2.3. The Case Against Representationalism
2.3.2. The argument from looks
The best known, but perhaps most misunderstood, of Travis’s arguments purports to show that (i) the notion of p-representation plays no fundamental
role in a philosophical account of perception, and (ii) the Face-value and Looks-
indexing constraints that many representationalists place upon p-representation are inconsistent, and so that there can be no such form of representation. Byrne (2009: 14–15), for example, sets out Travis’s argument in terms of providing an account of illusion, thereby portraying it as aiming to secure the weaker conclusion that representationalism lacks support, whilst Siegel (2010: 60–65) takes it to be primarily about the semantics of ‘looks’. Travis, however, clearly takes himself to be arguing for the much stronger conclusion that ‘perception is not [p-]representational’ (Travis 2004: 57), and so ‘is, in a crucial way, not an intentional phenomenon’ (ibid. 93). The truth, I will argue (5.2.4), lies somewhere in between these two extremes.
Travis’s argument from looks proceeds on the assumption that what makes the representational content of perceptual experiences recognisable to a subject must, by hypothesis, be the way that things in that experience appear, i.e.
Looks-indexing. In the case of visual perception, this corresponds to how things look to the subject, raising the question of whether any notion of looks is capable of indexing representational content. As such, this argument does not
rule out forms of representationalism that reject Face-value, Recognisability or
Looks-indexing.19 Rather, it aims to establish that p-representation cashed out
in terms of mere appearances, i.e. looks, cannot perform the function that many representationalists assign to it, and so cannot constitute an adequate explanation of experience.
19 Rejections of the latter principle are dealt with by the argument from recognisability (2.3.3).
The argument may be summarised as follows:
L1! The content of any given p-representation must be recognisable
to the subject solely in virtue of how, in the relevant experience,
things perceptually seem to that subject. (Looks-indexing)
L2 If visual experiences were p-representational, then their contents
would be indexed according to the way that things look [to the
subject]. (Corollary of L1)
L3! Visual (i.e. comparative) looks are unfit to index representational content since they are indeterminate between multiple contents,
which would contravene Face-value.
L4! Thinkable (i.e. epistemic) looks are unfit to index
representational content since they cannot be determined solely on the basis of what is perceptually available to the subject in
experience, which would contravene Recognisability.
L5! No further notion of looks is capable of satisfying both Face-
value and Recognisability.
L6! The contents of visual experiences cannot be indexed according
to the way that things look [to the subject]. (From L3 to L5)
L7! Visual experiences are not p-representational. (From L2 and
L6)20
The transition from L1 to L2 is justified by inference to the best explanation as the most plausible account of how visual experiences are able to satisfy
Recognisability. Travis’s notion of ‘indexing’ relates to whatever feature of perceptual experience is supposed to make its representational content recognisable to the subject. Thus, the content of any perceptual experience that is looks-indexed is recognisable in virtue of how, in it, things visually appear to the subject (2.2.5). L3 and L4 are concerned with the various notions of looks that might perform such perceptual indexing. Here, Travis identifies two distinct forms of looks, claiming that neither is capable of performing the required function. From this, along with considerations about the conflicting demands upon the notion of looks (L5), Travis draws the conclusion that visual
experience (L6) — and by generalisation all forms of perception — cannot be p-
representational (L7).
The argument from looks presents the representationalist with an apparent dilemma. They must either (a) elucidate a notion of ‘looks’ that is capable of indexing the relevant representational content, thereby rejecting one of L3, L4
or L5, or else (b) reject Looks-indexing, Face-value or Recognisability. Rejecting
20 Although the argument is presented in terms of visual perception, it is presumably intended to generalise to cover other perceptual modalities.
Looks-indexing places the onus upon the representationalist to find some other
way of satisfying Recognisability, or else justify dropping this apparently
plausible condition upon p-representation. (Travis has a separate argument
against such views that I discuss in 2.3.3.) Rejecting Face-value, on the other
hand, loses one of the supposed benefits of representationalism, namely that perception represents the world as being some particular way. To understand why the dilemma is pressing, however, it is necessary to gain a clear
understanding of the notions of visual and thinkable looks that Travis
considers,21 along with the reasons why he considers it impossible that any
further notion of looks could meet the representationalist’s requirements.
The first notion of looks that Travis considers is what are more commonly
called comparative looks (cf. Chisholm 1957: 45). Such looks involve some kind
of explicit or implicit comparison with the visual appearance of another object, or objects, and are characterised in terms of what something ‘looks like’ in order
to appear the way it does (Travis 2004: 69–70). Thus, they are visual looks
(Travis forthcoming: §3). For convenience, I will abbreviate this as looksv. For
example, if the object before me looksv like a lemon, then it has the
characteristic look that lemons have — call this looking lemonish. Furthermore,
since many things share that very same way of looking, anything that looks lemonish also looks like a wax imitation lemon, or (to the untrained eye under appropriate circumstances) like a yellowish lime, the front surface of a hollowed-out lemon, a lemon-shaped bar of soap, and so on. In fact, there are innumerable ways that something can look like a lemon. Thus, for all that
things lookv a particular way, there are any number of ways that the world
might actually be, all of which share the same visual appearance.
Importantly, the corresponding resemblance relationships are symmetrical; if
something looksv like a wax lemon then a wax lemon also looksv like it.
Consequently, claims Travis, there can be nothing about an object’s lookingv
like p that identifies the content of that experience as representing p; for example, that there is a lemon before me. Rather, the very same perceptual experience might equally be said to represent any (or all) of the numerous ways
in which it can lookv to me just like there is a lemon before me — that there is a
wax lemon, for example. As per L3, comparative or visual looks fail to meet the
Face-value condition (2.2.2), since they ‘do not decide any particular representational content for any given experience to have’ (Travis 2004: 69). Visual looks, in this sense, are equivocal.
The second notion of looks that Travis considers is what are generally called
epistemic looks (cf. Chisholm 1957: 44). Whereas visual looks relate to resemblances between appearances, epistemic looks are ‘very much a matter of what can be gathered from, or what is suggested by, the facts at hand, or those
21 Travis (2004) uses the terms ‘looks like’ and ‘looks as if’ in place of visible and thinkable looks, but this is apt to generate the impression that the argument concerns the semantic properties of certain linguistic forms rather than two roles that such appearances can play. I therefore adopt the terminology of Travis (forthcoming) in order to remain neutral about the nature of looks and their semantics, which are considered in greater depth in chapter 4.
visibly (audibly, etc.) on hand’ (Travis 2004: 76). They are what might be called
thinkable looks (Travis forthcoming), or lookst for short. Thinkable looks refer
to a specific way that things are in order to look the way that they do. Thus, they are ideally suited to indexing p-representational contents like ‘there is a
lemon before me’. Indeed, thinkable looks just are those contents that
perceptual experiences incline a perceiver to believe or judge under the relevant
circumstances.22 Whereas one might say, for example, that a particular painting
looksv like a Vermeer despite our knowing that it was in fact painted by van
Meegeren (an artist with an indistinguishable visual style), we would not
normally say that it lookst as if it is a Vermeer since we already know that it is
not (ibid. 75).23
It is doubtful, however, that the contents that are indexed by or identical to thinkable looks are recognisable to the subject solely on the basis of information that is perceptually available to them in experience. For example, if Amy sees what she takes to be a lemon in front of her, then there is a sense in which the
relevant object lookst to her as if it is a lemon (which it is). But for all that
things look that way, she might equally have taken the same object to be a lemon-shaped bar of soap had she had a subjectively indistinguishable
experience of it in a different context — upon walking into a chemist’s shop, for
example. This is not due to any difference in the information that is perceptually
available to the subject, but rather a matter of what she takes to be the case on
the basis of that information. Plausibly, what is different about these two
situations is not a matter of how things look in any perceptual sense, but of
what the subject is inclined to infer from their total evidence base under the
circumstances. Such inferences are a matter of judgement and not of experience, which conveys only how things appear. It is therefore unclear how one could
differentiate solely in virtue of perceptual experience, as Recognisability
requires, which of various otherwise indistinguishable possibilities are p- represented. Moreover, thinkable looks are a form of autorepresentation which, Travis argues, cannot be ‘given’ to the subject since its content is already accepted as true (2.2.3). Thus thinkable looks are in danger of collapsing into what Travis (2004: 67) calls mere ‘indicating’. That is, as suggesting to a subject
that, under the circumstances, p may be the case. But this cannot be what makes
representational content recognisable for similar reasons. Thinkable looks cannot index p-representational content on the basis of how things perceptually seem to the subject since the information that distinguishes them is not
22 Travis (2004) associates thinkable looks with the English locution ‘looks as if’ in the indicative mood, as distinct from ‘looks like’, which is typically (though not always) comparative.
23 The issue is complicated by the fact that several different locutions of ‘looks‘ — including, on occasions ‘looks like‘ — can be used to signify either comparative or epistemic looks. Travis (2004) claims that ‘looks as though … were …’ in the subjunctive mood only ever expresses the former notion, whereas ‘looks as if … is …’ in the indicative mood only expresses the latter. His argument, however, does not turn on this point, and the linguistic claim is dropped in Travis (forthcoming).
perceptually available to them, either in experience or otherwise, and thus
Recognisability fails. Thinkable looks are not perceptual looks.
It is important to emphasise that Travis’s argument from looks is not a merely semantic dispute about the meaning of ‘looks’, ‘appearance’, ‘seems’ and their cognates. As such, the point of the argument is not that there is no widely accepted meaning of ‘looks’ that individuates perceptual content. Rather, the
intended point is that there can be no such notion of looks on the basis that the
very idea of a univocal, objective and wholly perceptual ‘look’ is itself incoherent. Either (a) looks are visual, in which case they fail to pick out any specific way that the world must be in order for things to look that way, i.e. they are equivocal, or (b) looks ‘index’, or are identical to, thinkable contents about the subject’s perceptual environment, in which case they are not wholly perceptual, since nothing that is perceptually available to (as opposed to knowable by) the subject could pick out such univocal content.
Having established the two horns of the dilemma that Travis presses, the question naturally arises as to whether some other notion of looks is able to index representational content in a way that both has face value and is perceptually available to the subject. As Travis (2004: 79–82) makes clear in his discussion of McDowell’s notion of ‘ostensible seeing’, however, his answer to this question is emphatically negative. According to McDowell’s disjunctive
notion of looks — call this looksd — every possible state of affairs matching the
relevant perceptible appearance is said to be represented. This either robs p- representation of its univocality, since experience does not represent things to be a determinate way, or, if the disjunction itself is the face value, it removes the possibility that such content can misrepresent, thus undermining standard representationalist explanation of perceptual illusion (2.3.1).
In essence, the need to satisfy Recognisability pushes towards visual looks,
which contravene Face-value, whilst attempts to satisfy Face-value push towards
thinkable looks, which contravene Recognisability. The requirements to
establish both univocal representational content (Face-value) and to make that
content recognisable solely in virtue of how things appear to the subject (Looks-
indexing) thus work against each other in a way that is, according to Travis, fundamentally irreconcilable. Thus there cannot be any intermediate notion of looks or middle ground between these two alternatives, and so the idea of looks-
indexed p-representation is incoherent.24 Nevertheless, many of Travis’s critics
(e.g. Byrne 2009 and Schellenberg 2011b) take there to be a further ‘non- comparative’ notion of looks that shares the relevant features of visible and
24 One way around this would be to abandon the notion that p-representational concepts concern the subject’s perceptual environment in favour of their being facts about the experiences of subjects (cf. Glüer 2009). But this robs representationalism of much of its explanatory power, since the resulting propositions are no longer capable of grounding objective knowledge or belief about external objects.
thinkable looks in order that both Face-value and Looks-indexing may both be
met.25 Such rejections of L5 are examined in greater detail in chapters 3 and 4.
An alternative response to Travis’s argument from looks is to reject Looks-
indexing in favour of the weaker Recognisability condition, or else to reject
Recognisability outright. The former option places the onus upon the representationalist to explain how perceivers are able to recognise the contents of their perceptual experiences in a way that does not fall foul of Travis’s argument from recognisability (2.3.3). It is, however, difficult to see how this
can be done other than through Looks-indexing, at least in the case of visual
perception. This response may be combined with a rejection of one or more of
Givenness, Common Content or Face-value, each of which is independently plausible for reasons given above. The second option of rejecting or
reformulating Recognisability is more radical, though once again raises the
question of in what sense the resulting states would involve a form of
representation as opposed to mere causal covariance. Nevertheless, if p- representational content is thought to be externally individuated, then one might
not expect it to be recognisable — at least not in the standard sense — to the
subject, depending upon how this condition is formulated. This possibility is
examined in greater detail in chapters 5 and 6.