Why, and in what sense, things look different in the shade: solving the puzzle of constancy

John O ()

Philosophy department, University of Birmingham
5pm-7pm, Thursday 27th of March 2014

Room 149, ERI Building, University of Birmingham Campus (G3 on Campus Map: http://www.birmingham.ac.uk/Documents/university/edgbaston-map.pdf)  

Royal Institute of Philosophy, Birmingham Branch Public Lecture on Perception

John O'Dea (University of Tokyo, Komada): Why, and in what sense, things look different in the shade: solving the puzzle of constancy.

This lecture is free and open to all. Refreshments will also be provided. For further information, please contact Dr Jussi Suikkanen ([email protected]).

Abstract: I want to dispute an assumption about perceptual experience that is almost universally held but is undefended because it is unnoticed.  This assumption is wreaking havoc in certain debates in the philosophy of mind. It is this: that insofar as perceptual qualities represent properties, they do so in a one-to-one manner; one experiential quality represents one, and only one, property. Call it the simplicity assumption. For example, this assumption would have it that there is an experiential quality as of redness, and this represents simply the quality of being red. Hopefully, as just stated this assumption will sound somewhat platitudinous. In what follows, I will make a case that it is actually pernicious, because there are simply no good reasons to believe it, and it hides from view solutions to some quite contentious debates. I begin by spelling out the assumption in more detail, and why it has little going for it. Then I discuss a problem for which we have the most to gain by ditching it — the problem of perceptual constancy.