Gibson's ambient light and light speed constancy

Philosophical Psychology 25 (4):1-16 (2012)
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Abstract

Special relativity insists that the speed of light in a vacuum is constant for all inertial observers. This is often said to be counterintuitive: why should light alone, among all things in the world, return the same speed value to all inertial observers, regardless of their different states of motion? I argue that this question or puzzle arises because physics misconstrues light by characterizing it as a freestanding phenomenon. As James Gibson insisted, and as any analysis of the visual experience makes plain, light, the agency of sight, cannot be overtaken by sight. A better characterization of light is Gibson's optic array, which prompts the realization that our prior complicity with light keeps us from getting leverage on it as a freestanding phenomenon, and this is why it returns the same speed value to all observers. To show the limitation of freestanding light, I offer two derivations of relativistic time dilation. The first imagines freestanding light and then, to complete the derivation, artificially requires light speed constancy; the second achieves the same result in a fully natural way?that is, without putting observers in an abstract, arguably impossible, situation?by merely attending to the seeing experience

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Phenomenology of perception.Maurice Merleau-Ponty - 1945 - Atlantic Highlands, New Jersey: The Humanities Press. Edited by Donald A. Landes.
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An inquiry concerning human understanding: with a supplement, An abstract of A treatise of human nature.David Hume - 1955 - Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill Educational. Edited by Charles William Hendel & David Hume.

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