Roope Ryymin

Cases of looking at camouflaged objects raise a puzzle. On the one hand, it is appealing to think that we do not see camouflaged objects because we do not discriminate them from their surroundings. On the other, it is appealing to think we do see camouflaged objects because they are present in our visual field and thereby directly determine our visual phenomenology. Here, I investigate this puzzle and its implications for naïve realist theories of perception. I show how a naïve realist can solve the puzzle by distinguishing between different ways of seeing things. I first argue that a basic form of visual presentation has a one-to-many relational form. I then show how distinguishing between one-to-many and one-to-one forms of visual presentation best explains the phenomenological, epistemic, and cognitive changes that occur when one sees a cuttlefish camouflage. By doing these two things, I make progress on the question of what the positive naïve realist picture of veridical experience should be. I also contribute to the more general debate about perceptual transparency by arguing that introspection can reveal features of perceptual experiences that are distinct from the things that they (re)present.

This thesis defends naïve realist perceptualism about absence experiences: the claim that sometimes absences are among the things that we genuinely perceive and thereby are consciously acquainted with. I argue for a view on which absences can be among the objects of our perceptual experiences, where perceptual experiences are understood as presentational relations of conscious acquaintance between perceivers and the perceived things. Such a view provides a compelling account of what it is like to see or feel holes, see shadows or darkness, hear silence, see or feel something disappear, or see the absence of a friend in a café. In the first part, I investigate the metaphysical and ontological commitments of a naïve realist account of perception. In the second part, I look at different kinds of absence experiences and argue that a perceptualist account gives the best explanation of their conscious characters. Over the course of six chapters, each focusing on a specific kind of an absence experience, I develop a novel unified account of absence experiences and their objects on which absences are temporally extended instances of properties of spatial and temporal locations.