Abstract
According to capacitism, to perceive is to employ personal-level, perceptual capacities. In a series of publications, Schellenberg (2016, 2018, 2019b, 2020) has argued that capacitism offers unified analyses of perceptual particularity, perceptual content, perceptual consciousness, perceptual evidence, and perceptual knowledge. “Capacities first” (2020: 715); appealing accounts of an impressive array of perceptual and epistemological phenomena will follow.
We argue that, given the Schellenbergian way of individuating perceptual capacities which underpins the above analyses, perceiving an object does not require employing a perceptual capacity which picks it out. Although each eye, used on its own, can suffice for perceiving objects in one’s environment, binocular vision allows one to see the same object(s) via both eyes, taking advantage of informational disparities registered by each eye. Yet in certain conditions it is possible to simultaneously see one object via the left eye and a distinct object via the right eye (at least when the inputs are sufficiently similar to prevent the onset of binocular rivalry). We argue that capacitism has trouble making sense of this. After surveying responses, we conclude that not all of the above phenomena can be unified under the capacitist framework. We then present a more nuanced, disjunctivist account of how capacities are individuated. While it may be illuminating to think of perceiving as the employment of perceptual capacities, this picture does not best favour a ‘common factor’ theory of perceptual content in the way existing presentations have envisaged.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Similar content being viewed by others
Notes
What does S see in the relevant portion of the scene? Schellenberg suggests S is “seeing the coloured surface that (unbeknownst to [S]) happens to be the skin of the chameleon”, and also that S sees some property instance had by the chameleon (2019a: 749). Both claims are in some tension with her observation that S does not discriminate where the chameleon ends and where its surrounding begins. That is, it isn’t obvious S ‘registers a difference’ between the surface (or blueness) of the chameleon and the (blueness of the) sky. But perhaps registering spatial differences (as seems to be Schellenberg’s reply in wall, described below) is sufficient. In any case, the capacitist has options here.
It is not obvious what representationalists should say the content of Elizabeth’s visual experience is. Perhaps all that is available is general content of the form <∃x Red(x) & Matchbox(x)>. Or it might be that the content of her experience is plurally referential (despite this being opaque to her). We set these issues aside here. (See Openshaw & Weksler (2020) for discussion.)
Perhaps the capacitist will want to think of perceptual capacities as more ‘low-level’ than the capacity to single out and discriminate matchboxes. We run our discussion at this level for convenience (and we note that Schellenberg is also happy to refer to high-level capacities, e.g. to single out and discriminate a dog versus a ‘robot dog’ (2018: 207–8)). Nothing significant seems to hang on this. The subject in Anscombe’s matchboxes does not any more clearly single out and discriminate box-shaped objects (etc.).
This reply suggests that ‘right-eye seeing’ capacities are person-level when the left eye is closed (and only right-eye monocular vision processes are operating) but subpersonal when the left eye is open (and binocular vision processes are operating). This result might seem awkward. However, to take one account of what it is for a representation to be person-level—on which the representation must be available to ‘central coordinating agency’—whether the content of ‘right-eye seeing’ is fully available to central coordinating agency does depend on whether the left eye is open. For, when the left eye is open, what is available to central coordinating agency is the content of ‘cyclopean’ seeing, and some of things seen via the right eye alone are not seen via the ‘cyclopean’ eye (see the discussion of Reply G in § 5). From this perspective, the result is not awkward so much as an upshot of how which processes (and which perceptual capacities they partly constitute) are person-level can depend on processing elsewhere.
Someone who holds that perceptual experience can only represent low-level properties (or property-instances) such as shape, distance, and colour, may wish to claim that ‘perceptually’ knowing that there is a matchbox in front of one is strictly speaking inferential. As we noted in footnote 3, however, high-level properties are inessential to Anscombe’s matchboxes. It is possible to replace matchboxes with box-shaped objects or even with ‘three rectangular surfaces orthogonal to each other’ without loss. What matters is just that Elizabeth in some sense sees two objects as if they were one, no matter whether we say these are matchboxes, boxes, or three rectangular surfaces orthogonal to each other.
One need not think that the universals themselves are causally efficacious. The claim could instead be that the particulars which are causally related to Elizabeth’s visual system are not seen despite such relations nevertheless being sufficient for the perception of certain universals instantiated by M and M*.
This case is adapted from one considered by Green (2017: 30), in which a subject monocularly views a nearby half-disc and a slightly larger whole disc directly behind it, without any stereoscopic apparatus, so that there appears to be a single bounded disc in her environment.
It is possible to think of this as involving plural reference so long as one has a distributive view of plural reference in mind, rather than the collective view described in § 4 under (A). On distributive views, plural reference involves reference to each individual in the plurality separately. On collective views, it involves only reference to the individuals jointly, absent reference to any of those individuals separately (see Oliver & Smiley (2008; 2016) for discussion). Embracing the collective view would seem to force one down reply (A), whereas we are here considering the reply that Elizabeth singles out each of M and M*.
This is not true when one eye is dominant. In that case the argument below can simply be applied to the non-dominant eye.
It has, of course, been argued that such capacities make for poor explanations (Williamson, 2000).
One strongly externalist option may be to deny that Elijah, Elizabeth and Eli are all equally justified in believing on the basis of their perceptual experience that there is exactly one matchbox in front of them (Williamson, forthcoming).
References
Anscombe, G. E. M. (1974). ‘Comments on Professor R. L. Gregory’s paper’, in S. C. Brown (ed.), Philosophy of Psychology. London: Macmillan. Reprinted in The Collected Papers of G. E. M. Anscombe, Vol. 2. Oxford: Blackwell, 1981
Blake, R. (2001). ‘A primer on binocular rivalry, including current controversies’. Brain and Mind, 2, 5–38
Burge, T. (2010). Origins of Objectivity. Oxford: Oxford University Press
Burge, T. (2014). ‘Reply to Block: Adaptation and the upper border of perception’. Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, 89(3), 573–583
Cohen, J. (2002). ‘The grand grand illusion illusion’. Journal of Consciousness Studies, 9(5/6), 141–157
Cohen, J. (2019). ‘Schellenberg on perceptual capacities’. Analysis, 79(4), 720–730
Dretske, F. (1969). Seeing and Knowing. Chicago: University of Chicago Press
Evans, G. (1982). The Varieties of Reference. Oxford: Clarendon Press
French, C. (2020). ‘The Unity of Perception: Content, Consciousness, Evidence, by Susanna Schellenberg’, Mind 129(513): 339–349
Green, E. J. (2017). ‘Attentive visual reference’. Mind & Language, 32(1), 3–38
Goldman, A. I. (1976). ‘Discrimination and perceptual knowledge’. Journal of Philosophy, 73(20), 771–791
Lande, K. J. forthcoming. ‘Seeing and visual reference’, Philosophy and Phenomenological Research. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1111/phpr.12859
Martin, M. G. F. (2004). The limits of self-awareness’. Philosophical Studies, 120(1–3), 37–89
Martin, M. G. F. (2006). ‘On being alienated’. In T. S. Gendler, & J. Hawthorne (Eds.), Perceptual Experience. Oxford: Oxford University Press
Millar, A. (2008). ‘Perceptual-recognitional abilities and perceptual knowledge’. In A. Haddock, & F. Macpherson (Eds.), Disjunctivism: Perception, Action, Knowledge. Oxford: Oxford University Press
Noë, A., & O’Regan, J. K. (2000). ‘Perception, attention, and the grand illusion’. Psyche, 6(15), 6–15
Oliver, A., & Smiley, T. (2008). ‘Is plural denotation collective?’. Analysis, 68(1), 22–34
Oliver, A., & Smiley, T. (2016). Plural Logic. Oxford: Oxford University Press
Openshaw, J. (2021). ‘Thinking about many’. Synthese, 199, 2863–2882
Openshaw, J., & Weksler, A. (2020). ‘A puzzle about seeing for representationalism’. Philosophical Studies, 177, 2625–2646
Papineau, D. (2014). ‘I—The Presidential Address: Sensory experience and representational properties’, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 114(1): 1–33
Peacocke, C. (1981). ‘Demonstrative thought and psychological explanation’, Synthese 49(2): 187–217
Phillips, I. (2016). ‘Consciousness and criterion: On Block’s case for unconscious seeing’. Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, 93(2), 419–451
Phillips, I. (2018). ‘Unconscious perception reconsidered’. Analytic Philosophy, 59(4), 471–514
Schellenberg, S. (2016). ‘Perceptual particularity’. Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, 93(1), 25–54
Schellenberg, S. (2018). The Unity of Perception: Consciousness, Content, Evidence. Oxford: Oxford University Press
Schellenberg, S. (2019a). ‘Accuracy conditions, functions, perceptual discrimination’. Analysis, 79(4), 739–754
Schellenberg, S. (2019b). ‘Perceptual consciousness as a mental activity’, Noûs 53(1): 114–133
Schellenberg, S. (2020). ‘Précis of The Unity of Perception’. Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, 100(3), 715–720
Siegel, S. (2006). ‘How does visual phenomenology constrain object-seeing?’. Australasian Journal of Philosophy, 84(3), 429–441
Sosa, E. (1999). ‘How to defeat opposition to Moore’. Noûs, 33, 141–153
Williamson, T. (2000). Knowledge and its Limits. Oxford: Oxford University Press
Williamson, T. forthcoming. ‘Justifications, excuses, and sceptical scenarios’, in F. Dorsch & J. Dutant (eds.), The New Evil Demon. Oxford: Oxford University Press
Acknowledgements
The authors contributed equally to this paper. We would like to thank Eva Schmidt’s reading group at the Technische Universität Dortmund for a helpful discussion of an early draft. The paper also benefited from the comments of Aliza Avraham, Jonathan Berg, Benjamin Henke, Arnon Keren, and Sam Lebens, thanks to the University of Haifa’s work in progress seminar, and those of two anonymous referees for this journal. Finally, we are very grateful to Susanna Schellenberg for discussing these ideas with us at an early stage of writing. This research was funded by the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under the Marie Skłodowska-Curie grant agreement No. 101032391, a Mind Association research studentship, and an Israel Science Foundation grant (project no. 715/20).
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding authors
Additional information
Publisher’s note
Springer Nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Openshaw, J., Weksler, A. Perceptual capacitism: an argument for disjunctive disunity. Philos Stud 179, 3325–3348 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-022-01831-4
Accepted:
Published:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-022-01831-4