Abstract
Intuitively, we often see absences. For example, if someone steals your laptop at a café, you may see its absence from your table. However, absence perception presents a paradox. On prevailing models of perception, we see only present objects and scenes (Marr, Gibson, Dretske). So, we cannot literally see something that is not present. This suggests that we never literally perceive absences; instead, we come to believe that something is absent cognitively on the basis of what we perceive. But this cognitive explanation does not do justice to the phenomenology. Many experiences of absence possess immediate, perceptual qualities. One may further argue that the ability to detect certain absences confers strong adaptive advantage and therefore must be as primitive and fundamental to humans as seeing positive things. I argue that we can literally see absences; in addition to representing objects, perception represents absences of objects. I present a model of seeing absence based on visual expectations and a visual matching process. The phenomenon of seeing absence can thus serve as an adequacy-test for a theory of perceptual content. If experiences of absence are possible, then we have another reason (following Siegel) to reject the view that perceptual content is restricted to colors and shapes. Furthermore, if the proposed account is correct, then we have grounds for dissociating seeing absence from other imagery-based phenomena termed “perceptual presence-in-absence” (Noë, Macpherson).
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Notes
My main focus will be on visual experiences of absences of physical objects such as laptops or keys. In the conclusion, I will discuss how my model of absence perception may be applied to other sensory modalities. I will restrict my use of ‘seeing absence’ or ‘perceiving absence’ to refer only to the conscious experiences of absence, and will note when the unconscious perception of absence is at issue.
More carefully, it is events rather than objects that specify the affordances. Thus, absences may be perceived in so far as they participate in the ecologically salient events. Accordingly, Gibson notes that “going out of existence, cessation or destruction is a kind of environmental event and one that is extremely important to perceive” (1979, p. 14) and offers analysis of these events in (ibid, pp. 106–107). His analysis, however, does not apply to absences that do not involve radical transformations “in the state of matter.” Consider seeing absence of a snake on a branch. A snake’s absence is a non-event: it does not involve annihilation, disappearance or displacement of a snake (the snake was never there). Gibson is silent on whether such uneventful, yet salient absences can be directly perceived.
Marr begins his Vision (1982) with “What does it mean, to see? The plain man’s answer (and Aristotle’s too) would be, to know what is where by looking. In other words, vision is the process of discovering from images what is present in the world, and where it is.”
For example, the apparent immediacy of experiences of absence is compatible with the view on which perceptions of absence are computed by subpersonal inferences. The proponent of CA will then have to show that such computations occur downstream of “pure” perception.
Schematically, the method works like this. Suppose we are interested in showing that perceptual experiences can represent some property P. We then seek out a pair of phenomenally contrasting experiences E1 and E2, where E1 is hypothesized to represent P. The next step is to lay out alternative hypotheses of phenomenal contrast between E1 and E2. Then, we argue that the best explanation of phenomenal contrast is the hypothesis that E1 does perceptually represent P.
See Tsal and Kolbet (1985) for some empirical results on the role of attentional focus in forming percepts of the ambiguous stimuli. Nanay (2010) takes the relevant attentional differences to be reflected at the level of perceptual content with the result that perceptual content is individuated in a fine-grained way. Price (2009), Speaks (2010) and Macpherson (2006) disagree and take attention-based phenomenology to pose a problem for the view that holds that phenomenal character supervenes on fine-grained contents.
Reporting what is not where in (3) requires meeting two semantic requirements. The mechanism of absence perception must demarcate experiences of absence from other types of seeing and it must individuate them (distinguish seeing absence of X from seeing absence of Y).
My case that seeing absence belongs to the perceptual domain is cumulative. It requires meeting the format requirement (absence representations must be perceptual in format, Kosslyn 1994), having a certain kind of phenomenology, and fulfilling the function commonly attributed to perception. In Sect. 5, I will address the question whether the fact that absences are represented by perceptual means implies that they can be literally seen.
These, for example, include mismatches used in adjustment of retinal disparity in perception of depth and in transsaccadic alignment of images in perception of motion.
To be efficient, these templates may be perceptually sparse and encode only a few features definitive of the target object. Thus, Esterman and Yantis (2010) hypothesize that tasks involving exemplar expectations (expecting to see a particular house) utilize vivid imagery to a higher degree than tasks involving category expectations (expecting to see a house). Here is another source of variation in templates: templates used for tracking moving objects, plausibly, will draw upon object-files (Kahneman et al. 1992). Such templates thus will differ from templates used to represent absences of objects in simple static displays (e.g., a missing dot in a grid of dots.).
This case parallels the camouflaged moth example used by Wright (1977) to illustrate Dretske’s distinction between simple seeing and epistemic seeing (1969, chapter 2, 2004, 2006). In our example, you are simply-seeing Bill’s moustache prior to and during your experience of its absence because the light from the moustache is travelling to your eyes. You are failing to epistemically-see the moustache prior to and during your experience of its absence because you are not seeing that there is a moustache under Bill’s nose.
One might respond that absence phenomenology is not analyzable, either due to psychological factors (mismatches are fleeting and collapse, so we cannot properly attend to them), or because this phenomenology is in fact unanalyzable (we have a brute sense of absence, and that’s the end of story).
The phenomenology of incongruity may be quite brief and primitive, for instance, when we don’t understand which object is absent, or it may be representationally rich, when attention makes one of the elements of the mismatch (conscious image or a positive percept) more prominent in one’s experience. Between the two accounts, this is the account I favor.
This definition thus will accommodate those scenarios in which one sees absence an object even if one has never had a first-hand experience of that object (e.g., I will see the absence of your computer in a café if you describe it to me and ask me to look for it).
In Being and Nothingness, Sartre claims that expectations are essential for seeing absence: e.g., “It is evident that non-being always appears within the limits of a human expectation” (1956, p. 7). In particular, his case rests on the examples involving violation of expectation (expecting Pierre to be in a café, expecting fifteen hundred franks in a wallet). But Sartre may also be interpreted as proposing a broader condition, according to which seeing absence requires a psychological state in which absence is entertained as a possibility (“The world does not disclose its non-beings to one who has not first posited them as possibilities”, ibid). I have argued that negative expectations meet this criterion.
The worry is that divorcing mismatches from expectations, we cheapen experiences of absence. Wouldn’t a memory/imagination-based account imply that one can randomly form an image of a tiger, mismatch it, and see its absence at one’s office? Is it all it takes to see an absence? I think that cases of this sort are indeed possible but not fully random. One may randomly project an image, but unless such projection transforms into a detection task (however strange or pathological), it will remain a mere imaginative experience. Detection tasks spontaneously generate mismatches, and in my opinion, only a spontaneously generated mismatch can yield a genuine experience (rather than a mere thought) of an absence.
To explain certain results in change-blindness cases, Rensink (1999, 2004) proposes a new mode of seeing called “visual sensing”: awareness that the perceived scene has changed, without corresponding awareness of what this change consists in. The sensation of absence I am referring to here is more specific: it is a feeling that something is missing from a desk, and not merely a feeling that the desk somehow looks different.
I am modifying Dennett’s Marilyn wallpaper example (1992, pp. 354–355).
Dretske (1969) explicates seeing as an extensional relation: if S sees X, and X is identical to Y, then S sees Y. For example, if you see your neighbor, who, unbeknownst to you, is a spy, then you see a spy. Seeing absence seems to obey this extensional principle: if you notice absence of a colleague in a meeting, and she happens to be a spy, you see the absence of a spy.
Esterman and Yantis (2010) demonstrate that “visual anticipation of an object category evokes increased activity in corresponding category-selective regions of temporal cortex.” Note that the categorical nature of these expectations does not preclude the authors from classifying such expectations as visual.
Endorsement of the Rich Content View may be taken to be equivalent to endorsement of the Liberal View on which high-level categorical properties can be represented in perceptual experience (for example, in Bayne 2009). My account of seeing absence challenges this identification. If experiences can represent absences, then the Rich Content View is true. But because absences are often represented at the lower level than uncles and justice, my account does not automatically imply that high-level properties can be represented in visual experiences. One may still wonder if high-level properties managed to slip into perceptual content through absences. After all, we have been examining experiences of absences of laptops, moustaches and colleagues—all high-level categorical properties. On my view, perceptual experiences can represent laptop-like appearances but not a kind property such as being a laptop. So, the claim that one can see the absence of a laptop should be understood as the claim that one can see the absence of laptop-like appearances.
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Farennikova, A. Seeing absence. Philos Stud 166, 429–454 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-012-0045-y
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-012-0045-y