Molyneux's question : vision, touch, and the philosophy of perception / Michael J. Morgan.

  • Morgan, Michael J.
Date:
1977
Catalogue details

Licence: Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0)

Credit: Molyneux's question : vision, touch, and the philosophy of perception / Michael J. Morgan. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    MOLYNEUX'S QUESTION The following description of what happened is taken from Merleau-Ponty:^^ If a subject is made to wear glasses which correct the retinal image, the whole landscape appears at first unreal and upside down; on the second day of the experiment normal perception begins to reassert itself, except that the subject has the feeling that his own body is upside down. In the course of a second set of experiments lasting a week, objects at first appear inverted, but less unreal than the first time. On the second day the landscape is no longer inverted, but the body is felt to be in an abnormal position. From the third to the seventh day, the body progres¬ sively rights itself, and finally seems to occupy a normal position, particularly when the subject is active. When he is lying motionless on a couch, the body still presents itself against the background of the former space, and, as far as the unseen parts of the body are concerned, right and left preserve their former localisation to the end of the exper¬ iment. External objects increasingly have the look of 'reality'. From the fifth day, actions which were at first liable to be misled by the new mode of vision, and had to be corrected in the light of the general visual upheaval, now go infallibly to their objective. The new visual appear¬ ances which, at the beginning, stood out against a background of previous space, develop round themselves, at first (third day] only through a great effort of will, later (seventh day) with no effort at all, a horizon with a general orientation corresponding to their own. On the seventh day, the placing of sounds is correct so long as the sounding object is seen as well as heard. It remains unreliable, and with a double, or even inaccurate, representation, if the source of the sound does not appear in the visual field. At the end of the experiment, when the glasses are removed, objects appear not inverted, it is true, but 'queer' and motor actions are reversed: the subject reaches out his right hand when it should be his left. There has been endless argument since then about whether subjects with a reinverted retinal image reaiJy ever see the world the right way up. It has indeed been the most interesting result of these experiments that argument has been possible. For the plain fact is that, if the subjects are asked which way up they really 'see' the world, they find it difficult to reply. When one of the investigators was asked whether things looked upside down, he replied that, although he had not thought of them as such until the question was asked, he could see that they were upside down with respect to what they had been before the reinversion. Further experiments by Kohler clarified this extraordinary state Phenomenology of Perception, 244-5. 172