Problems of vision: Rethinking the causal theory of perception

Historical Significance: Gerald Vision was Professor of Philosophy at Temple University College of Liberal arts Philadephia. He works in the areas of analytic metaphysics, epistemology, philosophy of language, philosophy of mind, seventeenth- and eighteenth-century philosophy, and topics in recent moral philosophy. The causal theory of perception is the view that to perceive an object is to be in a state that has some appropriate causal relationship to it, or that to remember an event is to stand in a similar causal relationship to its original occurrence. Whilst the basic idea is widely accepted, it proves difficult to pin down exactly the kind of relationship that counts as appropriate, for deviant causal chains may connect us with things that we nevertheless do not perceive or remember. In this book Gerald Vision argues for a new causal theory, one that engages provocatively with direct realism and makes no use of a now discredited subjectivism.