Do We Really Need Evidence?

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‘Consider furniture that looks Swedish ... or the properties of looking sad or looking delighted’

‘One can explain the apparently perceptual phenomenon thus. There is some kind such that the thing or person appears to be of that kind, and the person judges that things of that kind are (say) Swedish people [sic].’

‘But such a division ... does not ... fit the case of perception of the expression of an emotion. ... There is no kind described without reference to the emotions of which one can say that the facial expression appears to be of that kind and it is merely an additional judgement on the part of the person that people looking that way are sad.’

\citep[p.~66]{Peacocke:2004ke}

I’m not sure exactly what Peacocke takes from this (because I haven’t read enough of his book), but Joel Smith (2013) treats this claim as sufficient to establish ‘the fact that these cases [looking Swedish/excited and looking happy] are different with respect to visual presence’. (He seems to step back from this in the conclusion of Smith (2013, p. 18): ‘I have not offered a robust defence of the phenomenological claims set out in §2, motivating them rather on intuitive grounds’)

‘the fact that these cases [looking Swedish/excited and looking happy] are different with respect to visual presence’. \citep[p.~5]{smith:2013_phenomenology}

‘I have not offered a robust defence of the phenomenological claims set out in §2, motivating them rather on intuitive grounds’ \citep[p.~18]{smith:2013_phenomenology}

But I find this baffling. How do we know that ‘There is no kind described without reference to the emotions of which one can say that the facial expression appears to be of that kind and it is merely an additional judgement on the part of the person that people looking that way are sad’? Consider how difficult it would be to specify a kind that Swedish furniture appears to have that can be described without reference to Sweden.

With respect to the question I started with (involving the contrast between perceiving an indicator plus inferring and simply perceiving), Peacocke seems to be saying that the answer is obvious. Why does he think this? And why does Smith?

Peacocke (2004, 66)

L: For any object O and functional property F, if the perceptual anticipations in one’s perception of O ‘latch onto’ the functional role definitive of F, then one perceives O as being F.

\citep[p.~741]{smith:2010_seeing}

To explain the sense in which the nonvisible parts of objects, such as the back of a tomato, can be visually present, Smith follows many in suggesting that perceptual states can in some sense contain anticipations of what would happen if, say, an object were rotated or if one moved around it.

‘If we define mental state M as that property one has if one will behave in way B given input I, and [...] one perceptually anticipates that if I occurs then one will perceive B, then one’s perceptual states ‘latch onto’ property M’

\citep[p.~741]{smith:2010_seeing}

Suppose we accept this. Then the claim that we can perceptually experience Syliva’s happiness is the claim that perceptual states ‘latch onto’ Syliva’s happieness. But can they?

Do any perceptual states latch onto happiness?

‘This is a matter open to empirical and phenomenological confirmation ... [I]t seems likely to me’

\citep[p.~742]{smith:2010_seeing}

So we shouldn’t think of Smith as showing that we can or cannot perceptually experience happiness; instead we should think of him as explaining what it would be for emotions such as happiness to be perceptually experienced, leaving open the question of whether or not they are.

Smith (2010, 741-2)

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