Seeing Small,Seeing the Future

The Role of Science in Law by Feldman analyzes the vexed relationship between science and law. The book provides a good overview on the ongoing debate on the topic, but the author's attempt to suggest a guideline for the conflict between science and law falls short of any satisfactory conclusion.     

Seeing,Embodying, and Proclaiming Christ

This essay examines the way Irenaeus of Lyons describes Blandina in her martyrdom: seen by others as embodying Christ and so encouraging them to also bear witness and be born into life by the Virgin Mother, the Church. It explores in particular Irenaeus' exegetical moves, so as to regain a sense of the unity of theology and exegesis as a transformed and transforming vision, which in turn extends the incarnation of Christ into the present in those who also take up the cross. In this way Irenaeus offers a way of understanding the unity of the discipline of theology and a vision of life and the Church that speaks to our contemporary situation.     

Seeing aspects

International Journal for Philosophy of Religion -     

Seeing through eyes,mirrors, shadows and pictures

I argue that we can see in a great many cases that run counter to common sense. We can literally see through mirrors, in just the same way that we (literally) see through our eyes. We can, likewise, literally see through photographs, shadows, and (some) paintings. Rather than starting with an analysis of seeing, I present a series of evolving thought experiments, arguing that in each case there is no relevant difference between it and the previous case regarding whether we see. In a sense, my arguments can be thought of as akin to the Extended Mind Hypothesis (Clark and Chalmers 1998). But instead of arguing that our minds can extend into the world, I argue that our sensory organs can extend into the world. Among the things that emerge from this discussion are (1) that—contrary to Currie (1995) and Carroll (1996)—seeing an object O doesn’t require being able to locate O with respect to yourself, (2) that—contrary to Sorensen (2008)—we can see objects by seeing their shadows, and (3) that—contrary to Walton (1984)—it doesn’t matter whether the causal relation between O and yourself is mediated by beliefs.     

Seeing connections: reason,faith, and education

The article explores some of the congruencies of thought and resonances in phrasing in the work of Janet Erskine Stuart, John Henry Newman and Ludwig Wittgenstein. These three writers have in common their resistance to philosophers of religion who are preoccupied with proposing arguments for the existence of God and grounds for believing in God. They also share a belief in the importance of assent and that reason and faith cannot be easily separated; that faith is always there in the background. The article is concerned primarily with the interrelationship between reason and faith across human practices and the relevance to education and how we live our lives.     

Seeing absence

Intuitively, we often see absences. For example, if someone steals your laptop at a café, you may see its absence from your table. However, absence perception presents a paradox. On prevailing models of perception, we see only present objects and scenes (Marr, Gibson, Dretske). So, we cannot literally see something that is not present. This suggests that we never literally perceive absences; instead, we come to believe that something is absent cognitively on the basis of what we perceive. But this cognitive explanation does not do justice to the phenomenology. Many experiences of absence possess immediate, perceptual qualities. One may further argue that the ability to detect certain absences confers strong adaptive advantage and therefore must be as primitive and fundamental to humans as seeing positive things. I argue that we can literally see absences; in addition to representing objects, perception represents absences of objects. I present a model of seeing absence based on visual expectations and a visual matching process. The phenomenon of seeing absence can thus serve as an adequacy-test for a theory of perceptual content. If experiences of absence are possible, then we have another reason (following Siegel) to reject the view that perceptual content is restricted to colors and shapes. Furthermore, if the proposed account is correct, then we have grounds for dissociating seeing absence from other imagery-based phenomena termed “perceptual presence-in-absence” (Noë, Macpherson).     

Seeing lumps, sticks, and slabs in silhouettes.

Marr has suggested that we see three-dimensional (3-D) shapes in silhouettes because we make the implicit assumption that the viewed shapes are generalized cones. One difficulty with this suggestion is that it cannot deal with silhouettes of irregular 3-D shapes like clouds and trees; another is that it only applies to generalized cones with a relatively high length:width ratio. An alternative explanation, suggested by evidence from cross-cultural studies of language, from children's early speech, and from children's early drawings, is that the scene primitives actually used by humans are not generalized cones but 'lumps', 'sticks', and 'slabs', that is, primitives whose only shape properties are their relative extensions in 3-D space. In this paper it is proposed that the implicit assumption we make in interpreting silhouettes is that the extendedness of the silhouette reflects the extendedness of the viewed shape, so that a round region is seen as a lump and a long region is seen as a stick; and that such views seem "natural" because they are the views most likely to be encountered in normal environments. This account is more general than that of Marr because it explains how we interpret silhouettes of all kinds of 3-D shapes, even very irregular ones. Unlike Marr's account, it also deals with flat shapes like slabs and discs, and shows why it is difficult to see these shapes in silhouettes.     

Seeing black: race, crime, and visual processing

Using police officers and undergraduates as participants, the authors investigated the influence of stereotypic associations on visual processing in 5 studies. Study 1 demonstrates that Black faces influence participants' ability to spontaneously detect degraded images of crime-relevant objects. Conversely, Studies 2-4 demonstrate that activating abstract concepts (i.e., crime and basketball) induces attentional biases toward Black male faces. Moreover, these processing biases may be related to the degree to which a social group member is physically representative of the social group (Studies 4-5). These studies, taken together, suggest that some associations between social groups and concepts are bidirectional and operate as visual tuning devices--producing shifts in perception and attention of a sort likely to influence decision making and behavior.     

Seeing the Impossible

I defend the view that it is not impossible to see the impossible. I provide two examples in which one sees the impossible and defend these examples from potential objections. Theories of depiction should make room for impossible depictions.     

Seeing and thinking

According to ratiomorphic theories of perception every visual phenomenon would be the result of unconscious inferences through which the visual system, starting from a set of axioms and premises, reaches certain conclusions (which constitute actually the visual phenomena) by a process analogous to a reasoning process. The author presents some examples from the area of amodal completion which, according to him, hardly support a ratiomorphic theory. Instead they constitute counterexamples that rather support the hypothesis that seeing and thinking function according to different rules.     

Seeing through CORNEA

For useful comments on an early draft of this paper, I wish to thank Andrew Cortens, William Hasker, Richard Swinburne and Mark Webb. I am especially grateful to William Alston, Frances Howard-Snyder and John O'Leary-Hawthorne for extended discussion on several pertinent matters.