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.
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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 |
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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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