Eric Schwitzgebel

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445 appearances 1 recordings 1 series first heard Jun 2011 last heard Jun 2011

Eric Schwitzgebel’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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New Books in Philosophy · Eric Schwitzgebel, “Perplexities of Consciousness” (MIT Press, 2011) · 15 Jun 2011 podcast

But it goes back, I think, at least to Malbranche.

The idea...

And I think a lot of people who have interviewed informally about this seem comfortable with the idea that the tilted penny in some sense looks elliptical.

Now, I'm not sure whether it looks elliptical.

When I kind of look at the tilted penny myself, I'm not much inclined to say that it looks elliptical, although I can warm myself to that idea sometimes.

But what I think might be going on is that people are over-analogizing visual experience to flat projective media, like paintings and photographs.

So a tilted coin in a picture makes an elliptical shape on the surface of the print.

Right.

Same with painting of a tilted coin.

So if you think that your visual experience is kind of like a painting or like a photograph, then it seems very natural to think, ah, well, the tilted coin looks elliptical.

But there are... And that could be right.

I'm not 100% convinced that's wrong, but there are a couple reasons that I'm suspicious.

One is that...

I think the geometry, the implied geometry of this view has problems when you try to generalize it.

And the other is that there seems to be at least some cultural contingency to these sorts of reports.

So if you look at cultures like ancient Greece and like the introspective psychologists circa 1900 in Western Europe and the United States...

you tend not to see these claims about tilted pennies looking elliptical and similar kinds of what I call projective distortions, right?

The idea, the kinds of geometrical deformations that you would get by projecting the visual scene onto a flat surface.

Right.

They don't, I mean,

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