Percepire spooky things: un'indagine critica della percezione di assenza

Under various circumstances, it is common to bump into an absence. Imagine travelling to a familiar winter tourist destination and being stunned by the absence of snow on the mountains. What is happening in such a case? One could describe the phenomenon in terms of a failure to see snow, or in terms of seeing that snow is absent, or even by saying that what one sees is precisely the absence of snow. In philosophical literature, the term ‘absence’ has been used to refer to these and other distinct cases such as voids, holes, darkness, and so on. It is precisely one of the tasks of this thesis to specify which of them, which are usually unfairly lumped together, can be counted as genuine absences for this work. Indeed, if each of these categories of absences presents us with a distinct phenomenology, it suggests that some theoretical distinction may help to provide clarity. The core interest of this thesis concerns the possibility of perceiving absences directly. The work is organized into three chapters, the first of which is dedicated to the presentation of the three main positions involved in this recent debate, namely perceptualism, cognitivism, and meta-cognitivism. Each of these views offers a different answer to the question “can we genuinely perceive absences?” and an attempt will be made to show what might be the merits and possible objections to each of these views in their standard versions. The second chapter is intended to lay out the basis for the introduction of a perceptualist account of absence perception and will primarily deal with the topic of attention in perceptual processes. In contrast to Farennikova’s account, it is intended to argue that appealing to attention proves effective in explaining how absences can become part of our perceptual experience, especially by considering the effects of perceptual expertise and the phenomenon of change detection. In particular, it is intended to emphasise that the variety of instances of the perception of absences cannot be captured by a single perceptual mechanism. The reason lies in the fact that absence perceptions are but one way in which we label a variety of different perceptual phenomena. Finally, the third chapter aims to demystify the paradox that hovers around the perception of absences, supporting the idea that this case can be accommodated in a classical theory of perception, i.e. one that respects the causal theory of perception.