Thursday, March 31, 2011

To Australia, and Representational Realism

I'm off to Australia with my family for a week (to consider the ANU job offer), then to a conference in St. Louis, so it might be a couple weeks before I'm blogging again.

As a parting thought, it occurred to me to clarify why I'm so interested in mirror images, which I don't think I made explicit in either of my earlier posts on the topic. Such issues might seem merely an amusing irrelevance -- and I do find them (for whatever reason) amusing. But I also have some big game in my (warped, distorted, reflective) sights. If it turns out that the best thing to say about such cases is that (a.) they are veridical, and yet also (b.) our visual experience is different than in the light-straight-to-the-eye case, then I have a hunch that this is a thread I can pull on that might unravel the whole of representational realism -- by which I mean the view that the properties of observed external objects resemble the properties of our experiences of those objects, e.g., that there is something analogously squarish both about an outward square and about our normal visual experience of that square.

No guarantees that's where I arrive after fuller consideration, but that's the snark in the bush.

1 comment:

Anibal Monasterio Astobiza said...

whatever your final decision... it might be good. Enjoy ;-)