Is the visual world a grand illusion

Abstract

In this paper I explore a brand of scepticism about perceptual experience that takes its start from recent work in psychology and philosophy of mind on change blindness and related phenomena. I argue that the new scepticism rests on a problematic phenomenology of perceptual experience. I then consider a strengthened version of the sceptical challenge that seems to be immune to this criticism. This strengthened sceptical challenge formulates what I call the problem of perceptual presence. I show how this problem can be addressed by drawing on an enactive or sensorimotor approach to perceptual consciousness. Our experience of environmental detail consists in our access to that detail thanks to our possession of practical knowledge of the way in which what we do and sensory stimulation depend on each other. Traditional scepticism about perceptual experience questions whether we can know that things are as we experience them as being. This paper targets a new form of scepticism about experience that takes its start from recent work in perceptual psychology and philosophy of mind. The new scepticism questions whether we even have the perceptual experience we think we have. According to the new scepticism, we have radically false beliefs about what our perceptual experience is like. Perceptual consciousness is a kind of false consciousness; a sort of confabulation. The visual world is a grand illusion. The new scepticism raises important questions for philosophy, psychology, and consciousness studies. What is the character of our perceptual experience? And who does the sceptic mean by ‘we ’ anyway? Ordinary perceivers? Ordinary perceivers in unusual reflective contexts? Or psychologists and philosophers? These are surprisingly difficult questions. I argue, in what follows, that the new scepticism, and perhaps also the new perceptual psychology it has spawned, rests on a misguided and overly simplistic account of perceptual phenomenology.

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