Chapter 3 - Visual demonstratives

Summary

This chapter distinguishes three sorts of ideas that play a role in visually guiding action. It argues that vision directly gives awareness concerning certain objects. Austen Clark has constructed a theory in which the content of visual experience consists of visual features attributed to places in a three-dimensional visual field. Clark' s visual features include colour, luminance, relative motion, size, texture, flicker and line orientation. Visual states are about individual things, and this creates a puzzle. Snowdon proposes that when one visually perceives something, he/she is thereby capable of making a demonstrative judgement about it. Neither recollection nor imaging is capable of guiding bodily motion. Snowdon endorses a view known as disjunctivism on the basis of his view about demonstratives. The chapter argues that on-line visual states assign seen objects egocentric locations. It is by means of these location assignments that perceivers act on these objects quickly and accurately.