Jonathan Shaheen: "Perception at a Distance"

Jonathan Shaheen, Uppsala University: "Perception at a Distance (in a Plenum)"

Abstract
This paper considers Cavendish’s theory of perception at a distance. She intends her patterning-based theory of perception to be an alternative to the Hobbesian pressure-based theory. She is thus explicit that the medium between a perceiver and a perceived object is not responsible for transmitting pressure to the perceiver’s eye. But she is not equally explicit about whether the medium does anything else, and this has opened the door to a variety of interpretations. The contention of the present paper is that she fully intended to commit to perception at a distance. Moreover, it argues that objects are directly perceived, rather than being perceived via copies of themselves in the medium or (in the case of vision) in light. The titular parenthesis is thus intended to highlight the irrelevance of her plenism to her theory of perception.

In support of the paper’s contentions, Cavendish’s general account of perception works is distinguished from special cases involving echoes and reflections. To interpret passages about the distance required by some causal relations, the paper distinguishes between causation by surface-to-surface contact (which such passages do not support) and causation by the virtual contact of bodies’ spheres of causal activity (which such passages do support). The most puzzling feature of the relevant texts is Cavendish's discussion of light in the sky as if it were a kind of echo. This feature is explained, in the present paper, in terms of Cavendish's reception of the Scholastic lux/lumen distinction. The textual evidence is held in sum to support the view that Cavendish thinks sight genuinely operates at a distance and not via intermediate bodies in the plenum, nor via the mediation of light patterning out visible bodies, even as she thinks that light is always patterned out or perceived alongside the visible bodies that it discloses.