Abstract

Sensorimotor expectations concern how visual experience covaries with bodily movement. Sensorimotor theorists argue from such expectations to the conclusion that the phenomenology of vision is constitutively embodied: objects within the visual field are experienced as 3-D because sensorimotor expectations partially constitute our experience of such objects. Critics argue that there are (at least) two ways to block the above inference: to explain how we visually experience objects as 3-D, one may appeal to such non-bodily factors as (1) expectations about movements of objects, not the perceiver, or to (2) the role of mental imagery in visual experience. But instead of using sensorimotor expectations to explain how objects are experienced within the visual field, we can instead use them to explain our experience of the visual field itself and, in particular, our experience of its limits; that is, our ever-present visual sense of there being more to see, beyond what’s currently within the visual field. Crucially, this inference from sensorimotor expectations to the constitutive embodiment of visual phenomenology is not threatened by the above two challenges. I thus present here a sensorimotor theory of the phenomenology of the visual field, that is, our experience of our visual fields as such.

Highlights

  • There is a puzzle at the heart of visual phenomenology: surveying the scene before one, objects occlude both parts of themselves and parts of other objects

  • The sensorimotor theorist claims that this puzzle is solved when we factor into visual experience our sensorimotor expectations: it is true that you cannot see the rear, occluded sides of the objects before you, you expect to see those occluded sides, were you to move in the relevant ways

  • Contrary to the claims of sensorimotor theorists, that embodiment need not concern how things appear within the visual field, i.e. as whole 3-D objects with occluded, rear sides

Read more

Summary

Introduction

There is a puzzle at the heart of visual phenomenology: surveying the scene before one, objects occlude both parts of themselves and parts of other objects. The claim that visual phenomenology depends upon one’s body in a mere causal sense makes bodily movement and expectations one thing and visual experience is another. The second objection is that our experience of the occluded sides of objects may have nothing to do with expectations about bodily movement and may be a matter of the sensory imagination filling in the relevant details (Thomas 2009; Nanay 2010; Kind 2018) While these are not the only objections that have been put to sensorimotor theorists, they are exceptionally serious ones insofar as they directly challenge the sensorimotor theorist’s inference from sensorimotor expectations to vision’s constitutive embodiment. I present here a sensorimotor theory of the phenomenology of the visual field, our awareness, that is, of our visual fields as such

The problem of object-active expectations
The problem of the sensory imagination
Martin’s field
A sensorimotor theory of visual field phenomenology
Objections revisited
Object-active expectations
The sensory imagination
Conclusion
Full Text
Published version (Free)

Talk to us

Join us for a 30 min session where you can share your feedback and ask us any queries you have

Schedule a call