The visual experience of causation

Philosophical Quarterly

Volumn 59, Issue 236, 2009, Pages 519-540

  Siegel, Susanna ^a  

^a HARVARD UNIVERSITY   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 75949110793     PISSN: 00318094     EISSN: 14679213     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1111/j.1467-9213.2008.607.x     Document Type: Article

References (20)

1. A. Michotte, The Perception of Causality (London: Methuen, 1963)
2. Further discussion of this point can be found in E.N. Zalta (ed.), The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/ spr2005/entries/perception-contents, §2.1
3. Even if experiences are not assessable for accuracy, something very much like the question of whether causation is represented in experience would still arise. For instance, if some experiences consist in a subject's perceiving an object as F, as some naïve realists about perception hold, then one can ask whether the values of F can include causation. Likewise, if experiences consist in adverbial modifications of the subject whereby one is 'appeared-to F-ly', one can ask in which ways one can be appeared-to, and specifically whether one may be appeared-to by two (or more) relata in a causal manner
4. Readers are encouraged to view these at http://research.yale.edu/ perception/causality/ capture-launchAlone.mov and http://research.yale.edu/ perception/causality/entraining.mov
5. Psychologists today use 'perceptual causation' to refer to the kind of mental representation that Michotte posited to explain this description, though sometimes this term is used to label the kinds of scenes that adults are prone to describe as causal - launching, entraining or expulsion
6. I discuss and defend this method in 'How Can We Discover the Contents of Experience?', Southern Journal of Philosophy, 45 (2007), pp. 127-42
7. I have focused on how the observed events seem to be related: the light's going off seems related to the trajectory of the ball. Arguably, the associated experiences (or parts of experience) also seem to be related: the experience of seeing the lights go off seems related to the experience of seeing the ball land in the plant. I am setting aside the question of how these two kinds of unity may be related
8. The further alternative that the experiences in question are simply 'raw feels', with no content at all, is at odds with the starting assumption that the visual experiences in question have contents. Some responses to the two-component view in §VI address this view as well
9. Husserl discusses the notion of retention, in connection with hearing melodies, in lectures given between 1893 and 1917, in On the Phenomenology of the Consciousness of Internal Time, tr. J.B. Brough (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1980)
10. I have discussed the contrast between melody and motley sounds in Siegel, 'The Phenomenology of Efficacy', Philosophical Topics, 33 (2005), pp. 265-84
11. C. McGinn, 'Another Look at Color', Journal of Philosophy, 93 (1996), pp. 537-53, at p. 540
12. EJ. Gibson and R.D. Walk, 'The "Visual Cliff"', Scientific American, 202 (1960), pp. 67-71
13. I am focusing just on Hume's claim about a transition between mental items, ignoring other commitments about the nature of ideas Hume may have had which might rule out the causal thesis
14. Sometimes 'singular causation' is used differently, to pick out causal relations holding between particulars as opposed to properties
15. E. Sosa and M. Tooley (eds), Causation (Oxford UP, 1993), introduction, p. 13
16. Sosa and Tooley's remarks could also be developed into an argument about seeing, taking 'S observes that p' to be factive, and substituting 'see' for 'observe': if S sees that a causes b, then S sees that (a, b) instantiate a law; we cannot see that a law obtains; so we cannot see that a causes b. The criticism raised against the argument presented in the text applies to this argument as well
17. The first theory is defended by R. Casati and A.C. Varzi, Holes and Other Superficialities (Cambridge: Bradford Books, 1994)
18. the second by D.D. Hoffman and W.A. Richards, 'Parts of Recognition', Cognition, 18 (1985), pp. 65-96
19. see also D.K. and S.R. Lewis, 'Holes', Australasian Journal of Philosophy,48 (1970), pp. 206-12, repr. in D.K. Lewis, Philosophical Papers, Vol. 1 (Oxford UP, 1983), pp. 3 - 9
20. Versions of this paper were presented at the Arizona Ontology Conference, Bates College, the On-Line Philosophy Conference and the University of Warwick. Thanks to audiences for their responses. For further discussion, thanks to Stephen Butterfill, Elizabeth Camp, Imogen Dickie, Andy Egan, John Hawthorne, M.G.F. Martin, Casey O'Callaghan, Laurie Paul, Brian Scholl, Jessica Wilson, and especially David Chalmers