I argue against such "Relation Intentionalist" theories of consciousness as the higher-order thought and inner sense views on the grounds that they understand a subject's awareness of his or her phenomenal characters to be intentional, like seeming-seeing, rather than "direct", like seeing. The trouble with such views is that they reverse the order of explanation between phenomenal character and intentional awareness. A superior theory of consciousness, based on views expressed by Russell and Price, takes the relation of awareness to be (...) a nonintentional "acquaintance". (shrink)

Pictures are 2D surfaces designed to elicit 3D-scene-representing experiences from their viewers. In this essay, I argue that philosophers have tended to underestimate the relevance of research in vision science to understanding the nature of pictorial experience. Both the deeply entrenched methodology of virtual psychophysics as well as empirical studies of pictorial space perception provide compelling support for the view that pictorial experience and seeing face-to-face are experiences of the same psychological, explanatory kind. I also show that an empirically informed (...) account of pictorial experience provides resources to develop a novel, resemblance-based account of depiction. According to what I call the deep resemblance theory, pictures work by presenting virtual models of objects and scenes in phenomenally 3D, pictorial space. (shrink)

The subject of the present thesis is the phenomenon of simultaneous colour contrast: As is well known, the perceived colour of a given light stimulus depends almost as strongly on the stimulation of neighbouring regions of the visual field as on the local stimulus itself. Thus, the perceived colour of a target stimulus can be manipulated either by changing the colour co-ordinates of the target itself, or, alternatively, by changing the colour co-ordinates of the surround. Classical models of simultaneous contrast (...) are based on the implicit assumption that the changes in perceived colour brought about by these two kinds of manipulation are basically of the same kind, and thus may compensate each other. This ‘compensation assumption’ is equivalent to the widespread assumption that the space of perceived colours is three-dimensional. In principle, though, the well-established facts of trichromatic theory are compatible with a dimensionality of the space of perceived colours higher than three (namely three times the number of differently coloured regions in the visual field). One of the central results of the present investigations is that the compensation assumption seems to be unwarranted in the case of simple centre-surround stimuli. This instilled the expectation that classical methods for measuring simultaneous contrast effects, such as grey settings and asymmetric colour matching, may sometimes be inappropriate, and thus yield misleading results. In further experiments it is shown that this is indeed the case when uniformly coloured surrounds are used. In the case of variegated surrounds, however, matters appear to be much less complicated. This difference seems to be due to impressions of perceptual transparency being evoked by uniform surrounds, but not by variegated ones. (shrink)