How Does Visual Phenomenology Constrain Object-seeing?*

Perception provides a form of contact with the world and the other people in it. For example, we can learn that Franco is sitting in his chair by seeing Franco; we can learn that his hair is gray by seeing the colour of his hair. Such perception enables us to understand primitive forms of language, such as demonstrative expressions ‘this’ and ‘that’. These are expressions we can readily use to talk about the particular things we perceive. Given its apparently fundamental role in knowledge and understanding, it is natural to wonder what the nature of our perceptual access to the world is. I will focus on the case of seeing ordinary objects—people, horses, trains, and the like. What it is to be an object is notoriously difficult to define, but it is clear enough to support theorizing by psychologists (for instance, theorizing about what concept of object adults and infants each have) [Spelke, et al. 1995, and many of the papers cited therein], and there are plenty of paradigm objects to point to, however cloudy the margins of the concept may be. Sticking with paradigm ordinary objects, I’ll call cases of seeing them ‘object-seeing’. So while I’ll be talking quite a bit about seeing Franco, I won’t talk at all about seeing the colour of Franco’s hair. Consider what makes an experience a case of seeing a particular object o, rather no object at all. Views at one extreme say that the phenomenology of the experience has nothing to do with this. An example is some versions of the causal theory of perception, according to which it doesn’t matter for object-seeing what sort of phenomenology object-seeing has; all that matters is how that phenomenology would change with changes in the object seen. A pure counterfactual analysis, on this view, can reveal the nature of the object-seeing relation. Views at another extreme say that given each object o, there are specific constraints on what kind of phenomenlogy the experience can have and still be an experience of seeing o. An example is the view that for each object o, there are limits, specific to o, concerning