The purpose of the ensuing discussion is to defend the doctrine that perceptions are essentially experiences. This theoretical position is what one would naturally assume if the conclusions of the previous Part II are correct. The theory there advanced characterized perception as an event in which a phenomenal item comes as object to the attention or awareness. And can awareness be so engaged in the absence of experience? Indeed, what else is 'experience' but precisely events of such a kind? All this strikes me as relatively obvious. However, phenomena like 'blindsight' (so-called) are thought by some to cast doubt on these near truisms. I shall argue in this chapter that those truistic propositions are part of the very foundation of the concept of perception, and that their abandonment would be tantamount to jettisoning an indispensable part of what one might call our 'conceptual heritage'. With this in view I propose to take a closer look at the phenomenon in question.
(1) There are are at least two phenomena one might consider in this context, 'blind-sight' and 'subliminal seeing'. However, I will confine the discussion to the former phenomenon. But first, a preliminary word about each. In 'blindsight' subjects with damage to the visual cortex claim that they see nothing, yet upon being asked to guess whether (say) a light is before them make guesses which are (say) 80 per cent accurate. In 'subliminal seeing' visually normal subjects are confronted (say) with a light for so many milliseconds, and once again their experience is apparently of nothing yet their guesses are (say) 80 per cent correct.
Common to both cases is that the visual apparatus is affected by light, not quite as it normally is but similarly, that there occurs as a result a cognitively significant phenomenon whose content tends to match that present in normal visual situations, and that the subject claims to have had no visual experience. These cases seem as if they might show that the real nature of seeing cannot be what we naturally take it to be: an experience. They raise two important and closely related questions. First, do such phenomena demonstrate that seeing is not necessarily an experience, that seeing might occur without visual experience? Second, do they demonstrate the
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