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

  • Morgan, Michael J.
Date:
1977
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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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    AFTERWORD: RECENT DEVELOPMENTS of affairs. He found that adaptation proceeded in a haphazard and piecemeal fashion; some objects in the visual field might appear the right way up and others still look wrong. An object could suddenly change its orientation, as when an upside-down candle snapped into the upright when it was lit (an amusing film of Kohler's experiments attempts to show these effects). Vehicles were seen correctly as driving on the right-hand side of the road but with their licence numbers reversed, and so on. Simi¬ larly, in an experiment on left—right inversion described by Taylor a subject who had learned to move his left or right hand and foot appropriately when the side of the body was indicated by a stick, failed to do so with his knees, shoulders and elbows.^® The conclusion from these phenomena is that Berkeley was right: there is indeed no such thing as a specifically visual space. If there were, it is hard to see how a person could be in doubt as to its orientation, or how some objects in it should be 'correctly' and others 'incorrectly' oriented. More generally, if it is a ques¬ tion of visual space, the phenomenon of adaptation is inexplica¬ ble. Rock's theory, for example, is that we remember how the world used to look on our retina, and compare it with the reinverted image to find the latter 'upside down'. Merleau-Ponty describes this theory as 'unintelligible' because it says nothing about the experiences of upside down and right way up. Even if (as seems unlikely] the stored representations of visual images could literally be rotated with respect to present input, why should that cause them to be seen upside down - unless they suggest to us a whole new set of actions which are the reverse of those we habitually associate with the objects? And unless the new objects we see, instead of being the same objects, actually appear 'queer' and 'different', as subjects report. The results in fact show that perceptual space is not at all like the space of the physicist, an indifferent, isomorphic three- dimensional manifold, in which objects are situated sensible to feeling as to sight, and in which things are the same no matter how oriented. Instead, we see objects in relation to us; they differ according to their orientation. A face seen upside down is not the same face incomprehensibly maintaining all its properties but its position in a featureless container; it is a different face, Behavioral Basis of Perception, ch. 9. 173