Abstract
The paper presents a new philosophical theory of blurred vision according to which visual experiences have two types of content: exteroceptive content, characterizing external entities, and interoceptive content, characterizing the state of the visual system. In particular, it is claimed that blurriness-related phenomenology interoceptively presents acuity of vision in relation to eye focus. The proposed theory is consistent with the representationalist thesis that phenomenal character supervenes on representational content and with the strong transparency thesis formulated in terms of mind-independentness. Furthermore, the interoceptive approach is free from controversial assumptions adopted by other philosophical theories of blurred experiences and is able to account for the epistemic and motivational role of visual blur, i.e. that blurred experiences provide a prima facie justification for beliefs regarding our vision and motivate actions directed toward our eyes.
Highlights
The paper presents a new philosophical theory of blurred vision according to which visual experiences have two types of content: exteroceptive content, characterizing external entities, and interoceptive content, characterizing the state of the visual system
Many philosophical theories of blurred vision weaken or abandon the transparency thesis by postulating that blurriness is a property of some mental entities (e.g., Crane 2006; Pace 2007) or discard the intuition that in blurred experiences blurriness is not attributed to external objects (e.g., Allen 2013; Gow 2019)
This paper presents a novel theory of blurred vision which is consistent with both representationalism and transparency
Summary
I discuss the contemporary philosophical theories of blurred vision. I do not aim to provide arguments which would force anybody to abandon these theories, but I show that all available accounts of blurred experiences have some important drawbacks. This serves as a basis for showing that the described problems do not threaten my interoceptive theory. Accounts which accommodate this intuition but reject or weaken the transparency thesis are discussed. I believe that negative theories present correct but incomplete account of visual blur which should be supplemented by introducing interoceptive visual content
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