Do you see tinted lenses?

You’re looking at a white wall which appears pink because you're wearing tinted sunglasses. Do you see anything pink? The wall isn't pink; and you're not seeing a pink sense datum (just ask my new blogmate). But how about the lenses of the sunglasses -- do you see those?

I’d always been tempted to say: no. You see through them (which is why the wall, of which you are directly aware, appears pink) but you don't see them. But now I have my doubts.

For suppose that you remove the glasses and hold them at arms length. Now you have no trouble seeing the lenses. Nor do you have any trouble seeing the part of the left lens that was moments ago right in front of your left eye. Now you slowly put on the glasses, continuing to attend to that part of the left lens (it may help to close your right eye). If you were seeing that part of the lens before, surely you are seeing it now as well (it's still in plain view, still looks pink, etc).

Moreover, it looks like your run-of-the-mill causal theory of perception (e.g., that S perceives o iff o exists, o causes S to have experience e, and o roughly satisfies the content of e) will yield a positive verdict in both cases. If, when the glasses are at arms length, you're having an experience as of a pink expanse (there, where the lens is) which is caused by, and whose content is roughly satisfied by, that part of the lens, then presumably the same is true at all the times leading up to and including putting the glasses back on.

Comments

[Kenny Easwaran]

Isn't there still a sort of phenomenal difference however? I feel like I can switch between looking at a scene depicted in a painting and looking at the painting itself, or similarly with a computer screen. I suspect that the surface in these cases behaves similarly to a mirror, or a window, or thus a lens. But maybe I see both things in both cases - I don't know.

But speaking of lenses, what about ordinary, non-tinted, prescription lenses? I certainly don't think that I see the lenses of my glasses when I'm looking around at the world (though if I'm aware of it, I do see the frame around the periphery of my visual field). But the visual impression I get of the world is quite different with and without them.

[chad]

It seems plausible that your visual system is representing the pink lenses when they are on your face, but it also seems plausible that you are not always aware of the pink lenses. I agree that you *can* be aware of them (as in the case you describe), and that you see them when you are aware of them. I'm not sure, however, whether you can be said to see something when your visual system is representing it but you are not aware of it. I guess it seems right to say that you always visually perceive something that your visual system is representing. And it does seem weird to say that you don't see something that you visually perceive. So maybe it is right that you always see the lenses. But I hesitate.

[Derek Ball]

I don't have a view on this, but I think that these considerations won't be decisive without further argument. Two points:

1. You write, "If you were seeing that part of the lens before, surely you are seeing it now as well (it's still in plain view, still looks pink, etc)." But this just looks question-begging. Why should the invisibilist grant that it's still in plain view? True, there's nothing in between it and your eye; but this doesn't entail that it's in plain view. (And even if it were still in plain view, this doesn't entail that you are still seeing it.) Moreover, why should the invisibilist grant that it still looks pink? You can't see it, so it doesn't look any way at all.

2. You suggest that the causal theorist should claim that x sees o only if o roughly satisfies the content of x's experience. Is it obvious that this condition is satisfied when the lens is close to your eye? It seems like the content of the experience as you've described it is something like: there is a pink wall before me. Does the lens satisfy this content? The lens isn't a wall. You would need the content to be something like: there is a pink lens before me, and a wall behind it. This is clearly the content when the lens is at arm's length, but (I would have thought) clearly not the content in the case at issue. (Maybe you're suggesting that the content can't change like that - but why not?)

I also like Kenny's question. Do your arguments show that we see our own corneas?

[Dan Korman]

Kenny,

Everything you say sounds plausible; it’s what I want to say, but I still can’t see my way out of the problem. Take the prescription lenses. It looks like the same reasoning will apply in that case. When I hold the glasses at arms length, I can see both the lenses and a large undetached part of the left lens that will later be right in front of my eye. As I put them on, nothing relevant to perception changes; all that changes is that that part of the lens takes up more and more of my visual field.

I agree that there *seems* to be a phenomenal difference between the arms length case and the on-your-face case. It doesn’t look like there’s anything pink right in front of your face (it’s just the world beyond that looks pink); but it does look like there’s something pink at arms length when you’re holding the glasses at arms length. Nevertheless, I wonder how this can be. When I attend to the frames in the periphery, *then* it seems that there’s a pink expanse right in front of my eye. But I don’t see why what I’m attending to should affect the phenomenal content of my experience, or what I’m seeing. By analogy, consider a case in which I don’t notice the loud bells ringing in the background. Plausibly, I do hear them, and I do have an experience as of ringing bells; I just don’t notice them.

(Other replies on the way.)

[Dan Korman]

Chad -- Are you convinced by the bells example that you can hear something without being aware of it (by which I take it you mean something like: without attending to it or noticing it).

Derek -- Would you (or your invisibilist) agree with Chad that one does see the lens while wearing the glasses, so long as one’s attention is properly focused on the lens (or perhaps on the part of the frames in the periphery)? If so, the visibilist argument would run as follows: you see the lens when you attend to it; if you see the lens when you attend to it, then you see the lens when you do not attend to it; so you see the lens whenever you look through the glasses.

The invisibilist will have to deny the second premise. But on what grounds? Can what part of the visual field you’re attending to really affect the phenomenal content of your experience? ‘Looks’ is famously ambiguous, but isn’t there some sense (the phenomenal sense!) in which things look the same to the person attending to part of the lens or the (out-of-focus) frames as they do to the person attending to the wall? If so, then (the visibilist argues) the phenomenal content is the same in both cases, is satisfied in both cases, and so (at least on the aforementioned theory of perception) you see the lens in both cases. More cautiously: in both cases, you have an experience as of something pink in front of your eye and as of something pink out where the wall is, and the former is satisfied by the lens and the latter by the wall.

As for seeing your cornea, the visibilist can (plausibly) deny that you can attend to your cornea, so the reasoning wouldn’t apply in that case.

[chad]

I don't know about the bells case. How about this: I might not hear what you said even if I heard you whispering, and even if the whispering was loud enough that I would have heard what you said if I had been really concentrating on it. In that case, it seems like what you said is being represented even though I still didn't hear what you said.

[Kenny Easwaran]

You might not be able to attend to your corneas, but if you look up at a clear blue sky, you can sometimes see little white dots moving around - I've heard that those are the white blood cells in the blood vessels in your retina! You can definitely attend to those.

It sounds like the question is coming down to one of whether attention to something is necessary in order to perceive it. Does it spoil all the fun to suggest that "perceive" (and "see" and "hear" and all the others) is ambiguous between a sense that requires attention and a sense that doesn't?

[Dan Korman]

Chad -- What you say about whispering sounds plausible, but I'm not sure how it helps. The natural analogy to draw would be: I see the lens without attending, but only when I attend to the lens do I see *that there is* a lens. But then you've already conceded the point to the visibilist.

Kenny -- I guess in the dots case, you are seeing the white blood cells; but that seems to me to be the *right* result. Your ambiguity thesis would indeed spoil the fun, but I'm not sure how plausible it is. Take a perfectly normal case: there's a computer and a cup of coffee in front of me, in full view, and I'm attending to the computer. Is there any sense at all in which I'm not seeing the coffee cup? If not, then there's no sense of 'sees' that applies only to things to which I attend.

[marc moffett]

Hey Dan. I am trying to get a grip on the upshot of your post. On the one hand, you might just think that this is an interesting point about that particular case. On the other hand, you might think it undermines an argument for (or against) a broader philosophical theory. If the latter, I just want to note that the orginal sort of case can be recovered by a simple change of example. For instance, when I go skiing I sometimes wear these yellow-tinted goggles. When I look up, I see a green sky. Now even if we grant that I am seeing the yellow-tinted lenses, I am still seeing nothing green. So that general concern does not go away even if we grant your proposal.

[Dan Korman]

Marc, I agree that this case doesn't have any general implications for whether perception of the external objects is direct or indirect. But I do suspect that it has general implications for either the analysis of perception or issues surrounding phenomenal content -- at least if you want to resist my conclusion (which, I think, should be resisted).

It's starting to look like the best way to resist the conclusion would be to insist that attention plays a pretty big role in determining not just what you notice, but also what you see. And it's unclear how it can affect what you see (on any analysis of perception that I'm aware of) unless we allow that what you attend to can affect the phenomenal content of your experience. This would provide some independent motivation for some bizarre things that O'Regan and (I think) Noe have said in accounting for change-blindness cases. And others (Bengson?) may be independently attracted to a view on which attention can play this kind of role.

[Derek Ball]

Now it looks like you've proposed three distinct and independent arguments (one based on holding the lens at arm's length, one from the causal theory, and one from attention). I'm more sympathetic to the third, but I don't see how it responds to the criticisms of the first two.

In response to the argument from attention: it isn't so obvious that changes of attention can't change the content of an experience. Change blindness cases are an example; it's really controversial whether the content of your experience is the same before and after you notice and attend to the change. (Also relevant: it's controversial whether you see the change, or the part of the scene that changes, before you've noticed it and attended to it.)

[Dan Korman]

You can see these all as being part of a single argument

(1) You see the lens at arms length while attending to it
(2) If you see the lens at arms length while attending to it, then you see the lens right in front of your eye while attending to it.
(3) If you see the lens right in front of your eye while attending to it, then you see the lens right in front of your eye even if you’re not attending to it
(4) So you see the lens right in front of your eye even if you are not attending to it.

The argument for (3):

(3a) Suppose that you see the lens right in front of your eye while attending to it
(3b) You see the lens iff the lens both is the cause of your present experience and roughly satisfies the content of your experience
(3c) The content of your experience is the same whether or not you are attending to the lens
(3d) The relevant causal facts are the same whether or not you are attending to the lens
(3e) So you see the lens even if you are not attending to it
So (3).

Of course you’re right that (3c) is controversial. So is (3b). What’s interesting is that we may be *forced* to choose between the controversial denial of one or the other of these, or else the unpalatable (visibilist) conclusion that we typically see the lenses of the glasses we’re wearing.

[Dan Korman]

Whoops, 'sees' should be changed to 'perceives'.

[Derek Ball]

Ok, that's helpful. I have a couple of picky points and a couple of substantive points:

Picky points:
1. I still don't see why anyone should accept (2) unless they already accept the consequent of (2). But this doesn't matter much because the consequent of (2) seems pretty hard to deny.
2. We've both made analogies to the change blindness cases. Maybe this is obvious, but it might be worth pointing out that invisibilism doesn't commit us to any particular view of those cases (and it definitely doesn't commit us to O'Regan and Noe's more outrageous views.) (So denying (3c) is controversial but not as controversial as our analogies might have made it seem.)

Substantive points:
3. Another alternative would be to deny (3d). Attention makes some kind of causal difference; maybe it is a relevant one. Here's a toy example: someone might hold that I see o only if the information about o gets to neural center n, and my attention to o is what causally determines whether the information gets to n. (Some of John Campbell's views might attract a person to this sort of picture.)

4. Relatedly, someone might be inspired by Tye's PANIC view to hold that although the lens-related content is always around, it's only appropriately poised when I attend to the lens, and thus isn't always a content *of the experience*. This is in effect to deny (3c), but it's (somewhat) independently motivated and grants something closely related to (3c) (i.e., that my total informational content doesn't change).

[Kenny Easwaran]

One interesting point about (2) - in the case of the tinted lens I think I can attend to the lens when it's right in front of my eye. In the case of the prescription lens, I'm not sure if I can attend to it unless there's some sort of blemish. I'm trying to attend to the lenses right now, and all I manage to notice is the frame in the periphery of my vision - if I had huge lenses then I'm not sure if I'd be able to attend to anything here, so the argument would be blocked (for the clear prescription lenses) before getting to any parts of (3).

[Dan Korman]

Derek -- the motivation behind 2 is that there doesn't seem to be any relevant phenomenological change between the arms length case and the on your face case (where you're attending in both cases); all that changes is that one of the pink things you were seeing before seems to get closer, and increasingly many things start looking pink (through the lens). So those who would accept 1 and deny the consequent of 2 should at least feel some tension there. The Campbell-style route to resisting the argument is certainly interesting; I'll have to think more about it.

Kenny -- So are you proposing that we deny 1, 2, or 3 in the case of prescription lenses?

[John Bengson]

Hi Dan,

Provocative post. I for one am extremely skeptical of the argument -- in particular, (3c). Three rather hasty thoughts.

First: what it is like presumably affects the content of experience in some way. But what it is like for me when I attend to a lens I'm wearing is *very* different from what it is like for me to attend, say, to a wall which appears pink because it happens that I'm wearing tinted lenses. If this is so, then the content of the experiences will not be the same, in which case (3c) is false.

Second: I wonder, what do you think is the content of the two experiences? Given the nature of the satisfaction condition invoked in (3b), I take it that what you're calling the content of experience is not exhausted by what it is like (where what it is like is the phenomenal character of the experience, which for intentionalists determines the experience's *phenomenal* content). Since presumably the content of experience (in this sense) is singular, at least in part, it is doubtful that (3c) will be true.

Third: It seems plausible that if x sees y then y looks some way to x. In your case, the wall looks some way to you -- namely, pink. And when you're attending to the lens, it looks some way to you -- namely, pink. But when you're not attending to the lens you're wearing then presumably the lens doesn't look any way to you. So you don't see it.

This is all very quick, I know. But I thought I'd just toss out a few thoughts in case you had something to say about them.

[Dan Korman]

John -- in reply to your first point, I'm wanting you to imagine a case in which at first you just notice the wall, and then (without moving your eyes) you come to notice the top of the frames of the glasses. Is it so obvious that what it's like is different when (without moving your eyes) you begin noticing the frames (and thereby the lens)?

All my argument requires is that there's no phenomenal change in that case. So, in reply to your third point: the lens looks pink when you attend to it; what it's like for you is (not obviously not) the same even when you're not attending; so the lens (doesn't obviously not) look pink to you when you're attending only to the wall.

Do you agree with that (so long as I add in the not-obviously-not clauses)?