Theory of Appearing

The Causal Theory of Appearing

One might think that there are only a limited number of ways in which distinct entities can be related to each other: They can stand in spatial relations to each other, temporal relations, and/or causal relations. Consider now the appearing relation. Suppose I open my eyes and see a tomato; in virtue of seeing the tomato, the tomato visually appears to me. A tomato cannot appear to me unless it exists at the same time as myself and is situated within my field of vision. But surely to say that the tomato appears to me is to say more than that the tomato is temporally and spatially related to me in a certain appropriate way. So the appearing relation must be at least in part a causal relation. According to the causal theory of appearing, what it is for a physical object to appear to a conscious subject is for the physical object to cause the conscious subject to undergo a certain kind of conscious state: a perceptual experience. Consider again the tomato that is appearing to me. Note that the tomato does not merely appear to me in some general manner; it appears to me in virtue of appearing to me in particular ways: It appears red to me, for example. According to the causal theory of appearing, the tomato appearing red to me is a matter of the tomato causing me to have a certain kind of visual experience, a visual experience somehow characterized by redness. Science gives us many details about the nature of this causal process (the tomato reflects light into my eyes, the light stimulates receptor neurons in my retinas, etc.), but we need not be concerned with these details here. What is relevant here is that according to the causal theory of appearing, all there is to a physical object appearing to a conscious subject is the object causing the subject to have a certain kind of experience. The experience itself is merely a state of the subject; the subject is related to the physical object only in that the physical object causes the subject to have the experience.

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