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ABSTRACT
Are kind properties (e.g. being a eucalyptus tree) presented to us in visual experience? I propose an account of kind recognition that incorporates two conflicting intuitions: (1) Kind properties are not presented in the content of visual experience, (2) the application of kind concepts affects the phenomenology of experience. The conjunction of these claims seems puzzling only given the uniformity assumption that dominates theories of experience, according to which experience presents all properties in the same way: either by representing them (‘the content view’) or through acquaintance with the object that instantiates them (‘the object view’). I have developed a hybrid account, according to which experience has sensory content (i.e. of colors and shapes), but is also an acquaintance with objects that are recognized as instantiating kind properties. The motivation for the hybrid account is that it can preserve the conflicting intuitions in a way that shows them to be essential to a proper account of perceptual reason and perceptual knowledge.
Acknowledgements
I would like to thank Hilla Jacobson and Arnon Cahen for their crucial substantive comments. Lastly, I would also like to thank two anonymous referees whose objections and suggestions greatly improved the paper.
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Notes
1 Use of the generic term ‘presentation’ is compatible with various views on experiential content: propositional content, conceptual albeit non-propositional content, non-conceptual content, and no content at all. Though the discussion is open-ended in this respect, I will argue that the best account of perception of K-properties does ascribe conceptual content to experience.
2 This term was coined by Siegel (Citation2011).
3 See, e.g., Siegel (Citation2006) and Bayne (Citation2009).
4 Note that here ‘seeing’ is not being used in the purely extensional sense, whereby a bird can be said to see, e.g., the prime minister; the classic exposition of this point is Dretske (Citation1969).
5 It is simply a matter of ‘being able to infer more sophisticated beliefs from a more or less stable perceptual content.’ (Speaks Citation2005, 390)
6 McDowell’s inspiration for this paper can be found in Travis (Citation2004). See also Brewer (Citation2011).
7 McDowell (Citation2013) argues for this point.
8 See Stalnaker (Citation1998).
9 For this section, I’m indebted to an anonymous referee.
10 This objection to the sameness intuition underwrites one of the leading strategies against the conceptual content view. For it explains the difference in phenomenology by the different complex of low-level surrogates that is ‘recognitionally coextensive’ with the K-properties. See, e.g., Block (Citation2014), Seigel and Byrne (Citation2016), Nanay (Citation2011), and Prinz (Citation2013).
11 See Watzl (Citation2011).
12 Roessler (Citation2009, 1030). Fish (Citation2013) argues on the basis of empirical data that K-properties are perceived in the absence of attention.
13 I’m indebted to an anonymous referee for this formulation of the phenomenological condition of adequacy on theories of experience.
14 For views that take the content of perception to be partly conceptual and partly non-conceptual see the next section.
15 On Tye’s view, recognition includes two components, a cognitive state and a sensory experience. See Tye (Citation1995, 215).
16 I thank Arnon Cahen for this objection.
17 I thank an anonymous referee for urging me to clarify this point.
18 The first two claims are argued for in McDowell’s recent revision of his account of visual experience (McDowell Citation2009, 261). I think that they leave an explanatory lacuna that is answered by claim 3. I will come back to this lacuna in section 6.
19 I thank an anonymous referee for pressing me to elaborate on these views.
20 The motivation for ‘impure relationalism’ is the denial of disjunctivism regarding perception of K-properties. The hybrid view, by contrast, is open to disjunctivism with regard to all properties.
21 ‘Millar is not in the business of offering a reductive account of recognitional capacities in terms of reliable belief-forming methods.’ Thanks to an anonymous referee for clarifying Millar’s view (Millar Citation2011).
22 ‘For I may say something looks to me “like a nail” when it appears to me (visually) constant in size and shape in a manner typical of nails—i.e., it looks to me the way nails look.’ (Siewert Citation2013, 202)
23 I thank an anonymous referee for pressing me to clarify the requirement to appeal to sensory properties.
24 Or, as Noordhof (Citation2018) puts it, the chicken-sexer ‘would, upon inspecting a chick, take the chick to look one sex or another and, on the basis of that, judge the sex accordingly’ (91).
25 On this challenge to McDowell, see Gersel, Jensen, and Thaning (Citation2017).
26 See, e.g., Siegel (Citation2006, 494); Travis (Citation2004); Brewer (Citation2011).
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Hagit Benbaji
Hagit Benbaji’s main research is in metaphysics and the philosophy of mind. She focuses on the nature of colors, perception, and emotions, as well as on the connections between these three themes. Her research interests also include epistemology, practical rationality, and metaethics.