Abstract

A commentary on Dretske, "Change Blindness" (same journal issue). Dretske analyzes standard cases of change blindness as properly being difference blindness, since the eye is in saccade when the change occurs and so the change itself (the event of the change) is not seen. He considers two models of the phenomenon, the object model and the fact model, preferring the latter. In previous work, he had affirmed the object model. I reconsider its merits, first looking more closely at the notion of differences and then making a case for seeing differences nonepistemically, or in Dretske’s “object mode.” I then consider some imagined cases that might rightly be classed as difference blindness in object mode, and offer a further taxonomy of various forms of difference blindness. The concluding section raises a fundamental question about the notion of seeing objects nonepistemically, or in a natural sensory (and hence nonconceptual) way. I do not deny the viability of the concept of nonepistemic perception in general, but I do question the notion that we are correctly thought to see spies and other types of individuals in natural sensory mode. That is, I question whether seeing spy-individuals is properly thought of as a natural sensory representational achievement. In this connection, I suggest that there is a tension in Dretske’s thought between nonepistemic seeing as he originally conceived it (1969) and the naturalized counterparts to that notion developed in his later works (1981, 1995). At least part of the explanation for this tension can be found in the differing methods and aims of his earlier and later work – the earlier work focusing on epistemology and philosophy of science, the later works on philosophy of psychology and a naturalized metaphysics of mind.