Ontology of early visual content

Abstract

The way in which our visual perception presents reality suggests an ontology of the world as composed of objects located in three-dimensional space, which in turn possess various properties and fall into different kinds. Similarly, it is commonly claimed within contemporary philosophy of perception that visual representations present the world as being a certain way (e.g., Schellenberg, 2011;Siegel, 2010). In other words, the content of visual representations specifies objects that have to be present in a visual field if these representations are to be adequate, and so determines a certain "visual ontology. " We may ask for a more precise description of such a "visual ontology" and seek to discover how it is developed through the various stages of the perceptual process. My goal in this article is to provide a sketch of such an ontology, relying on the assumptions of influential scientific models of vision. Because of this, I do not restrict the class of visual representations to conscious perceptual experiences (on which philosophers often focus in discussions regarding content). I instead consider contents of visual representation that are postulated by cognitive, psychological models. I argue that such models contain assumptions concerning objects whose presence is a necessary condition of visual representations' adequacy. The analysis of these assumptions allows us to answer the question of how, according to scientific models of vision, the world would have to be for the representations these models postulate to be adequate.I believe that there are at least two reasons why we should be interested in answering the above question. First, there exist philosophical controversies concerning the ontology of visual content. For example, Russell (1956Russell ( , 2009) endorsed a version of the bundle theory of objects in the context of vision by stating that visual objects can be analyzed as certain combinations of various visual qualities, with special positional qualities among them. Opposed to this view, defenders of "bare substratum" theories claimed that in seeing two objects that are qualitatively the same, we are visually acquainted not only with features and locations but also with irreducible particulars (Allaire, 1963). More recently, Austen Clark (2004) has argued that to present an adequate account of visual content a notion of "visual ABSTRACT The main goal of the paper is to sketch an ontological model of visual content at the low-and medium-level of visual processing, relying on psychological conceptions of vision. It is argued that influential cognitive models contain assumptions concerning "objects of content, " that is, objects whose presence is a necessary condition of the adequacy of visual representations. Subsequently, the structure of considered objects of content is presented, and its development through the perceptual process is described. In addition, during the course of the article I present some connections between analytic metaphysics and the ontology of visual content.