"Seeing What's Not There" - Philosophy Colloquium

Come to Duke's Philosophy Department and enjoy a talk by Professor Jorge Morales on "Seeing What's Not There."

Abstract: A foundational question in the philosophy of perception is: What can perception be about? A common-sense answer-accepted by the philosopher, the cognitive scientist, and the person on the street-is that perception is about "what is there": objects (and their properties) that are present in the environment around us. This is true, but perception is also about what is not there. Absences can be perceived. If you visited the Louvre in 1912, you could have seen that the Mona Lisa was not there. If you visit Egypt, you can see that the Sphynx is missing its nose. If your laptop were stolen, you could see it was no longer where you left it. One might think these kinds of experiences involve inference rather than perception, but I will argue that seeing an absence bears the right marks of perception. To show this, I develop a general model of perception based on "object files"-a classic construct from cognitive science-and supplement it with a novel notion I call "perceptual frames". The main consequence of the model is that it makes seeing present and absent things continuous and reliant on the same kind of processes. Moreover, it overcomes limitations of current proposals and avoids reducing the perception of absences to epistemic states, mental imagery, or other unrelated visual phenomena. The proposed approach allows absent objects, as well as missing parts and properties, to be proper perceptual contents of experience, shedding light on the mental architecture that supports both cognition and perception. Perception is about what is there-but just as crucially, it is about what is missing.

Jorge Morales is an Assistant Professor of Psychology and Philosophy at Northeastern University.