Seeing absence
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Seeing absence Anna Farennikova
Ó Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht 2012
Abstract Intuitively, we often see absences. For example, if someone steals your laptop at a cafe´, you may see its absence from your table. However, absence perception presents a paradox. On prevailing models of perception, we see only present objects and scenes (Marr, Gibson, Dretske). So, we cannot literally see something that is not present. This suggests that we never literally perceive absences; instead, we come to believe that something is absent cognitively on the basis of what we perceive. But this cognitive explanation does not do justice to the phenomenology. Many experiences of absence possess immediate, perceptual qualities. One may further argue that the ability to detect certain absences confers strong adaptive advantage and therefore must be as primitive and fundamental to humans as seeing positive things. I argue that we can literally see absences; in addition to representing objects, perception represents absences of objects. I present a model of seeing absence based on visual expectations and a visual matching process. The phenomenon of seeing absence can thus serve as an adequacy-test for a theory of perceptual content. If experiences of absence are possible, then we have another reason (following Siegel) to reject the view that perceptual content is restricted to colors and shapes. Furthermore, if the proposed account is correct, then we have grounds for dissociating seeing absence from other imagery-based phenomena termed ‘‘perceptual presence-in-absence’’ (Noe¨, Macpherson). Keywords Perceptual content Visual experience Perception of absence Phenomenal character Memory Imagination
A. Farennikova (&) Department of Philosophy, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 240 East Cameron, CB#3125, Chapel Hill, NC 27599-3125, USA e-mail: [email protected]
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A. Farennikova
1 Introduction You’ve been working on your laptop in the cafe´ for a few hours and have decided to take a break. You step outside, leaving your laptop temporarily unattended on the table. After a few minutes, you walk back inside. Your eyes fall upon the table. The laptop is gone! This experience has striking phenomenology. You do not infer that the laptop is missing through reasoning; you have an immediate impression of its absence. Our life is replete with more mundane examples. We discover that there is no milk in the fridge, notice an absence of a colleague in a meeting, or see that the keys are missing from the drawer. These are routine cases of perceiving an absence. However, absence perception presents a paradox. On prevailing theories of perception, we see only present objects and scenes (Marr 1982; Gibson 1966; Dretske 1969). So we cannot literally see something that is not present. This suggests that we never actually perceive absences; instead, we come to believe that something is absent on the basis of what we perceive. But this cognitive explanation does not do justice to the phenomenology. Experiences of absence p
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