Do Things Look Flat?
I've posted a draft of Chapter Two of my book in progress (tentatively titled Perplexities of Consciousness). The chapter is titled "Do Things Look Flat?" and is a revision of my 2006 essay of the same title, with a little more nuance and historical depth and a longer discussion of the view (dating back to Ptolemy but peaking, evidently, circa 1900) that most things appear doubled in the visual field. Comments/suggestions/criticisms welcome, of course, either as email or as comments on this post.
Abstract:
Does a penny viewed at an angle in some sense look elliptical, as though projected on a two-dimensional surface? Many philosophers have said such things, from Malebranche (1674/1997) and Hume (1739/1978), through early sense-data theorists, to Tye (2000) and Noë (2004). I confess that it doesn’t seem this way to me, though I’m somewhat baffled by the phenomenology and pessimistic about our ability to resolve the dispute. I raise a geometrical objection to the view and conjecture that, maybe, the view draws some of its appeal from the over-analogizing of visual experience to painting or photography. Theorists writing in contexts where vision is analogized to less projective media – signet ring impressions in wax in ancient Greece, stereoscopy in introspective psychology circa 1900 – seem substantially less likely to attribute such projective distortions to visual appearances. Stereoscope enthusiasts do, however, seem readier than scholars in other eras to attribute a pervasive doubling to visual experience – like the doubling, perhaps, of an unfused image in a stereoscope.