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‘Let us imagine that God has made a miniature earth and sky’: Malebranche on the Body-Relativity of Visual Size

Chamberlain, Colin; (2020) ‘Let us imagine that God has made a miniature earth and sky’: Malebranche on the Body-Relativity of Visual Size. Journal of the American Philosophical Association , 6 (2) pp. 206-224. 10.1017/apa.2019.44. Green open access

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Abstract

Malebranche holds that visual experience represents the size of objects relative to the perceiver's body and does not represent objects as having intrinsic or nonrelational spatial magnitudes. I argue that Malebranche's case for this body-relative thesis is more sophisticated than other commentators—most notably, Atherton (1990) and Simmons (2003)—have presented it. Malebranche's central argument relies on the possibility of perceptual variation with respect to size. He uses two thought experiments to show that perceivers of different sizes—namely, miniature people, giants, and typical human beings—can experience the very same objects as having radically different sizes. Malebranche argues that there is no principled reason to privilege one of these ways of experiencing size over the others and, more specifically, that all three kinds of perceivers experience size veridically. From the possibility of this kind of veridical perceptual variation, Malebranche infers that visual experience represents only body-relative size.

Type: Article
Title: ‘Let us imagine that God has made a miniature earth and sky’: Malebranche on the Body-Relativity of Visual Size
Open access status: An open access version is available from UCL Discovery
DOI: 10.1017/apa.2019.44
Publisher version: http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/apa.2019.44
Language: English
Additional information: This version is the author accepted manuscript. For information on re-use, please refer to the publisher’s terms and conditions.
Keywords: Malebranche; contents of perception; spatial perception; scale; body-relativity
UCL classification: UCL
UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL SLASH
UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL SLASH > Faculty of Arts and Humanities
UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL SLASH > Faculty of Arts and Humanities > Dept of Philosophy
URI: https://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/10193970
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