Filling-in

visual science and the philosophy of perception

Evan Thompson

pp. 145-161

in: Denis Fisette (ed), Consciousness and intentionality, Berlin, Springer, 1999

Abstract

Is there a difference between visual experience and visual judgement? According to Daniel C. Dennett there is not: visual experience has no content over and above the content of the visual judgements we are disposed to make. As he puts it in his book Consciousness Explained: "There is no such phenomenon as really seeming — over and above the phenomenon of judging in one way or another that something is the case" (1991, p. 364). I think that this is wrong: there is a difference between presentational content and judgemental content in visual perception, between 'seeing as' and "visually judging that." To get at the difference I will focus on the phenomena collectively known as visual filling-in.¹