Seeing and Seeing As

Seeing and Seeing AsAuthor(s): G. N. A. VeseySource: Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, New Series, Vol. 56 (1955 - 1956), pp. 109-124Published by: Wiley on behalf of The Aristotelian SocietyStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/4544559 .

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Meeting of the Aristotelian Society at 21, Bedford Square, London, W.C.1, on February 13th, 1956, at 7.30 p.m.

VI.-SEEING AND SEEING AS

By G. N. A. VESEY.

(1)

ON looking at a thing sometimes we say " It's a torpedo, a lemon, an inkblot, solid, bent, green, etc.", and sometimes we say " It looks like a torpedo, like a lemon, like an inkblot, solid, bent, green, etc.". Sometimes we say of a person that he saw a torpedo, a lemon, an inkblot, and sometimes we say that he saw something as a torpedo, a lemon, an inkblot.

On what sort of occasions do we say " It looks like a torpedo " instead of " It's a torpedo"? Do we say " It looks like a torpedo" because the object in question does not look to us as it does when we unhesitatingly say " It's a torpedo"? But surely what we say when the object does not look as it does when we say " It's a torpedo " is either " It isn't a torpedo ", or " It doesn't look like a torpedo ".

It would seem that the object in question may look exactly as it does when, in other circumstances, we unhesitatingly say " It's a torpedo ", and yet we may say, not " It's a torpedo ", but " It looks like a torpedo ". The implication is that the point of our saying " It looks like a torpedo " instead of " It's a torpedo " lies in the circumstances; not, so to speak, in the content, but in the context.

Under what circumstances, other than those in which we say It's a torpedo ", do we say " It looks like a torpedo"?

The answer, I submit, is that we say " It looks like a torpedo " when we have reason to believe that the object may not really be what it looks like. A reason to believe that an object which looked like a torpedo was not one would be that no one was at war. This would be a good

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reason if the object were observed out at sea; but not such a good one if it was seen on dry land.

A stick half in water looks bent to both the man who says " It's bent " and the man who says " It looks bent ". But the man who says " It looks bent " thereby exhibits his sophistication in the matter of how an object's being half in water leads to his seeing it otherwise than as it is.

What an object looks like to somebody is what, on looking at it, that person would take it to be, if he had no reason to think otherwise. If he has a reason to think otherwise then he says, not " It is . . . ", but " It looks . . .

If a person has no reason to think that something is not what it looks like to him, can he, then, have no occasion to say " It looks . . . " ? No; for sometimes we say such things as " He not only is a confidence-trickster, but what is more he looks like one ". And we talk of people " seeing things for what they are ". But even so, it is still the fact that a thing may look to somebody like something it is not which gives point to our remark. If confidence- tricksters always looked like confidence-tricksters our remark would not be understood.

(2)

Is the expression " It looks . . ." always used in the sense with which we have been concerned so far? On the face of it there would appear to be at least two other senses:

1. Sometimes a person says " It looks to me as if. . .

and sometimes "As I see it, . . . ". For example, he may say " It looks to me as if there'll be no end to this inflation ". He might as well have said " In my opinion . . ." or even " I think . . . ". Contrast " It looks to me as if there'll be no end to this inflation " with " It looks like a torpedo ". Whereas the former expresses



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the judgment that there'll be no end to inflation, the latter does not express the judgment that the object seen is a torpedo. In saying " It looks like a torpedo " we report what would have been our evidence if, in the absence of reasons to think otherwise, we had judged it to be a torpedo.

The same sort of ambiguity is to be found in the expressions " It seems . . . " and " It appears .

The striation marks on an old cinematograph film present the appearance of rain. Yet it does not follow that it seems to the audience that it is raining. They are not taken in by the appearance of rain.

2. Sometimes we say of something, such as a formation of rocks or an inkblot, that it looks like, or that we see it as, say, an organist playing an organ. But in saying this usually we do not wish to suggest that the appearance of the object might mislead people into thinking that it really was an organist playing an organ, or a picture of one.

At one time the sort of toyshops which sold clockwork mice sold irregular-shaped pieces of dark-blue metal. Such an object looks like an inkblot, and the inkblot it looks like may look like an organist. But, in such a case, whereas somebody might ask for an ink-eraser, nobody, except as a joke, would ask who the organist was.

What else distinguishes this use of the expression 'looks like ' from that considered first?

Someone might say " When we say of what we know very well to be rocks or inkblots that they look like organists playing organs, or lions and lambs, we are simply drawing attention to certain features, principally to do with the shape, which the object in question has in common with what we say it looks like ". This answer is plausible until one reflects that we say of those ' reversible ' or ' ambiguous ' figures, beloved of the authors of introductory textbooks on psychology, that they look at one moment like one thing, at the next like another, in spite of there being no alteration in their shape. And it could hardly be maintained that the person who says of a reversible figure that it looks to him like a staircase is, in so saying, showing that he has

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12 G. N. A. VESEY.

reason to doubt whether the drawing actually is of a staircase.

Alternatively, it might be said that the person to whom a formation of rocks or an inkblot looks like an organist playing an organ is 'using his imagination'. What exactly does this mean? We talk of a person imagining he is the Chancellor of the Exchequer, or the inheritor of a vast fortune. Such a person pretends to himself that he is in the favoured state. Does the person who sees an inkblot as an organist pretend to himself that it is a picture of an organist? Does the person who sees a reversible figure as a staircase pretend to himself that it is a picture of one? He may well do so, but it does not seem essential to his seeing it thus.

If to say that the person who sees an inkblot as an organist is using his imagination is to mean that the psychological explanation of this is somehow different from that of his seeing it as an inkblot, then it would seem to be simply false. The reversible figures are in the psychological textbooks to bring out something about perception in general, namely that it is a function of the receiving organism as well as of the stimulus. It is not just a function of the stimulus when something is seen as ' meaningless' black and white marks, becoming also a function of the receptor when it is seen as, say, a vase. Perception is a function of both stimulus and receptor, throughout.

What might be meant when it is said that a person, who sees a formation of rocks or an inkblot as an organist playing an organ, is using his imagination, is this: Imagining is something we need not do. We can be content just to see the rocks as rocks, the inkblot as an inkblot. We don't have to ' go beyond' this, which is just as well since such going beyond is not directed to seeing things for what they are.

There are two points here, which, in reverse order, are:

(a) The person who says of an inkblot " It looks like an organist" is not doubtful as to whether it is




a picture of an organist. If people said " Well, is it or isn't it? " all he could say was that they had mis- understood him. He does not doubt whether it is a picture of an organist. He knows perfectly well that it is not a picture of an organist but an inkblot. But his attention is not directed to seeing things for what they are.

(b) The person who says of an inkblot " It looks like an organist " can refrain from seeing inkblots as things, just as people can refrain from 'reading' the pattern of tea leaves left in cups.

I am not sure whether the second of these points is true. The reversibility of some of the drawings in the psychological textbooks depends on seeing first one part of the drawing as figure and the rest as ground, then the first part as ground and the rest as figure. To see the drawing for what it is, presumably we should have to see things otherwise than in terms of figure and ground. This may well be psychologically impossible, in which case it would not be true that we could refrain from 'going beyond ' the marks on the paper. But at least such refraining would remain conceivable.

What is true, then, is that it makes sense to say that an inkblot does not, in the sense of ' looks like' in which to somebody it looks like an organist, look like anything to somebody else, who nevertheless sees it clearly.

In the other sense of ' looks like ', however, it is hard to see what meaning could be given to talk of something not looking like anything. " I saw it, but I didn't see it as anything " seems to be self-contradictory, unless we choose to apply the expression ' not see it as anything' either (a) when what something is seen as is so indefinite as to be of negligible value in indicating what the object is, or (b) when what is seen is so strange as to defy description.

I will mark my non-acceptance of these meanings for 'not see it as anything' by saying "All seeing is seeing as.



114 G. N. A. VESEY.

(3)

"All seeing is seeing as." In other words, if a person sees something at all it must look like something to him, even if it only looks like 'somebody doing something'. The less definite one's perception the less chance of its being non-veridical, but also the less chance of its being useful.

Another way of expressing the point that all seeing is seeing as is to say that perceptions, like judgments, are either true or false. They are true when what the object looks like to somebody, that is, what on looking at it the person would take it to be if he had no reason to think otherwise, is what the object is; false otherwise.

It was said earlier that the point of our saying " It looks like . . . " as distinct from " It is . . . " lies in the context. It is tempting to imagine that the point lies, not in the context, but, somehow, in the content, that is, in the actual experience of seeing, itself. This temptation seems to be reinforced when it is said that perceptions, like judgments, are either true or false. It seems to be reinforced because the inference is drawn that if perceptions are like judgments in this respect, they must involve judgments. The assumption is that only judgments can be true or false.

In this manner, I think, are philosophers, like Dawes Hicks, led to say such things as: " I realise, of course, the awkwardness of saying, as many psychologists have felt themselves constrained to say, that judgment is involved from the outset in cognitive apprehension, that even the simplest cognitive state is in reality a state of judging. For unquestionably the term 'judgment ', as ordinarily understood, expresses a highly reflective act, which depends for its exercise upon a definite recognition of the distinction between the subjective and the objective, such as no one supposes the primitive mind to be capable of. The difficulty here is, however, purely a verbal difficulty, and to throw it in the way is simply to obscure the issue ".1

1 G. Dawes Hicks. " Is there 'knowledge by acquaintance'? " Arist. Soc. Supp., Vol. II, 1919.




It is not perfectly clear what Dawes Hicks means by this.

We have already considered, by implication, one meaning which might be given to " All perception involves judging ". It is, that I always judge things to be what they look like. With this meaning it is plainly false.

Dawes Hicks implies that it is not true of the judgment which is involved in 'even the simplest cognitive state' that it ' depends for its exercise upon a definitive recognition of the distinction between the subjective and the objective'. Presumably ' the subjective' is what a thing looks like, and 'the objective ' what it is. What he says would seem to amount to the theory, which, I believe, is held by some philosophers today, that whenever something is seen as being of a certain sort, the idea that it is of that sort is

entertained'. Entertaining a proposition' has been proposed by some philosophers as an element common to the analysis of both believing and disbelieving, that proposition. It is not always made clear whether or not the theory is one which we are supposed to test by introspection. If it were added that entertaining was the reverse of a highly reflective act, this would in effect rule out introspection as a test of the theory. Dawes Hicks implies that it is not true of the judgment that is involved in perception that it ' expresses a highly reflective act '.

With its modifications this theory, it seems to me, is quite safe from disproof. Disagreement between what the object looks like and what one judges it to be is not to the point. Introspection is not to the point. The trouble is that, at this stage, nothing seems to be to the point, except the power of one person to persuade another to extend his use of the word 'judgment ' to cover cases he would not previously have used it to cover.

Perhaps the above theory of the role of judgment in perception is only adhered to because philosophers find repulsive the alternative theory and yet cannot bring themselves to renounce the dogma that only a judgment can be true or false.



116 G. N. A. VESEY.

The alternative theory is the theory that the judgment that is involved in perception is a judgment not about a material thing but about a non-material thing called a ' sense-datum '. Before considering this theory it will be as well to outline the problem to which it is thought by some to provide a solution, or, rather, for the solution of which it is thought to provide a language.

(4)

Perceptions, like judgments, are either true or false. Many of our false perceptions we can correct by attending more closely to the object before us. But there are some, known as ' illusions ', which persist despite all our efforts to see things as they are. Such false perceptions are thought of by unreflective people as tricks, oddities, exceptions to the rule, things to be explained away. 'The rule ', here, is constituted by the vast majority of perceptions in which there is no disagreement between what people see things as, and what they believe, or find, them to be. These are the cases which provide no occasion for talking of what things look like, or what people see things as. And they provide no occasion for having to conceive of perception as something which occurs under such conditions as the state of the perceiver's nervous system. One might conclude from his lack of recognition of the dependence of his perceptions on the state of his nervous system, that the man in the street must think of himself, qua perceiver, as a disembodied spirit.

Some people see in the fact that perception occurs under conditions the necessity of concluding that we are not really aware of the material world.

A. C. Ewing, for example, writes ('Fundamental Questions of Philosophy' pp. 68-9): "Two different people looking at the same thing at the same time from different positions in space may see it differently, e.g. as having different shapes. But the same thing cannot really




have two different shapes at the same time. Therefore they are not really seeing the same thing ".

And Thomas Reid, in his " Essays on the Intellectual Powers of Man "2 considers the argument: "The table which we see, seems to diminish as we remove farther from it; but the real table, which exists independent of us, suffers no alteration. It was, therefore, nothing but its image which was presented to the mind ". Reid's reply to this argument is as follows: "Let us suppose, for a moment, that it is the real table we see: Must not this real table seem to diminish as we remove farther from it? It is demonstrable tllat it must. How then can this apparent diminution be an argument that it is not the real table? When that which must happen to the real table, as we remove farther from it, does actually happen to the table we see, it is absurd to conclude from this that it is not the real table we see".

It is not only philosophers who consider that it follows from perception occurring under conditions that we are not really aware of the material world. A scientist3 recently wrote: " Let us begin by considering how we get our information about the world from our senses: chiefly from sight, hearing, and touch. We know, for example, that when we see an object, the rays of light from the object enter the eye and are focused on the retina, where they cause sensitive cells to send messages or disturbances of an electrical nature along nerve fibres which go to the brain. These disturbances can be traced within the brain to regions which are known to deal with vision, and no doubt the nerve cells which they enter influence many others in the intricate layers of cells which form the cerebral cortex. There our present information comes to an end, although we are aware of the result. Out of the messages we make, and in some way are aware of, a 'picture' of the outside world.

2 Edited and abridged by A. D. Woozley, Macmillan, 1941, p. 145. 3J. A. V. Butler, " Pictures in the Mind ", Science News 22, Penguin

Books, 1951.



118 G. N. A. VESEY.

We are so familiar with this picture that we take it to be the outside world. We say that we are ' looking ' at the world, and primitive and simple people think that when they look out of their eyes and see what is before them, they are performing a positive act. There is no doubt that what we are aware of is a ' construct', made from the varied sensations which reach the brain; a picture which we make by selecting and emphasising some data and ignoring many others, a picture which in many ways is highly personal ".

Philosophers are divided on the question of the relevance of psychological and physiological discoveries about perception to the propriety of our everyday language about what we perceive. The situation may be compared with that in which psychological theories about the causation of human behaviour are held by some, but not by others, to bear on the validity of the distinction between voluntary and involuntary actions. Philosophers who say that determinism and free-will are compatible usually defend their claim by ' analysing' voluntariness in terms of the tests we employ, when we are not philosophizing, to decide whether an action is voluntary. Philosophers who disagree with them reject this analysis as not giving the essential meaning of voluntariness, which, they say, is " such as to exclude from being voluntary any action which is causally determined ". Similarly a philosopher who says that the psychology of perception is not relevant to the propriety of our everyday talk about what we perceive may analyse such a proposition as " Smith and Jones were seeing the same thing " in terms of the tests we employ, when we are not philosophizing, to decide whether the proposition is true. And a philosopher who disagrees wvith him will say " Ah, but the psychologists' discoveries show that when we say that Smith and Jones are seeing the same thing we are not using ' same ' in its proper, strict, literal sense, but in a derived, loose or Pickwickian sense ".

In neither case are the psychologists' discoveries felt to make it impossible to use the language as iti was used



SEEING AND SEEING AS. 119

before: the tests that were applied can still be applied.4 What is felt is that if the statements are to be true they must express no more than the results of the tests. They are no longer felt to be true in some sense, usually described as ' literal ', ' strict', or ' real', in which, it is claimed, they were felt to be true before perception came to be thought of as occurring under such conditions as the state of the perceiver's nervous system.

(5)

The reasoning behind the sense-datum theory of perception would seem to be something like this:

(1) The problem arises from the fact that a material thing can look (feel, sound, etc.) like something it is not. This is because our alleged ' awareness ' of material things is essentially ' under conditions '. Because it is under conditions, two different people looking at the same thing may see it differently, for example, one as a stick, the other as a snake. But what they are aware of cannot be both a stick and a snake. Therefore they are not really aware of the same thing.

(2) A material thing can look (feel, sound, etc.) like something it is not. That is, our perception of it can be mistaken. To make a mistake is to draw a false conclusion from given evidence. If there is not to be a vicious regress there must be some element in our alleged awareness of material things of which our awareness is such that mistakes are impossible, that is, of which we are aware

4 Berkeley, " Three Dialogues between Hylas and Philonous, in opposition to Sceptics and Atheists ", Third Dialogue. Philonous: If the term ' same' be taken in the vulgar acceptation, it is certain (and not at all repugnant to the principles I maintain) that different persons may perceive the same thing; or the same thing or idea exist in different minds. Words are of arbitrary imposition; and since men are used to apply the word 'same' where no distinction or variety is perceived, and I do not pretent to alter their pre- ceptions, it follows, that as men have said before, 'several saw the same thing', so they may upon like occasions still continue to use. the same phrase, without any deviation either from propriety of language or the truth of things. But if the term ' same ' be used in the acceptation of philosophers, who pretent to an abstracted notion of identity, then . . ..



120 G. N. A. VESEY.

otherwise than under conditions. Let us call this element the 'sense-datum', and our awareness of it 'immediate awareness '. The sense-datum is the evidence without which we could not draw a conclusion about the material world.

(3) Being something of which we are aware, the sense- datum is a thing, though not, of course, a material thing, since our awareness of it is not under conditions. To find out what is the sense in which two people can be perceptually aware of the same material thing we must discover what is the relationship between sense-data and material things.

' Real' or 'immediate' awareness, and its object, are defined in this theory in terms of the ideas (i) that, for perception to be veridical or non-veridical it must somehow involve a judgment, and (ii) that the evidence on the basis of which the judgment is made must be some thing of which we are aware in a manner otherwise than under conditions.

The expression ' that of which we are aware in a manner otherwise than under conditions' could be given meaning if we said that we were aware, in this manner, of, for example, the torpedo-like look of an object to us, or the staircase-like look of the reversible figure. With this meaning, all the conditions-not just those having to do with our position in space in relation to the object but also those having to do with our past experience, our present psychological ' set ', and so on-under which we perceive material things, are allowed for in the' object ' of immediate awareness. They can be allowed for only because the ' object ' is not a thing. It is not a thing,5 and it is not a thought, and it is not a thought about a thing. And it is only because it is none of these that it can constitute our experiential evidence for whatever may be our thoughts about the material world.

b If the two different 'appearances' of a reversible figure were indeed things ('pictures') we could conceive of them projected out from our minds, on to a screen, side by side, and distinguishable. But the only images on a screen which could serve as. projections of the two different- ' appearances' would be identical.




(6)

But why cannot the object of immediate awareness be a thing, and yet be our evidence for whatever may be our thoughts about the material world?

To account for the fact that we often see a thing as, say, green, but not as any particular shade of green, or as triangular, but neither as scalene nor as equilateral, we refer to lack of ' attention '. It is no good just directing your gaze at something; to see it as having a determinate quality with respect to a certain determinable you must 'attend ' to it with a view to ascertaining what that quality is.

The correlate, in psychological theory, of attention is 'interest' or 'set'. Some philosophers are inclined to deny that objects can be seen as, say, green but not any particular shade of green. They ask themselves, as an experiment, the question " Can I see this but not be aware of its precise colour? ". They do not ask " Do we always notice what colour things are? ". It would seem that the explanation of their answering the first question in the negative is that the very process of trying to answer it involves them in having a ' set' which they might otherwise not have had, namely the set which goes with their attending to colour.

An object, in virtue of being gazed at, in virtue of being before one's open eyes, is not evidence for any beliefs. It is my seeing an object as green, to do which I mtist to some degree attend to it, which may justify my believing it to be green.

If a sense-datum is a thing, then it cannot have only generic or indeterminate qualities; its qualities must be fully determinate. It cannot be just 'green', but must be some particular shade of green.

Suppose an object looks green to me. According to the theory with which we are concerned the analysis of this is into (a) my being immediately aware of a sense-datum of a certain determinate shade of green, say peacock green; and (b) my thinking that it is green. If the object looks peacock green, the first element in my perception remains



122 o. N. A. VESEY.

the same, but the second becomes ' my thinking that it is peacock green'. My evidence-the sense-datum-is the same in both cases, but my thought is different. I might merely have noticed that it was coloured, but my evidential situation would be the same as if I had seen exactly what colour it was.

I conclude that, if we are immediately aware of the sense-datum, and if the sense-datum itself, in virtue of our being immediately aware of it, constitutes our evidence for whatever we think about it, then there can be no explanation for our thought about the sense-datum being whatever that thought is. There can be no explanation on the lines of the ' lack of attention' explanation of our not being perceptually aware of the fully determinate qualities of material things; for our awareness of the peacock green sense-datum, whether we think of it as peacock green, green, or merely coloured, is the same-immediate. And there can be no explanation on the lines of our being aware of a different object; for in each case it is the same, fully determinate sense-datum of which we are aware. So long as the sense-datum is a thing, and the awareness of it immediate, those facts of perception which we ordinarily account for by saying " He was not paying any attention to . . . ", "His mind was elsewhere ", and so on, on the one hand, and " His mind was fully on the . . . " " He was paying particular attention to . . ." on the other, simply cannot be accommodated in the language of sense- data and immediate awareness. But attention is a necessary condition of perceptual awareness. Hence, it seems to me, a solution to the problem of reconciling the notion of perception as occurring under conditions, with the 'common-sense ' assumption that different people are frequently aware of the same thing, cannot be found by using the terms of the sense-datum language. Rather, it would seem, is a solution of the problem made impossible by so doing.

(7)

A solution to the problem of reconciling the notion of




perception as occurring under conditions, with the ' common-sense assumption that different people are frequently aware of the same thing, is possible. It is possible if we are prepared (1) to renounce the dogma that only judgments can be true or false; (2) to extend our notion of what constitute the conditions under which awareness of the same thing by different people is possible. Ordinarily we do not regard the fact that different people are situated in different positions with respect to an object as entailing that they are not aware of the same object. We say, with A. E. Murphy6, " To be sure, we gain our perceptual information about such objects through such expedients as looking at them, and what we thus see of them is the way they look (appear) under the conditions in which they can be observed. But how else would a human organism see a material object? ".

What is required is that we should refuse to draw any distinction between such conditions of observation as position in space in relation to the object perceived and such conditions as the 'possession', by the perceiver, of an appropriate physiological apparatus. In so doing we may preserve the common-sense conception of the object of perception as a ' public object ', even if we have to relinquish the idea that this public object has all the 'sensible' qualities (colour, smell, and so on) we perceive it as having.

(8)

My aim in this paper has been to combat the idea that in seeing an object as something, in recognising an object, there is necessarily involved a judgment, either about the object in question or about some other, non-material, object.

Whenever we see an object it looks like something, or looks to have some quality. But its looking thus is not to

6 cc The Philosophy of G. E. Moore ", 1942, p. 312.



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be identified with our judging it to be what it looks like. Nor is its looking thus to be identified with a judgment about some other thing, for in no ' thing ' can we incorporate such conditions of observation as our attention to the features of an object.

In other words, the look of a thing is something pheno- menal, not intellectual. But this is not to deny that experience and judgment are connected: for what an object looks like to a person is what he would judge that object to be if he had no reason to judge otherwise.



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