Dretske on Non‐Epistemic Seeing

Abstract

AbstractIn this article, I make a distinction between two versions of non‐epistemicism about seeing, and bring explicitly into view and argue against a particular version defended by Dretske. More specifically, I distinguish non‐epistemic seeing as non‐conceptual seeing, where concept possession is assumed to be cognitively demanding, from non‐epistemic seeing as seeing without noticing, where noticing is assumed to be relatively cognitively undemanding. After showing that Dretske argues for the possibility of non‐epistemic seeing in both senses of the term, I target his thesis that a given subject (non‐epistemically) sees all the objects that are visually differentiated in her visual field, where visual differentiation does not require that she notice those objects. I argue that the notion of a visual field deployed in the formulation of the thesis cannot be phenomenal and therefore that seeing without noticing amounts to mere visual confrontation (in a sense to be specified). I further argue that since the epistemicist does not (and need not) deny the existence of seeing without noticing in the sense of mere visual confrontation, there is a clear sense in which Dretske's non‐epistemicism turns out to be trivial.