The effect view and the causal theory of perception

I have suggested that the natural view and the simple metaphysical picture might make intelligible the relationalist claim offered by naïve realists to explain the directness of perception, namely the claim that the worldly objects perceived are literally constituents of the perceptual experience. The simple metaphysical picture makes good this claim by identifying what we call ‘experience’ with just the worldly process or state of affairs that is the object’s being perceived by the subject. Nothing metaphysically extravagant is

intended by this claim. Quite the reverse: it is intended to be deflationary about ‘experiences’ insofar as it denies that talk of ‘having a perceptual experience’ is to be understood as entailing the occurrence of something – an experience – that is in some way distinctively mental and separate from the thing perceived. ‘Having a perceptual

experience’ is, given the simple metaphysical picture, taken instead to be a convoluted synonym of ‘perceiving’.12 _{Otherwise, the claim that perceptual experience takes the}

worldly object as a constituent might strike one as implausible or bizarre insofar as it contradicts a commitment that is, explicitly or not, common to the vast majority of theories of perceptual experience. The commitment in question is a broad claim about the

relationship between perceptual experience and the physical process involved in

perception, namely that perceptual experience is an event or state within the subject which occurs at the end of a causal chain originating externally to the mind, such that the

12 _{One might think that it is possible to perceive unconsciously, while having a perceptual experience} expressly implicates conscious perceiving. In that case, we might prefer to treat ‘having a perceptual experience’ as synonymous with ‘consciously perceiving’, but without taking this to require that the conscious aspect of it involves the occurrence of an ‘experience’ in the substantial sense that I reject.

experience itself is an effect of the worldly thing perceived. I will call this the effect view of perceptual experience:

The effect view: perceptual experience is a state of, or event within, the subject which is caused by the worldly object perceived.13

The effect view is widely seen as uncontroversial and indeed obviously true. As a result, it is rarely defended as a philosophical claim in its own right.14 _{A philosophical}

claim it is, nonetheless. Doubtless what has obscured its contestable status as a

philosophical claim is a failure to conceive of any plausible alternatives. And the likely worry is that a rejection of the effect view would entail detaching experience from the realm of causes altogether, an outcome with unfortunate consequences for all of the philosophical projects, metaphysical and epistemological alike, that centre on reconciling mind and the physical world.

It should be clear, however, that it is just this reconciliation between mind and world that the natural view is intended to bring about. More precisely, it follows from the natural view that the felt need for reconciliation is really an artefact of the effect view’s conception of ‘mind’ as something more or less distinct from the world. As such, we can go further than the weak requirement that the physical facts about the perceptual process do not rule out the natural view or otherwise favour the effect view, and assert more strongly that the natural view is more obviously consistent with a broadly physical ontology. The purpose of the current chapter is to show that the weaker requirement is met – that the natural view

13 _{Most theories of perceptual experience will draw a distinction between the experience itself and its} ‘content’ – what the experience is about, the state of affairs that would make the experience accurate or true. This distinction is often cashed out as holding between an inner state of the subject and what that state represents; between a representational ‘vehicle’ and the representational content (e.g. Dretske 2003: 68). Clearly, on this view, where the content of the experience refers to an object in the subject’s

environment the experience’s content is not a state of or event within the subject caused by that object. In respect of such theories the effect view therefore concerns the experience itself – the vehicle rather than the content. On the view that I will defend there is no such distinction: the objects that a perceptual experience is about are constituents of the experience itself.

14 _{For example, Valberg states that what he calls ‘the causal picture of experience’ – crucially incorporating} the claim that experience is the ‘upshot’, ‘result’ or ‘culmination’ of the familiar causal process of vision involving light, eyes, nervous excitation, etc. – is “not in any sense a ‘philosophical’ view or theory” (1992: 24). A little more circumspectly, Strawson remarks that “with the distinction between

independently existing objects and perceptual awareness of objects we already have the general notion of causal dependence of the latter on the former, even if this is not a matter to which we give much

reflective attention in our pre-theoretical days” (2011: 136). We might think the latter caveat somewhat undermines his earlier claim that the stated distinction “is as firmly a part of our pre-theoretical scheme as is our taking ourselves, in general, to be immediately aware of those objects” (ibid.: 135).

is consistent with the physical facts about perception. The wider metaphysical implications of the simple metaphysical picture will be the subject of chapter 7.

I will argue that we can reject the effect view by denying the need to postulate a perceptual experience that is taken to be a more or less discrete, datable event or entity occupying a particular place within the physical-causal perceptual process. As we will see later, however, this denial requires that the burden of explaining any peculiar features of perception, and of sensory experience more generally, falls back on to the world. In other words, any seemingly anomalous features of how things appear to us sensorily must, after all, prove explicable in terms of the nature of the physical world. Accordingly, in chapters 3 to 6, I will argue that the natural view is consistent with what we know about experience from the first-person perspective, and in particular that it can accommodate phenomena like perceptual illusion and hallucination which have widely been seen as problematic for naïve realism.

In the meantime, it might be thought that the effect view is supported by empirical findings regarding the perceptual process. One might furthermore hold it to be a

requirement of our ordinary concept of perception. In other words, the effect view might be considered as either or both an empirical and a conceptual truth. In this section I will argue that it is neither. Clearly, the claim that the effect view is a conceptual truth is a stronger claim than the empirical claim, as the former would entail the latter but not vice

versa. For that reason it is the conceptual claim that I will assess first.