Perceptual constancy and the dimensions of perceptual experience
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Perceptual constancy and the dimensions of perceptual experience John O’Dea 1 Accepted: 21 September 2020/ # Springer Nature B.V. 2020
Abstract Perceptual constancy, often defined as the perception of stable features under changing conditions, goes hand in hand with variation in how things look. A white wall in the orange afternoon sun still looks white, though its whiteness looks different compared with the same wall in the noon sun. Historically, this variation has often been explained in terms of our experience of “merely sensory” or subjective properties – an approach at odds with the fact that the variation does track objective features of the perceptual situation, such as illumination (in the case of colour constancy). One approach, becoming more common, is to account for the variation in terms of further “dimensions” to perceptual experience. Especially in colour perception, this is a natural thought to have but the idea is often left vague. In this paper I argue that the “dimensional” strategy has problems of its own, but is useful in drawing out some interesting complications in the way perceptual experience is structured. Specifically, the structure of “constancy spaces” brings out the different ways in which there is stability and instability in the experience of constancy, without the need for novel or merely subjective features. Instability arises in a contingent structural feature of perceptual experience. Keywords Perceptual constancy . Perceptual stability . Perception . Colour perception .
Philosophy of mind
1 Introduction The broad background question motivating this paper is: when we perceive the world around us, what is the world’s contribution to our experience, and what is our own contribution? What aspects of experience reflect objective features of the world, and what aspects are, as it were, merely subjective? This distinction seems to divide some * John O’Dea [email protected]–tokyo.ac.jp
1
Department of Interdisciplinary Cultural Studies, The University of Tokyo, Tokyo, Japan
J. O’Dea
experiences from others, such as seeing a tree and feeling an itch – the tree is really out there in front of me; the itch arguably is not. But it is commonly thought that within visual experience a related distinction also applies, which is usually (though not always) held to be a distinction between visual awareness of mind-dependent and mind-independent features. On the one hand there are “sensations”,1 also referred to as “sensational properties”,2 “visual field properties”,3 “perspectival properties”,4 “situational features”,5 “unasserted features”,6 “appearance properties”,7 “proximal mode perceptions”,8 “qualitative appearances”,9 “phenomenal appearances”,10 “phenomenal percepts”,11 “appearances*”,12 or simply “appearances”.13 These are often contrasted with perceptions14 as of objective worldly properties. A powerful reason for postulating these two aspects arises from the experiential variation that accompanies perceptual constancy: two surfaces can look to be the same colour, but if there is a
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