there is a visual phenomenal difference between the ways two objects a and b look to S is that what it is visually like for S for a to look the way it does to S is different from what it is visually like for S for b to look the way it does to S. The phenomenal character principle is phrased in terms of how things look to a particular subject. Sometimes I refer to the properties that objects phenomenally look to have, and leave it implicit that there is some particular subject to whom these objects phenomenally look to have the properties in question. The phenomenal character principle uses the locution ‘an object looks F’, where ‘F’ is to be replaced by an adjective. In English, some properties can
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be expressed by predicates of the form ‘is + adjective’. For instance, the property of being red can be expressed by the predicate ‘is red’. However, some properties, for instance, the property of being a tomato, are not expressed by predicates of the form ‘is + adjective’. There is no predicate ‘is tomatoey’ which expresses the property of being a tomato. In order to express the question whether an object can stand in the phenomenal looking relation to the property of being a tomato, we could invent an adjective, ‘tomatoey’, stipulate that being tomatoey is identical with being a tomato, and then ask whether objects can phenomenally look tomatoey. Instead, however, I shall simply ask whether an object can phenomenally look to be a tomato, or whether an object can phenomenally look to have the property of being a tomato. Phenomenally looking to be an F and phenomenal looking to have the property of being an F obey the same constraint as phenomenally looking F: if an object x phenomenally looks to be F, and another object y does not phenomenally look to be F, but phenomenally looks to be G, then there is a visual phenomenal difference between the ways that x and y phenomenally look to be. The stronger principle which quantifies over times and worlds also applies to phenomenally looking to be F. Some philosophers have argued that the expression ‘looks to be’ refers to a more epistemic kind of looking than the expression ‘looks’. However, I do not use ‘phenomenally looks to be’ in a different sense from ‘phenomenally looks’: they both obey the same constraint. Using the locution of ‘phenomenally looking to be an F’ is merely a way of avoiding having to introduce new adjectives such as ‘tomatoey’. One way of understanding phenomenal looking is to compare it with kinds of looking which are not phenomenal. Consider epistemic looking. Some looks-statements refer to a state of a subject that is at least partly epistemic. For instance, if Joan is looking at a DVD cover, she may say ‘This film looks intriguing’, and this looks-statement refers to an epistemic kind of looking. Epistemic looking is not phenomenal looking. An object can change from epistemically looking F to epistemically looking G without any visual phenomenal difference in the way it looks. For instance, at one time Joan might look at the cover and say ‘This film looks intriguing’. At a later time, when her interests have changed, she might look at the same DVD cover and say ‘This film looks unappealing’. Intuitively, there may be no visual phenomenal difference between the ways the DVD cover looks at the two times. Consider externalist-looking. Some philosophers have argued that there is a kind of looking which obtains between an object o, a perceiving subject S and a property F, when a certain internal state of S has been normally caused by a presence of Fness. For instance, consider a case of spectrum
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inversion in which what it is like to see tomatoes is different for two subjects Joe and Fay. Some philosophers would argue that the tomatoes externalistlook the same colour to Joe and Fay, namely, red; such philosophers would explain the difference between Joe and Fay by saying that what it is like for things to look red to them is different. It can be seen that externalist-looking is not phenomenal looking by considering that there is a world w1 at which the actual internal states that Joe and Fay are in, when looking at tomatoes, are normally caused by objects having some property other than red, say, green. At w1, given the definition of externalist-looking, tomatoes would externalist-look green to Joe and Fay, and given that Joe’s and Fay’s internal states are the same at w1 as they are at the actual world, intuitively there would be no visual phenomenal difference between the way tomatoes actually look to Joe and Fay and the way tomatoes look at w1 to Joe and Fay. It follows from the definition of phenomenal looking that externalist-looking is not phenomenal looking. II. ASPECT SWITCHING According to one view, objects phenomenally look to have a sparse range of properties, i.e., properties such as colour, shape, position and size. John Searle and Susanna Siegel use cases of aspect-switching to argue that this view is wrong, and that there are visual phenomenal differences which are not accounted for in terms of different colour and position properties that objects phenomenally look to have. Searle (pp. –) gives two examples:
[The shapes in Figure ] can be seen as the word ‘TOOT’, as a table with two large balloons underneath, as the numeral with a line over the top, as a bridge with two pipelines crossing underneath, as the eyes of a man wearing a hat with string hanging down each Figure side, and so on.... Consider, for example, the difference between looking at the front of a house where one takes it to be the front of a whole house, and looking at the front of a house where one takes it to be a mere façade, e.g., as part of a movie set. If one believes one is seeing a whole house, the front of the house actually looks different from the way it looks if one believes one is seeing a false façade of a house.... It is part of the content of my visual experience when I look at a whole house that I expect the rest of the house to be there if, for example, I enter the house or go round to the back.
Siegel (pp. –) also gives two examples:
The way [Cyrillic text] looks ... before and after [learning] to read Russian seems to bring about a phenomenological difference in how the text looks. (Christopher Peacocke makes a similar phenomenological claim in ch. of A Study of Concepts.) When you
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are first learning to read the script of a language that is new to you, you have to attend to each word, and perhaps to each letter, separately. In contrast, once you can easily read it, it takes a special effort to attend to the shapes of the script separately from its semantic properties. You become disposed to attend to the semantic properties of the words in the text, and less disposed to attend visually to the orthographic ones. The second example involves a different recognitional disposition. Suppose you have never seen a pine tree before, and are hired to cut down all the pine trees in a grove containing trees of many different sorts. Someone points out to you which trees are pine trees. Some weeks pass, and your disposition to distinguish the pine trees from the others improves. Eventually, you can spot the pine trees immediately: they become visually salient to you. Like the recognitional disposition you gain, the salience of the trees emerges gradually. Gaining this recognitional disposition is reflected in a phenomenological difference between the visual experiences had before and after the recognitional disposition was fully developed.
The challenge posed by the above passages can be put as follows: there exist visual phenomenal differences which are best explained in terms of objects phenomenally looking to have properties other than colours, shapes, positions and sizes. In §III and §IV I shall offer alternative explanations of the phenomena described by Searle and Siegel. In §V I shall argue that even if such phenomena do require that objects phenomenally look to have properties other than colours or positions, these properties do not include natural-kind properties, such as the property of being a tomato. I shall consider two different kinds of case, first Searle’s ‘TOOT’ aspectswitching case, and secondly Siegel’s language and pine tree cases.
III. SEARLE’S CASE Searle’s ‘TOOT’ figure in Fig. is one of a variety of ambiguous figures – figures which one can see under different aspects, or which one can see as different types of object. Other familiar examples of ambiguous figures include the duck/rabbit picture (Figure ) and also the young girl/old woman picture (Figure ).3 I shall argue that the phenomenal shifts in these examples are explicable in terms of the following Figure Figure differences:
3
The pictures in Figs and are from http://mathworld.wolfram.com.
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• • •
Differences in patterns of attention Differences in how one takes the objects to be Differences in how one visually imagines the objects to be.
Searle and Siegel argue that the best explanation of the visual phenomenal differences is that, in their terminology, visual experiences represent other properties in addition to colours, shapes, positions and sizes. I shall call this account of aspect-switching the content view. The account I shall defend, making use of the above three factors, I call the non-content view. I call it the non-content view because it does not hypothesize differences in the properties that the objects in question phenomenally look to have. I shall use the expressions ‘seeing as’ and ‘seeing under a certain aspect’ in such a way that it is not controversial that one can see ambiguous figures as different kinds of objects, or under various aspects. I take the substantive question to be about what the best explanation of seeing as is. III.. Patterns of attention Normally, aspect-switching on an ambiguous figure is accompanied by a shift in one’s patterns of attention towards the figure, though these shifts need not be the same for different individuals. My own patterns of attention change in the following way when I see the above ambiguous figures under different aspects. When seeing the duck/rabbit as a rabbit, I tend to look at the picture from left to right, and when seeing it as a duck, I tend to look at it from right to left. Also, when seeing it as a rabbit, I attend to the rabbit’s mouth and eye together; when I see it as a duck, I attend to the duck’s eye and beak together. When seeing the ‘TOOT’ drawing as the word ‘TOOT’, I tend to attend to the whole word at once, whereas when I see it as a man wearing a hat with strings hanging down each side, I tend to attend to the eyes first and then the hat. When I see the young girl/old woman as an old woman, I tend to attend to the mouth and the eyes first, and when I see it as a young girl, I attend to her cheek and left shoulder first. Other people’s patterns of attention may change in other ways. Changing one’s patterns of attention towards a figure can cause a phenomenal difference to occur, as with the picture in Figure . Initially, one’s attention is evenly distributed over the shapes in the picture. After one sees the Dalmatian in the middle of the picture, one attends to the specific outline of the Dalmatian. There seems to be a phenomenal difference associated with this shift in one’s pattern Figure of attention.
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Turning to Figure , one can see it as composed of a white triangle superimposed on black circles, and one can see it as composed of three black circles with wedges cut out of them. When one sees it as composed of a white triangle superimposed on black circles, it seems that one attends to the straight lines between the three black Figure circles that would be the edges of the white triangle. When one sees it as composed of three black circles with wedges cut out of them, then one attends to these circles alone without attending to the straight lines that would be the edges of the white triangle. III.. How one takes the object to be Cognitive states can have phenomenal character. There can be something it is like to understand a proposition. Switching between one’s cognitive states can thus involve phenomenal shifts. For instance, one experiences a phenomenal shift when thinking of the two different meanings of the sentence ‘Visiting royalty can be boring’. This phenomenal shift is not perceptual: one can be thinking about the different meanings of this sentence with one’s eyes shut and without one’s other sense modalities’ being stimulated. It is natural to think that there is some shift in cognitive phenomenal character between thinking of the duck/rabbit figure as a duck and thinking of it as a rabbit. Bill Brewer relies exclusively on this factor in his account of aspectswitching:
[When] I see it as a duck, say, this is again a phenomenological change, but one of conceptual classificatory engagement with the very diagram presented to me. Similarly, when I shift aspects, and see it as a rabbit, there is an alteration in this phenomenology of the categorization of what is presented.4
III.. Residual visual phenomenal differences and visual imagination One might argue that changes in one’s patterns of attention towards the duck/rabbit figure, and changes in how one takes the figure to be, do not fully explain the phenomenal shift which one experiences. One might argue that one can prevent one’s patterns of attention from changing, perhaps by looking only at the duck/rabbit’s eye and beak/ears, and still experience a visual phenomenal shift when one aspect-switches on the figure. If it is possible to aspect-switch on ambiguous figures without any change in one’s patterns of attention, and if there is a residual, specifically visual, phenomenal difference between seeing the figure under the two aspects,
4 B. Brewer, ‘How To Account for Illusion’, at http://www.warwick.ac.uk/fac/soc/ philosophy/staff/brewer.
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then the above two factors which I have discussed are not sufficient to account for the phenomenon of aspect-switching. The residual visual phenomenal differences can be explained by means of states of visual imagination. In particular, when one is looking at ambiguous figures, one may well be imagining unseen aspects of the figure. Unlike ordinary objects, ambiguous figures tend to be quite abstract, or lacking in detail. Thus it is not implausible to suppose that one’s visual imagination may ‘fill in’ some detail when one looks at ambiguous figures. For instance, when one sees the ‘TOOT’ picture as a man wearing a hat with two strings hanging down each side, one may visually imagine the boundary of a face below the eyes. This may be all that one visually imagines. One may not visually imagine features of the face such as a nose or a mouth. Merely visually imagining a small detail such as the boundary of the face would be sufficient to generate a visual phenomenal difference between seeing the picture as a man and seeing it as, say, a bridge. When one sees the figure as a bridge with two pipes passing underneath it, one may visually imagine the pipes as going off in such and such a direction. Again, this may be all that one visually imagines. Merely visually imagining brief lines going off in a certain direction would be sufficient to generate a visual phenomenal difference that would distinguish seeing the picture as a bridge from seeing it as a man. The aim of using visual imagination to explain any residual visual phenomenal differences which occur when one aspect-switches on an ambiguous figure, having fixed one’s patterns of attention is that the phenomenal character of visual imaginative states is similar to the phenomenal character of visual experiences. The kinds of phenomenal character in question do not seem identical, but they do seem similar. There seems to be a reason why visual imagination is called visual imagination. Thus shifts in one’s visual imaginative states may be able to account for the residual visual phenomenal differences in question.
IV. SIEGEL’S CASES Siegel argues that the acquisition of certain conceptual abilities, such as the ability to read Russian and the ability to recognize pine trees, can make certain kinds of objects, such as Russian sentences and pine trees, phenomenally look different. Siegel argues that there is a phenomenal difference between looking at a page before and after one learns Russian. This claim seems plausible. Inevitably some phenomenal shift will result just because after one has learnt
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Russian, one can read the text on the page, whereas beforehand one could not, and understanding the text on the page does have a certain kind of phenomenal character. However, this account would not explain the visual phenomenal shift that occurs in this case. Siegel argues (p. ) that after one has learnt Russian, one is ‘disposed to attend to the semantic properties of the words in the text’. It is not clear that one needs the idea of attending to semantic properties of the words in order to explain the visual phenomenal shift in question. An alternative explanation is that one becomes disposed to attend to the linguistically significant aspects of certain letters, i.e., aspects that distinguish those letters from other letters. For instance, there are two letters in the Cyrillic alphabet that differ only by the presence of a hook at the foot of one of them. In Chinese the width, height and thickness of a stroke are relevant to determining which character it is part of. Learning Russian and Chinese will cause one to be disposed to attend to such features of the letters as these, and these altered patterns of attention towards texts in Russian and Chinese will produce a visual phenomenal shift. If this explanation is correct, then the largest phenomenal shifts will occur when one learns a language which is written in an alphabet with which one is not familiar. A phenomenal shift may still occur when one learns a language which is written in an alphabet that one does know. The fact that one can read sentences written in the language will alter one’s patterns of attention to sentences written in that language. For instance, depending on the language, one may come to look at newly intelligible sentences in a systematic way from left to right, whereas before one learnt the language one might not have looked at the sentences in a systematic way from left to right, because one might not have been attempting to read them. A similar explanation may be offered for the phenomenal difference which occurs when one learns to recognize pine trees. After one learns to recognize pine trees, one starts to attend to those features of pine trees that distinguish them from other trees, for instance, the colour or thickness of the bark. Acquiring a recognitional disposition for pine trees will cause one’s patterns of attention to shift when one looks at a grove containing pine trees and other sorts of trees.
V. NATURAL-KIND PROPERTIES Suppose that acquiring a recognitional disposition for pine trees does cause pine trees phenomenally to look different. Suppose also that acquiring a recognitional disposition for tomatoes, a disposition which I shall henceforth
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call ‘the concept tomato’, causes tomatoes to look phenomenally different. I shall now discuss the question what new property tomatoes phenomenally look to have after one acquires the concept tomato. I shall argue that even supposing there is a property F such that acquiring the concept tomato causes tomatoes to look F, being F is not the property of being a tomato. On twin earth there are fruits, ‘twin tomatoes’, that look and taste just the same as tomatoes do, but which are not tomatoes, since they are made from different kinds of molecules from tomatoes. There is no visual phenomenal difference between the way twin tomatoes look to inhabitants of twin earth and the way tomatoes look to inhabitants of earth. Here I am assuming phenomenal internalism, which is as follows: Phenomenal internalism. Necessarily, for all subjects S1 and S2, if S1 is a molecule-for-molecule duplicate of S2 then S1 does not differ from S2 with respect to the phenomenal character of the mental states of S1 and S2. Suppose Oscar is an inhabitant of earth, and twin Oscar of twin earth. Just as, by hypothesis, Oscar’s acquisition of the concept tomato causes tomatoes phenomenally to look some new F to him, so twin Oscar’s acquisition of the concept twin tomato causes twin tomatoes phenomenally to look some new F to him. It seems that the acquisition of the concept tomato will bring about the same kind of visual phenomenal shift as the acquisition of the concept twin tomato. The argument for this claim is that Oscar and twin Oscar do not know the difference between tomatoes and twin tomatoes, and they are thus in the same types of brain state, narrowly construed. Given phenomenal internalism, the acquisition of the concepts tomato and twin tomato by Oscar and twin Oscar will produce the same kind of visual phenomenal shift in Oscar and twin Oscar. For the sake of argument, let us accept the claim that Oscar’s acquiring the concept tomato and twin-Oscar’s acquiring the concept twin tomato bring about the same kind of visual phenomenal shift for Oscar and twin Oscar. It follows that there is some new F such that their acquisition of their respective concepts causes tomatoes and twin tomatoes phenomenally to look F to Oscar and twin Oscar respectively. If being F is the property of being a tomato, then twin tomatoes will not be the way they phenomenally look to twin Oscar. This is counter-intuitive, since twin Oscar has as much right to say that being F is the property of being a twin tomato, and that tomatoes are not the way they phenomenally look to Oscar. To avoid an asymmetric treatment of the cases, it seems that the only option is to hold that being F is neither the property of being a tomato nor the property of being a twin tomato. Even if aspect-switching cases do require that objects phenomenally look to have a rich range of properties, there is reason to think
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that those properties will not include natural-kind properties such as being a tomato.
VI. CONCLUSION I have argued that aspect switching cases, such as the duck/rabbit, do not require that the properties which objects phenomenally look to have (or the properties which are represented by visual experience, to use Siegel’s and Searle’s terminology) must be richer than properties such as colour, shape, position and size. I have argued that aspect-switching cases can be explained by changes in patterns of attention, cognitive shifts and shifts in visual imagination. In the final section I argued that even if aspect-switching cases are taken to show that objects phenomenally look to have a richer range of properties than colour, shape, position and size, there is reason to think that those richer properties do not include natural-kind properties such as being a tomato.5 All Souls College, Oxford
5 Elsewhere I argue that objects phenomenally look to have just colour and position properties: see http://oxford.academia.edu/RichardPrice/attachment//full/Chapter----ASparse-View- About-The-Properties-That-Objects-Phenomenally- Look-To-Have.
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