M.G.F. Martin
What’s in a Look?
This paper is concerned with the superficial. Its main concern is with the looks of things, and with
how we manage to speak of these through talk of how things look. But in addition, the picture I want
to sketch both of our talk and of what we talk about aims to be more minimalist and parsimonious
than many discussions of these matters.1
One of the most detailed, and influential, discussions of the semantics of looks statements is
to be found in the first few chapters of Frank Jackson’s Perception: A Representative Theory. Jackson
hopes to convince us that we should endorse a sense-datum theory of vision through proper attention
to the logical form of looks statements. So he hopes to find in our lexical knowledge confirmation of a
substantive and controversial view of the nature of visual experience. Some more recent discussions
reflect similar ambitions: it is becoming common to note that we mark a difference between how
things look to us and how they are; and this contrast has been taken to indicate our commitment to
representational nature of sense experience. That is, some have supposed that the correct account of
our looks talk reveals a commitment to viewing sensory states as representational states or even
propositional attitudes.2
In contrast to both of these approaches, I will propose a minimalist approach to the semantics
of looks-statements. On the whole, we convey information to each other both about the looks of
objects, and about sensory episodes in which things look some way or other to us through the use of
implicitly comparative claims: that the object, or the sensory state, is relevantly similar to some other,
paradigm case. That we succeed in conveying information to each other through such talk
presupposes that we have more knowledge of looks and visual experience than is explicitly required
to grasp the form of the statements we make. On such a minimalist approach, it would be mistaken to
look to our semantic competence to argue in favour of one substantive theory of sense experience
over any other.
Such minimalism in the semantics of looks talk, then, puts more pressure on our knowledge
of the nature of looks, and of states of things looking some way to one. In turn, here, too, I propose we
adopt a strategy of parsimony. Various recent discussions of appearances in general, and looks in
particular, have been moved by concerns with conflicting appearances to posit a range of properties in
the world as the looks of things over and above the other properties that we are committed to
supposing objects have, such as their shapes and colours. According to these accounts we need to
recognize such things as perspectival shapes (‘oval from this angle’, for example) and apparent
colours to play the role of the looks of things through which we come to experience their colours and
1
This paper is written in memory of Barry Hall, a student of the philosophy of psychology and the psychology
of vision. Some of the original ideas which resulted in this work arose at a memorial event for Barry in
discussion with his supervisor Marcus Giaquinto. Various versions of this material were presented at talks in
Nottingham, Dundee, Fribourg, Oslo and Toronto and I am grateful to the audiences on those occasions for
comments and questions. Material from this was developed in seminars in Berkeley and London, and I am
particularly grateful to Michael Ayers, Michael Caie, John Campbell, James Genone, Hannah Ginsborg, Mark
Eli Kalderon, Rory Madden, Mohan Matthen, Matthew Parrott, Ian Phillips, Ian Schnee, James Stazicker, and
Paul Snowdon for their persistent questioning on these various occasions. I’m also grateful to Charles Travis
and John MacFarlane for various discussions of these matters; and to the editor for his great patience with the
delivery of this article.
2
See, for example, (Tye, 2002), Ch.3. For criticism of the idea that you can read off the commitment to
representationalism just from how we talk see (Breckenridge, 2007b).
1
shapes. In contrast, the parsimonious view of looks that I will sketch proposes that we identify the
looks of objects with their basic visible properties, including their colours and shapes.3
Accommodating within our ontology the looks of objects does not require that we posit additional
features of these objects over and above those properties we are otherwise committed to supposing
them to have through what we can know of them through perception.
This leads to a final introductory comment about the approach to be sketched here. A
common strategy in discussing the looks of things is immediately to offer an account of corresponding
psychological states: the visual experiences that we enjoy in looking at things. In offering semantic
theories, this has led writers to propose accounts of looks-statements which take as fundamental
ascriptions used to talk about psychological states. Both Jackson and Tye focus on giving accounts of
sentences of the form ‘O looks F to S’, rather than the seemingly simpler form ‘O looks F’.
Connected with this are at least two lines of thought. The first is that our talk of appearances in
general and looks in particular exhibit a subjectivity of use which parallels avowals of psychological
states, so one might take this as an indicator that this is best explained by supposing that at root such
talk avows the presence of relevant psychological states. Secondly, one may suspect that with such
elements as looks, philosophers are inclined to accept a phenomenalism which they are more likely to
reject for what they take to be the intrinsic properties of physical objects: namely, that facts about the
looks of objects are constituted by facts about actual or possible visual experiences one may have of
them. Although the assumption of phenomenalism seems widespread, and with it the assumed priority
of statements about how things look to x over statements about how things look, the account here
reverses the order. We will not assume that phenomenalism is true, and we will seek a sketch of the
meaning and use of statements of the form ‘O looks F’ in advance of what will be taken to be
semantically more complex, ‘O looks F to S’ or ‘O looks F from l’. I won’t here directly argue against
the more common assumption, but rather indirectly launch a challenge through indicating how the
reverse order is perfectly coherent and gives us a clear picture of what the looks of objects are, and
how our talk of them may be subjective without having to assume phenomenalism.4
The first part of this sketch focuses principally on questions about the semantics of looks talk.
I take off from Chisholm’s and Jackson’s proposals that there are three uses and indeed three senses
of looks statement: the epistemic, comparative and non-comparative or phenomenal. In the discussion
which follows I’ll broadly concur with this idea, at least with respect to how we can talk in English
about the looks of things. But, I shall argue, Jackson is mistaken to suppose that a phenomenal sense
of looks statements reveals much about the looks of the ordinary objects that we perceive; instead I
will conclude that our talk about how things look red or look oval, examples that Jackson takes to be
paradigms of phenomenal talk, instead to be best understood as comparative uses.
As I will explain, this indicates that our ability to discuss informatively the looks of objects
around us presupposes common knowledge of how things look directly (i.e. without reference simply
to how similar or different they are in look from other things). In turn, then, an account of our talk of
looks needs to give some account of what the nature of looks might be such that ordinary speakers
who have knowledge of the ways things are through ordinary perceptual capacities of sight thereby
are also in a position to know about those things’ looks as well. In the second half of the paper I will
3
See for example (Nöe 2004); (Brewer 2007a, 2007b); (Hyman, 2006), Ch. 5.
Note these thoughts can come apart. Breckenridge in his excellent thesis (2007a) argues that ‘o looks F’ should
not be thought to have a hidden argument place for a subject, and himself treats ‘to S’ as an adjunct. Nonetheless
on his view looks statements talk about sense experiences, but without having to indicate the subject of that
experience.
4
2
sketch an account which shows why we should favour a parsimonious view of looks that identifies
them with (logical constructions out of) manifest visible properties such as shape and colour. In this
discussion I will explore how such manifest visible properties can succeed in playing the
epistemological role of looks and make true statements about how things look. Finally I will explain
how a challenge from the ancient problem of conflicting appearances together with the pragmatic
marker of the subjectivity of much looks talk is consistent with supposing that ways of looking that
objects have are among their intrinsic properties and not relations to aspects of their environment or to
perceivers, their psychological states, or perceptual capacities.
PART ONE
1. On the surface there is a wide variety of ways of characterizing how something looks: one can say
that something looked red, or small, or nearly square; but equally one can say of someone that they
look ready for the Queen’s Bench, or in need of a good beating. Looking at an unkempt office one
may say that it looks as though a hurricane has hit it; staring at the edge of a design one may say that
it looks straight to me. One can say of someone that they look like a Russian shot-putter, or like their
mother. Given the diversity in talk of looks and similarity of looks that are permitted linguistically,
one might suppose that there is just too much disunity here for anything in general to be said about
visual appearances.
It is no surprise, therefore, to find philosophers seeking to impose order by suggesting
different uses or senses that we can put looks talk to, some and not other such uses cleaving to the
nature of visual appearances as such. The two most extensive discussions of the semantics of
appearance talk in English-speaking philosophy occur in Roderick Chisholm’s Perception, from 1959,
and nearly twenty years later Frank Jackson in Perception: A Representative Theory. According to
both authors, we should distinguish three principal uses, and indeed senses, of looks statements:
epistemic, comparative, and non-comparative or phenomenal uses. In the case of Chisholm and
Jackson, the intention is particularly to focus on our concerns on the non-comparative or phenomenal
sense of looks statements in order better to read off from this our knowledge of the nature of the looks
of things. Some critics have expressed scepticism of whether there is any variation in sense here, and
in particular whether there is any phenomenal sense of appearance talk.5
In what follows, I shall argue that there is something broadly right about Chisholm’s and
Jackson’s proposals. But this will only give them half of what they want, though. Although I think we
can pretty much demonstrate that there is structural semantic ambiguity between phenomenal and
comparative looks statements, there are no true phenomenal looks statements which concern things
looking red or looking square, the kinds of examples which Jackson takes to be a paradigm of the
phenomenal.
2. Although there is an application for Chisholm’s and Jackson’s three-fold distinction of uses (and, in
fact, senses), we need first to embed it in a two-fold division noted by the linguist Nikolas Gisborne,
and echoed in Charles Travis’s writings on looks.6 For one thing we can do with looks talk is to put
5
6
See Thau (2002) and also Breckenridge (2007a) for expression of such scepticism.
Gisborne & Holmes (2007); Travis (2002).
3
into play a proposition, indicating that there is visual evidence for it. One may say, ‘It looks like it is
going to rain’, avoiding thereby committing oneself to an outright assertion of the proposition that it is
going to rain, but still putting the proposition into play in the conversational context. One can do the
same with simpler sentences, such as, commenting on a neighbour, saying, ‘She looks pregnant’,
thereby offering the proposition that she is pregnant for consideration by one’s interlocutors.
In this evidential use with a sentence of the form ‘o is F’ the focus of conversational concern
is on the sentence ‘o is F’. That is, we are to consider how the adjective or adjectival phrase F applies
to the subject of the superordinate verb. Likewise with a form that has an explicit propositional
complement, as in forms such as ‘It looks as if p’, or ‘It looks like p’, focus is on that complement
proposition. Some writers, noting the lack of all-out assertion are inclined to talk of a tentative, or
guarded assertion.7 However while it may often be a consequence of advancing this speech act that
one is taken by an audience likely to be committed to the proposition in question (on failure of being
properly conversationally co-operative) it is not clear that assertion itself should come in degrees. So
perhaps we just think that the minimum that is here required is that the proposition in question be
epistemically possible, or rather that it be presented as epistemically possible (since the speaker may
be dissimulating about their attitudes towards it): that is, that its truth not be inconsistent with what is
common knowledge or evidence or is presupposed in the conversational context.
One can put the usage in sharper focus by making a contrast with a very different usage. For
there are uses where the status of the derived proposition is clearly not the focus of discussion.
Consider for example looking at the image which first made Saatchi & Saatchi’s name:
One might, commenting on the effectiveness of the advertisement, remark on how well the agency
succeeded and say:
(1) That model looks pregnant.
In this situation one might not suppose that there is any chance at all that the male model is pregnant
or could be; it may be a presupposition among the conversant that male pregnancy is nomologically
impossible.8 The purpose of one’s statement, then, is not to discuss the evidential status of the
proposition that the model is pregnant, nor is it to allude to some visual evidential ground for that.
Instead it seems that in this case the predicate complement is qualifying not the argument of the main
verb but rather the way of looking introduced by that verb: it is helping to specify for us which way of
looking the model in question has. It marks out that they haven’t just made him look as he would were
7
8
Most notably A.N. Quinton (1955) see also (Quinton, 1973), p.180.
This is in the 1970s and we can pretend that they could not even imagine transgendered roles.
4
he holding a pillow under his jumper, or if he had simply enjoyed the average number of pints of beer
of an English middle-aged male.
As we will see shortly, such uses Jackson and Chisholm assimilate to what they call ‘the
comparative use’. Here what matters is the contrast in conversational focus (at least for the form ‘o is
F’) between a case where one is concerned with a proposition predicating the complement adjectival
phrase of the superordinate subject, i.e. where one is concerned with whether o is F, and one where
the complement in some way seems to qualify the main verb ‘looks’ and the question is simply
whether o does look that way.
Now the contrast between the evidential and non-evidential (what Gisborne calls ‘evaluative’
use; it also corresponds to what Travis talks of as ‘demonstrable looks’) is marked initially as a
pragmatic one. And it requires us to focus briefly on the difficult topic of evidentiality. In perhaps a
quarter of the world’s languages there are syntactic markers (in most cases obligatory) which indicate
the evidential standing of the proposition put forward: for example whether the speaker has direct
evidence for it, whether the source is testimony, or is inference, or whether what is at issue is a
psychological avowal.9 English has no such syntactic markers, but we can provide our interlocutors
with evidential information through use of sense and appearance verbs. For example, where a
proposition is evident to us, we may say ‘I see that...’, where we know of something through
testimony, we say, ‘I heard that...’. There are certainly some instances which can be understood purely
pragmatically, but there are other evidential in some languages which seem to involve a semantic
component.
Certainly the focus just on the proposition that o is F cannot be affected when the looks
sentence is embedded, for example as the antecedent of a conditional. Moreover, as we will note when
working our way through the Chisholm and Jackson categories, sentences which otherwise have very
different uses can be employed evidentially. So the simplest hypothesis may yet be that this is a
pragmatic effect. On the other hand, Gisborne argues that historically the evidential use appears
earlier than the qualitative, and so one may suppose that this is some evidence that there is a
distinctive sense associated with it. Since our main concern is with varieties of non-evidential uses, I
shall from here leave aside the question whether the evidential can be handled purely pragmatically.
The most important thing to note is that the evidential use is not to be confused with what we
may call, following Chisholm and Jackson, the epistemic sense. Jackson introduces it so:
The epistemic use is propositional in that statements containing it are in (or can naturally be cast into)
the form ‘It looks as if p’, where ‘p’ is a sentence expressing a proposition: examples are ‘It looks as if
the sun is sinking into the sea’, ‘It looks as if these tomatoes are ripe’, and ‘It looks as if it is about to
rain.’ (Jackson, 1977, p. 30.)
The first of these is clearly not something we would employ in an evidential use, for we don’t suppose
it possible that the sun should sink into the sea. So this suggests that there is a contrast between being
epistemic and having the evidential role. And, I suggest, we can find other examples in English of
constructions which seem epistemic in this way, without having to be taken to be being used
evidentially. We have in English the peculiar infinitival form of complement which recommends
solely an epistemic reading without thereby having the evidential use indicated above:
9
For an overview see Aikhenvald (2004).
5
(2) John looks to be on the verge of tears
(3) Mary looks to have once been a nun
(4) Veronica looks soon to be a vice-president.
All of these are naturally read as having an epistemic sense: that there is a visually grounded evidence
for the proposition that John is on the verge of tears, that Mary has once been a nun, that Veronica
will be a vice-president soon. In these cases as in the first of Jackson’s examples, they do not have to
be used evidentially, in the sense we proposed above, of introducing into discourse a proposition and
the existence of a visual ground for it. With Jackson’s example, one might take the presence of the
comparative particle ‘as’ as indicative of some kind of comparison: the way the situation looks is one
which is relevantly similar to that in which it would be reasonable to infer that the sun is sinking (i.e.
if one lacked sufficient knowledge of astronomy). Likewise, one might find assertible (3) even in a
context of common knowledge that Mary has only ever been a bond dealer, indicating that her
appearance is nonetheless one on the basis of which it would be reasonable to infer the presence of a
sacred vocation.
In that case it is not entirely clear that the epistemic sense contrasts with the alleged
comparative sense, rather than providing a special case of it. To say of Mary that she looks to have
been a nun is to indicate a visible similarity between her and those about whom one can reasonably
infer membership of a Holy order; just as to point at the male model and say he looks pregnant is to
indicate a visible similarity between him and certain women. In the former case, the relevant visible
similarity is picked out by reference to evidential features that it has, that one can reasonably infer that
p, for the more general case we have yet to try to articulate what manner can be used to further specify
the look.
However I think we can see a confusion in Jackson’s discussion between a distinctive
epistemic sense which does not require an evidential use, and the evidential use itself. For he suggests
that sentences of the form ‘o is F’ are ambiguous between an epistemic and a non-epistemic sense.
According to him ‘The dog looks dangerous’ can be used epistemically, in which case it is equivalent
to ‘It looks as if the dog is dangerous’, or can be used comparatively, in which case it is equivalent to
‘The dog looks like dangerous dogs look’. While ‘It looks as if the dog is dangerous’ and ‘The dog
looks to be dangerous’ can be used evidentially, that is to put forward the possibility that the dog is
dangerous, both can also be used non-evidentially. Each of these is assertible in contexts where it
really is common knowledge that the dog is no more threatening than a hamster. On the other hand,
there seems to be no epistemic reading of ‘The dog looks dangerous’ in a context where it is
impossible that the dog be dangerous. In such contexts, we can only hear the sentence in the latter of
Jackson’s two disambiguations.
So Jackson’s example of ‘The dog looks dangerous’ does not give us a case of an epistemic
sense along with a comparative, but rather the fact that this sentence, along with many epistemic looks
sentences can be employed evidentially. This will lead to an ambiguity in sense if the evidential use
needs to be understood in terms employing a distinctive sense; but in that case it will turn out that
many sentences are ambiguous between the evidential and the epistemic sense as well. And as yet
6
there is no clear evidence that any sentence is ambiguous between the epistemic and the
comparative.10
3. As we noted (1) isn’t plausibly used in an evidential way; so what work is ‘pregnant’ doing in this
sentence? It seems in some way to be modifying ‘looks’ rather than the subject of the sentence. But at
the same time, although there is such a thing as a pregnant look, ‘pregnant’ is not being directly
predicated of the look the model has, since we interpret it in its normal sense in which it is true of
humans and other animals. And it is here that Chisholm and Jackson are inclined to interpret it as
having a comparative import, comparing the model with respect to his look with the looks of things
which are pregnant.
Chisholm introduces the idea of a comparative use of appearance statements. As he says, ‘the
point of the locution “x appears so-and-so”, in its present sense, is to compare x with things that are
so-and-so...’ (45). And with this comes the contrast between how something appears and how it is.
We are interested in the possible possession of the relevant condition introduced by the complement
without thereby committing ourselves to the ascription of it to the subject. We may rule out that x is
pregnant, but still be interested in comparing how x is with the look of those who are in fact pregnant,
so as suggested, we need not think of ‘pregnant’ as qualifying ‘looks’ on its own.
To recognize that there is a comparative function in (1) is not yet to explain how the
construction ‘looks pregnant’ works, and while Chisholm and Jackson both identify a comparative
sense of appearance verbs, understandably perhaps, they don’t do much to explain how such
constructions do their job. The further comment that Chisholm makes when he introduces the idea
doesn’t address the main difficulty. He writes: ‘A more explicit rendering of such locutions, therefore,
would be something like this: x appears to S in the way in which things that are ... appear under
conditions which are ...’ (45). What Chisholm wishes to make explicit is that ascriptions of
appearance can involve variability with respect to the circumstances of appearing in play in the
comparison. But that is not to address how we can get a specific way of appearing in to the
conversational context to compare the model’s appearance with simply from knowing that we are to
fix on pregnant women in some or other circumstance in which one might view them. For there is no
reason to think that there could only be one way of looking which is shared by all women when
pregnant, actual or possible. So how do we manage to latch on to some specific look when we come
to understand what is being said of the model in uttering (1)?
In part here the problem is one of simile and metaphor in general. Consider:
(5) Mary swims like an otter
This is an example of a comparative with VP ellipsis in the complement clause. As with all such VP
ellipsis the default interpretation is ‘Mary swims like an otter swims’, with the verb phrase echoed
10
There is an interesting question about whether there are constructions which could not admit of an evidential
use. Arguably forms which contain a quasi-subjunctive mood cannot be used evidentially: the sentence ‘He
looks as if he could have just been out of the army’ can’t be said in order to put into play the proposition that he
is just out of the army, and the string ‘He could have just been out of the army’ is itself used to express a modal
statement with evidential import, given our evidence at some earlier specified time, it was consistent that he had
just been demobbed, and can’t be used to assert anything directly.
7
from the main clause. (Note this needn’t be the preferred interpretation in context; perhaps in this
case, what is to be salient about otters is their running, and so we should understand (5) as ‘Mary
swims like an otter runs’, but leave that complication aside for the moment.) Someone who
understands the comparison that the speaker makes with (5) has to draw on more than just knowing
the meaning of the word ‘otter’, in addition they need worldly knowledge or opinion about what is
characteristic of otters. Indeed, with such mundane comparisons, one may anticipate that the speaker
selects a target of comparison on common expectations about the knowledge or opinions of their
audience concerning the kinds used as the basis of comparison. In situations of successful
communication involving comparison, it will be common knowledge what properties are associated
with Fs when one says that o in Ging is like an F. In comprehending the comparative, we may think
of the audience as having associated with various terms in their lexicon a database entry of
information about the kinds of thing the term stands for. We should think of this information as
generic: it is what communities of speakers take to be characteristic of Fs. For many such
characteristic features, it may well be a matter of knowledge, and indeed common knowledge, that Fs
are indeed that way. But comparisons may successfully convey information on the basis of shared
false opinion or prejudice: what is required is that it be a presupposition of speaker and hearer that
being H is indeed characteristic of Fs.
We can represent the audience, then, as exploiting the following kind of cognitive routine in
comprehending the comparison: they must execute a function getting-the-characteristic which returns
for a suitable kind F (this might be otters, Americans, things desired by Emily; and normally, some
suitable restriction of the kinds implicitly articulated in the invitation to compare) a value H, a
property or list of properties, which are stored as what is taken by the audience to be characteristic of
Fs in relation to some respect, R, such as running or swimming. The audience who can fully
comprehend the comparison offered in uttering (5) then needs to apply getting-the-characteristic to
otter and swimming and thereby return the value lithe and graceful.
Of course this is very much a toy model of how we make and comprehend comparisons. I
have focused here on comparisons of aspects of individuals with what is characteristic of kinds, but
one can compare kinds and kinds, and individuals and individuals. Moreover, many of the most
interesting similes require effort on the part of an audience to understand, and the interpretation of the
simile may be somewhat open-ended. The richest or most intriguing similes may well require
exploiting knowledge or conceptions of objects that go well beyond what one could anticipate others
would know about objects or kinds. For our purposes we can restrict ourselves to mundane
comparisons focused on kinds and on what someone can anticipate an audience should know about
the kind in question. For if any statement of the form o looks F is plausibly read as comparative in
intent, then that can only sensibly be construed as belonging to this mundane category.
Note, of course, that we need to distinguish between the sense of the comparative sense (5) as
uttered, and the comparison that the speaker makes and that the audience should grasp in order fully
to grasp the information to be conveyed by speaker. For one can perfectly understand (5) without
being in a position to grasp the comparison made and yet evaluate it. For example, one may perfectly
well be in a position to evaluate how Mary swims, but be ignorant of facts about otters. In that
situation, one may come to accept (5) as correct not through making the comparison, but rather using
adding-the-characteristic to enter relevant values for swimming for otters into one’s database based
on one’s appreciations of the virtues of Mary’s swimming. And someone may understand (5) without
8
yet knowing anything about Mary’s swimming, or know anything about otters other than that they are
a kind of animal. What they understand of (5), then, is a recipe for going about making the
comparison: find out what people take to be characteristic of otters in respect of swimming. So, even
where a speaker uses a comparative statement to make a comparison, one can grasp what is said
without yet being in a position to understand the comparison made. In addition, sentences can have
the form of comparatives without the speaker thereby making the comparison. If instead of (5), one
says:
(6) Mary swims like something in this room
Surely one has not in uttering (6) made any comparison. Rather one has indicated that there is a
comparison to be made. And this point will turn out to be important for our discussion below: for even
if comparative claims do not necessarily involve making comparisons, it may well be that commonly
we do make comparisons in uttering a comparative sentence, and the point of our so speaking will
then involve an assessment of the comparison made and not just the truth-conditions of the
comparative sentence.
In short, in the above linguistic exchange, an audience who fully grasps what the speaker
intends to communicate understands the indirect claim that there is some similarity between Mary’s
way of swimming and that of an otter. In doing so, they take up the invitation to make that
comparison and grasp the specific proposition that Mary’s way of swimming is similar to a lithe and
graceful way of swimming. In responding to the speaker’s utterance, such an audience is as liable to
respond to the proposition conveyed through the comparison as the pure comparative claim.
In contrast to (5), though, (1) lacks any explicit comparative particle. Moreover, unlike
‘swims’ in (5), the verb ‘looks’ in the relevant sense cannot occur on its own:
?
(7) John looks
is just semantically incomplete; at least in the sense in which we are concerned with some aspect of
his visual appearance and not an activity of visually attending as in looking at or looking for. In this
we have a parallel with ascriptions of weight:
?
(8) John weighs
which is semantically incomplete, at least where we are concerned with the attribute of mass under
gravitational force rather than the activity of measuring the weight of objects or of considerations. In
order to have said something with respect to John’s weight some further specification must be added
as complement to ‘weighs’, some measure (which might itself be taken implicitly to be a comparison
with some scale) or a comparison between John and someone else or some kind of thing. For example
(9) John weighs as much as a sumo wrestler
which by default would be interpreted as ‘John weighs as much as a sumo wrestler weighs’, but could
in some contexts be interpreted as ‘John weighs as much as a sumo wrestler eats’.
We can understand the parallels here as follows: in each case the main verb introduces an
attribute of the subject which must then be further specified by the complement of the verb. One way
9
to do this is to employ Higginbotham’s generalization of Davidson’s and Parson’s approach to action
sentences and eventives. For the examples in play, we might the note the near equivalence of ‘John
weighs as much as sumo wrestler’ and ‘John has the weight of a sumo wrestler’ and ‘That model
looks pregnant’ and ‘That model has the look of being pregnant’. We might represent (9) as:
(9#) s (Has (John, s)  (Weight(s)  (s)))
where the second conjunct tells us that the state John is in is a weight state, and that is further
specified by how  is filled out, in this case namely that which is derived from the comparison with
the weight of a sumo wrestler.11 In parallel we can think of (1) as having the form:
(1#) s (Has (that model, s)  (Look(s)  (s)))
with the adjectival complement of ‘looks’ somehow specifying the way of looking attributed to the
model. One issue thinking of the form of the sentence in this way highlights is that it suggests a very
simple picture of how looks statements may vary in their sense: the complement phrase to the main
verb is required to further specify the way of looking attributed; it is clearly an open possibility, then,
that there may be different means of providing that further specification, and hence different truthconditions for sentences with similar surface forms. Just this possibility we will explore below in the
discussion of phenomenal senses.
Chisholm and Jackson seek to explain what they take to be the comparative sense of a looks
statement by reference to sentences with an explicit comparative particle, ‘like’ or ‘as’, but it
shouldn’t be a condition on acceptance of their proposals that the simpler ‘o looks F’ has the same
logical form as ‘o looks like an F [looks]’. Rather, we may simply suggest that with respect to the
comparative use of a looks sentence, we are to construe the role of the complement adjectival phrase
as specifying a way of looking by inviting a comparison. What the sentence needs to convey is that
there is some way of looking characteristic of the pregnant which is similar to the model’s way of
looking. The simplest way we might represent this is assuming it is directly reflected in logical form:
(1*) s (Has (that model, s)  (Look(s)  SIM(C(Pregnant, Look, k), (s)))
Here we are to take SIM as a predicate of predicates and individuals: SIM(F, i) it is true of i just in
case i is relevantly similar to the Fs; the metric of similarity (and so, which function is selected) being
itself a contextually determined matter. (The need for this is something to which we’ll return in due
course.) In turn we should understand C(F, R, k) as the function which returns the value that the
psychological operation getting-the-characteristic ought to return for the lexical item F, for respect R,
given a contextual restriction k. That is, in our current situation, C will return the property
characteristic of the kind pregnant with respect to looks when we are considering the understood
restriction, human female in the nth week of pregnancy. So someone who understands (1), on this
view, can tell it will be true if the look that model has is relevantly similar to whatever look is
characteristic of the k pregnant. This is, of course, an indirect characterization of the model’s way of
11
One might rather prefer, even in the context of a Davidsonian logical form, that the adverb be taken as a
modifier of the main verbal predicate of the event or state, rather than conjoined as a further predicate. For
example, as Hornsby and Wiggins have pointed out, it is plausible even in the context of Davidson’s ontology of
events to suppose that an event is with a stick only qua walking rather than simpliciter (if the event is also a
signalling it need not be a signalling with a stick, though it is a walking with a stick). Such refinements are not
required for our current purposes and will be ignored here.
10
looking. But an audience who has suitable worldly knowledge associated with the lexical item
‘pregnant’ is in a position straight off to make the invited comparison, and so come to appreciate
directly the way of looking attributed. That raises a question about what looks are and our knowledge
of them, to be turned to below. For the moment, though, parallel with the comparative ascription of
weight, all we need assume is that there is some way of specifying a look, just as specifying a weight,
by associating a way of looking as being characteristic of those things picked out by the complement,
just as a given weight may be associated with a characteristic way of being picked out in the
comparison clause.
For the current discussion I assume that the logical form does contain at least all of these
elements, and hence that there is unarticulated in surface form appeal to a similarity metric and the
function C, as well as an indexical restriction on the kind with respect to which we considering what
is characteristic of it. Note that not only is there no surface trace of these elements, but there is no
obvious opportunity for them to interact with any other overt syntactical elements, such as through
binding or anaphora. In the light of this, one might instead suggest the simpler semantic proposal that
pragmatic processing is called for here: on encountering the sentence, ‘o looks pregnant’, an audience,
discerning that no look can literally be pregnant, enriches the lexicon with a new predicate true of
looks, ‘pregnant*’, which is true of something just in case it is relevantly similar to whatever is the
characteristic look of pregnant things restricted to k. This approach would allow for semantic and
syntactic simplicity; and some theorists suggest that this is the way we should understand the import
of metaphor, some simile and various approximations. The linguistic intuition we have that ‘pregnant’
does not qualify the look as such but things like o might be taken as the trigger for this enrichment.12
For our purposes, there is no need to try and choose among these options. But for presentation I’ll
assume the more explicit form, rather than enrichment.13
Note that the appeal here to activating knowledge of a look characteristic of Fs may explain
why we are hesitant to accept the move from ‘That model looks pregnant’ to ‘That model looks
female’. Leaving aside recent complications with the transgendered it may be a common assumption
among discussants that only women can be pregnant, so it may seem that if the model has a way of
looking which is similar to that of pregnant people, then it is one similar to a way of looking that only
women can, so doesn’t the model look female? This is not evidently a good inference. And that
should be predicted on what we have so far said: a way of looking which is the way of looking
characteristic of those pregnant is not thereby a way of looking characteristic of those female (pet fish
are all fish, but what is characteristic of a pet fish is not thereby necessarily characteristic of a fish).
12
One might object at this point that the adjectival complement can be filled by a pro-predicate, bound or
anaphoric on another element: cf. ‘The box really is red, but the vase merely looks so’. The ‘so’ here has to be
interpreted as re-introducing ‘red’ in the same sense as the first clause. But this no more tells against the
enrichment approach than examples of literal and metaphorical talk: ‘Felix is a cat and when you think about it,
so is Mary’ is perfectly construable, where Felix is an animal and Mary a human being. The latter example does
not definitely rule out an enrichment account of the import of metaphors (the pragmatic enrichment acts on the
value returned by the anaphor) and the same strategy can be returned in the case of looks talk.
13
It is a nice question the intersection between this account and Breckenridge’s proposals in (2007a), quite apart
from the contrasting appeals to properties of objects versus experiences of objects. Where here we appear to
knowledge of characteristic features of F, Breckenridge appeals to the interpretation of generic claims. There
may well be a strong connection between interpreting generic claims and exploiting knowledge of paradigms,
cf. (Leslie 2008).
11
A full-dress account would need to explain more of the nature of comparative claims and their
interactions with comparisons we make, but in closing this part of the discussion I want to highlight
just three further points which complicate the simple story. First, it is important to note an element of
the account, at least with respect to the information derived from comparison, cannot be modelled
extensionally. It should be clear in general that we can meaningfully make comparative claims
involving mythical or fictional characters. One can say of Ellen that she as acute as Sherlock Holmes.
There is no human being of whom ‘Sherlock Holmes’ is the name, and the fictional character
employed in Conan Doyle’s stories is an abstract entity and so not the kind of thing to be acute. I take
it that both the comparative sentence itself can be counted correct, along with many sentences
comparing one to a living or historical figure, as well as the conveyed proposition derived from the
comparison. Whatever exact form we discern in the comparative, this suggests that the phrase
introducing the compared measure is non-extensional. This, of course, fits with the underlying
cognition of comparison: what matters is that the interlocutor extracts the information which it is
commonly known is associated with the term in question, and this only indirectly connects with what
is true of what the term stands for.
Jackson seems somewhat to miss this point in his discussion of comparative looks statements
when he writes:
To say that something looks centaurian is simply to say that it looks the way a centaur would. This
means the claim that something looks centaurian is to a certain degree speculative; as there are no
centaurs, one must be speculating on how they would look if there were any... should it turn out (to our
great surprise) that in some remote place there are centaurs, we might well have to revise our
conception of what looking centaurian is like. (89)
Jackson is surely right that we would use the comparative claim to make a different comparison were
we to discover that there are actually centaurs in the world, and that they look very differently from
how they have always been depicted in art, and hence that at least in that circumstance the state of
affairs which would make true the comparative claim would be different from how we conceive
things as they stand. What is much less obvious is that claiming that something is like a centaur is
claiming a similarity between the object and how centaurs would in fact turn out to be, rather than
how characteristically we conceive of them.
The second point takes us to the main issue that both Chisholm and Jackson raise about
comparative uses of looks statements: exactly which comparison one wishes the audience to take into
account can vary from context to context and this can effect what we understand the import of the
speech act made. Consider for example:
(10) That one looks red
Used in two different circumstances about the same object:
(SHOWROOM)
We are surrounded by kitchen apparatus and utensils. You have asked me if you can see a
brightly coloured kettle for the home, and I see partly obscured in the corner a kettle and
pointing utter (10).
(STOREROOM)
12
We are surrounded by kitchen apparatus in very low light in the storeroom. It is common
knowledge among us that the red enamel used by appliance manufacturers attracts a kind of
luminous mould. Though one cannot really discern the chromatic colouring of any surface, I
can see the kettle in the corner with bright spots speckled across it, and pointing at it I utter
(10).
I take it that in both situations we are inclined to judge the utterances of (10) correct. But equally it
seems as if the two speech acts concern different aspects of the kettle picked out. In SHOWROOM
the audience is invited to make the comparison between the kettle and red things as they look in the
bright light of the shop; in STOREROOM, the comparison invited involves the special way red
enamel things look when viewed in the gloom of the warehouse. The proposition conveyed in the first
situation attributes the look of bright red objects to the kettle; that in the second situation attributes the
look of enamel objects with luminous mould. So the two utterances of (10) give us speech acts which
seem to concern very different aspects of the same object.
It would be consistent with what has so far been said, that this variability in the use of (10)
relates solely to the proposition conveyed through making the comparison, leaving the comparative
proposition expressed by the sentence uniform across the situations. But at least some reason to
suppose that is not so is given first by the fact that someone who can understand the comparative
claim, but is not yet in a position to evaluate the comparison (i.e. is ignorant of the relevant
characteristic case) should be able to understand that the speaker wishes them to pursue different
recipes in assessing the truth of each utterance; and second by the fact that it is quite intelligible in
STOREROOM to utter:
(11) That doesn’t look red
without thereby intending or even inadvertently effecting a denial of (10) as used in STOREROOM,
but rather commenting on the difference between these circumstances and what one would notice in
SHOWROOM.
Exploiting the form that we have proposed for (1), the variability in what’s said by the
different uses of (10) would amount to different values being understood for the restriction k in
specifying the comparison to be made. Chisholm and Jackson interpret the variability here both as
showing that the comparative claims are relativized to locations and viewers, and that the relevant
parameter can be filled by what we would vocalize with the adjective ‘normal’. Now that there is a
default interpretation for the comparative is suggested by the fact that without special stage-setting, it
is difficult to hear (11) as uttered in SHOWROOM as avoiding contradicting the utterance of (10)
made in that circumstance. That is, there seems reason to suppose that the comparative in
SHOWROOM invokes a default domain or interpretation. But the ways in which Chisholm and
Jackson spell out the idea of variation here still treats comparatives too much like elements of speech
which can be handled extensionally. If I say of Mary that she is as ferocious as Jekyll, I will be
interpreted as offering one comparison, or as ferocious as Hyde as making another. It little matters
here that Jekyll and Hyde are one, if we associate different characteristics with Jekyll and with Hyde.
Likewise in the current situation, with comparative claims about the looks of things, what should
concern us is what is characteristic of Fs in circumstances C, and what is characteristic of Fs in
circumstances C', regardless of whether Fs in fact have just the same attributes in both circumstances.
This point leaves us neutral on the question whether looks have themselves to be relativized to places
or subjects, and whether looks themselves actually vary across the situations. These issues will be the
focus of discussion when we turn to the question of the nature of looks and the viability of Parsimony.
13
The third complication we need briefly to consider also raises questions about the relation
between a comparative claim and the comparison conveyed. In the examples we have discussed so
far, it has been assumed that in making a comparative appearance claim there is some one way of
appearing that is to be attributed to the subject of the main clause, whether this be a very determinate
appearance, or something determinable. But this really can’t always be the case, even for an audience
in a position to assess the relevant comparisons. Commenting on how well a friend from New Zealand
has fabricated a new cheese, you might say,
(12) This really tastes French.
I imagine that for many speakers paradigms of French cheeses are Camembert, Brie or Roquefort. But
the speaker may not intend to claim that the cheese tastes like any of these three. There is a huge
variety to French cheese (for Churchill over three hundred; for de Gaulle a more meagre two hundred
and forty; according to some sources more than a thousand), and one might think that among that
variety there are still things for each specific sort of cheese which makes it distinctively French.
However, this need not mean that in addition one supposes that there is a determinable taste shared by
all French cheeses which marks them out as French. Rather, one might suppose that each French
variety is recognizably French as opposed to some other nationality of cheese. In this case, classifying
all those tastes together as French would be grouping them together by a consideration outside of
qualitative dimensions of taste. So the speaker in uttering (12) may just wish to indicate that the
cheese has at least one of the distinctive tastes that is that of a French cheese.
On the one hand, this highlights a point about appearances: that we may group or classify
them other than by their similarities to each other. But it also has an implication for the so-called
comparative use: rather than seeing (12) as claiming that the taste is similar to that taste French
cheeses have (there is no such unique determinable taste), it claims that it is similar to the French
tastes for cheese. The way ‘French’ qualifies taste here is to be understood as generalizing over the
account we offered above in terms of comparisons (i.e. a taste is French if it is one of the tastes which
is characteristic of some group of French cheeses).
The point can be made even more salient with claims about appearance involving quantifiers.
Drawing on an example of Breckenridge, consider the claim:
(13) Everything in the room looks American
Suppose we accept the claim as true, and that the room in question has a wide diversity of kinds of
object in it, including food stuffs, sporting goods, casual wear, mobile phones, and magazines. While
it is possible that speaker and hearer both assume that there is an overarching common way of looking
that these all have in common, it is not a necessary condition on understanding an assenting to (10):
one may simply think that for each relevant item in the domain it is true of it that its look is an
American one (with the comparison involving characteristic items suitable for it, be it baked goods, a
piece of cheese, a mobile phone, a pair of shorts, or a magazine). In contrast to our discussion of the
model and his apparent pregnancy we are not here concerned with one particular comparison but
rather with the various comparisons we could make for the different kinds of objects we are
considering. The simplest way to recognize this possibility is to switch from an indexical restriction
on the kind for comparison specified by the adjectival complement to a generalization over the
possible restrictions, to whit:
14
(13*) xs ((In the room, x)  Has (x, s)  (Look(s)  kSIM(C(American, Look, k), (s))).14
Given the possibility of asserting this generalized comparative form, one might ask whether all
comparative uses might not better be understood in terms of these truth conditions, rather than those
we offered above for (1). On this proposal, the apparent additional information conveyed by
appearance statements is to be understood entirely in terms of what the audience can pick up through
making the pragmatically invited comparison.
Now it must be said, it is not entirely clear how a purely pragmatic account can be offered on
the basis of the generalized account. As the examples of STOREROOM and SHOWROOM make
clear, it seems as if we are interested in making different comparisons in slightly different
circumstances and thereby conveying different information. If the proposition asserted simply
quantifies over the variety of possible comparisons (and hence relevant restrictions) it is not clear how
it could convey to the audience to focus on one comparison in one context, ignoring other possible
ones, and shift to another comparison in other circumstances.
One way to make this vivid is to consider one of the items in the room. Suppose there is a
novelty cake made in the form of an issue of the magazine French Vogue. It is a fact that European
women’s magazines look distinctively different from the American counterparts; and it is imaginable
that seeming to be a novelty food item (a cake in the form of a magazine) is entirely an American
appearance. In this case, ‘That looks American’ seems to be assertible of the magazine-cake qua cake,
and hence novelty food stuff, but not qua magazine. If we only could assert the generalized
comparative form as indicated in (13*), then there would be no option to hear an assertion of ‘That
looks American’ of the cake as false. Hence, it is probably for us to proceed on the assumption that
there are two varieties of the comparative use: one on which one invites a particular comparison by
demonstrating some particular restriction on the kind to be compared; and another on which one
generalizes over the possible restrictions that might be in play.
4. The map of different uses of looks statements that we have been sketching so far develops as
follows: there is a contrast between evidential and non-evidential uses, focusing on the idea of a
speech act which introduces a proposition that o is F into the discourse. Very different linguistic
forms can all be used to effect this result, ‘o looks F’, ‘o looks to be F’, ‘It looks as if o is F’. It may
be that the evidential use requires a distinctive sense applied across these different forms, but one
might equally seek to handle the use in a purely pragmatic form. Fixing now just on the nonevidential use, we have so far seen echoes of both the epistemic and comparative senses that
Chisholm and Jackson highlight. In English, there are constructions of the form ‘o looks to be F’
which indicate an evidence-related tie between a way of looking and being F; one might note for other
senses the availability of ‘smells of’ or ‘tastes of’ which play a similar role. If the cake tastes of
coffee, then the way it tastes is evidence of the presence of coffee, but that is consistent with solely
artificial flavouring having been used. ‘Looks’ also allows of the propositional appositive equivalence
to which Jackson takes as the mark of the epistemic use, ‘It/o looks as if p’, or ‘o looks as if it is F’.
14
As noted for the original form offered for the comparative use; there is a simpler enriched form that may be
proposed, which introduces a new predicate ‘American**’ understood in terms of the generalization over
possible comparisons analogous to the condition offered in (13*).
15
In turn, we have seen how such constructions as ‘o looks F’ and ‘o looks like a G’ have a
comparative import: one can say something about the way o looks through indicating its similarity to
what is characteristic of the look of Fs. In relation to this we have seen that there may be both direct
and generalized comparative claims, depending on whether the ascription is tied to some specific
comparison the audience is invited to make. This leaves just one further use that Chisholm and
Jackson are interested in, and indeed are most interested in, the non-comparative (for Chisholm) or
phenomenological/phenomenal use (for Jackson).
In the background here is an assumption in play in both authors that we have not entirely
vindicated. This is that the same simple form ‘o looks F’ may be ambiguous among different uses. We
have, it is true, found that for pretty much every construction we have an evidential as well as nonevidential use, and this will require ambiguity of sense if the evidential involves a shift of sense as
well as use. But Jackson also claims that such sentences as ‘The dog looks dangerous’ is ambiguous
between the epistemic and comparative uses. If he is not assimilating evidential to epistemic, there is
no evidence of this. For the cases we have so far discussed, therefore, one might hypothesise a
mirroring of overt syntactic form and sense: the difference between the epistemic sense and the
comparative is reflected in the different structures that complement of ‘looks’ has, be it infinitival, or
a comparative clause for the epistemic sense, or an adjectival phrase for the comparative.
Chisholm and Jackson, though, are also interested in, and indeed primarily interested in, a
further use or sense: that of the non-comparative (for Chisholm) or phenomenological/phenomenal
(for Jackson). Potential examples of this use will exhibit the same overt form as some examples of the
comparative. According to Jackson, ‘That looks red’ has, at least most commonly, a phenomenal use,
yet its overt syntactic form is the same as that of ‘That looks dangerous’, which can be read as a
comparative. Moreover, Jackson seems to tie the phenomenal sense to a strikingly different logical
form from that for the comparative. Jackson introduces the phenomenal sense so:
It is sometimes doubted whether there is any such use, but in the sense I will give the term, what is
open to doubt is not the existence of the phenomenological use but, rather, whether it is analysable in
terms of concepts pertaining to the epistemic or comparative uses.
The phenomenal use is characterized by being explicitly tied to terms for colour, shape, and/or
distance: ‘It looks blue to me’, ‘It looks triangular’, ‘The tree looks closer than the house’, ‘The top
line looks longer than the bottom line’, ‘There looks to be a red square in the middle of the white
wall’, and so on. That is, instead of terms like ‘cow’, ‘house’, ‘happy’, we have in the phenomenal use,
terms like ‘red’, ‘square’, and ‘longer than’. (33)
This passage indicates that Jackson intends to mark out the phenomenal use of looks statements
entirely superficially: it is a simple looks statement where the adjectival-phrase complement falls
under his list of terms for colour, shape, and distance. Since there is no doubt that there are such
sentences in English, this explains why one could not doubt in his sense the existence of a
phenomenological or phenomenal use of looks statements. Moreover in arguing that there is a
phenomenal use of looks statements in chapter two, Jackson offers no gloss on what the distinctive
sense associated with the use is, instead he argues only that it cannot be reduced to the epistemic or
comparative sense. So it is no accident that for the strategy of argument, the phenomenal use should
be singled out like this.
Whatever the presentational advantages of this strategy given the purposes of Jackson’s book,
it must surely be a mistake to stipulate the existence of a phenomenal use or sense in this way. In due
course, Jackson has a non-superficial proposal to make about the logical form of phenomenal looks
statements; one very different form that he gestures at for comparative or epistemic uses. So this
16
would raise the question why there should not be a comparative use of ‘That looks red’, the very
sentence for which we seemed to have at least one comparative use (in STOREROOM above); that is
why there should not be a sentence which has the superficial form of the phenomenal sense, but of
which the substantive account of the sense of such sentences is not true. To tell one that by stipulation
it counts as phenomenal is no answer, if in addition phenomenal uses require to be read with a logical
form that is not guaranteed to be present just by the use of the adjective ‘red’ or ‘square’ in the
sentence.
Hence it is better to read Jackson here as supposing that a necessary condition of being a true
phenomenal use of a looks statement is the presence of one of these adjectives, and that the restriction
to these is explained by the truth conditions derived from the underlying logical form. Jackson arrives
at his preferred account of the logical form of these statements later in the book, on the basis of the
correct interpretation of the entailments we should accept on the basis of looks statements and the
preferred interpretation of the phenomenal use is given in the following passage:
(22) X looks blue to S
entails something like
(23) There looks to S to be something blue.
On the Sense-datum theory, the explanation for this is that (22) is equivalent to
(24) S immediately sees a blue sense-datum belonging to X.
While (23) is equivalent to
(25) S immediately sees a blue sense-datum.
And the entailment from (24) to (25) is a simple, formal one. (104)
At first sight, Jackson’s proposal about the sense of phenomenal uses seems to be a radical one.
Intending, in effect, to model accurately the inferences we should be committed to in making looks
statements, he proposes a logical form which is radically different from anything we might discern on
the surface of looks statements. Jackson’s (24) seems to have a very different form from his (22). The
verbs of the two sentences seem to have different meanings, and (25) involves quantification over a
range of entities for which there is no surface marker in (22). Moreover, given the radical shift in
logical form, there is little to find in common with comparative uses of looks statements. And that
might seem to indicate that the hypothesis that there are different senses of looks statements requires
us to assume that the verb ‘looks’ is ambiguous across these different uses.
Well, as we shall see shortly, there is an interpretation of Jackson’s proposal which is not very
far from an understanding we are committed to in relation to other appearance verbs. And,
correspondingly, there is a way of interpreting his theory which allows one to insist on a uniform
treatment of the verbal form ‘looks’. So the proposal that we should find a phenomenal use here need
not be taken to require a radical revision of the logical form we read off these sentences.
That is, one could accept Chisholm’s and Jackson’s claims that there is a distinctive
phenomenal use and even sense of looks statements without thereby supposing this involves a radical
difference in form from the comparative use, indeed one could accept the claim that there are different
senses of the sentences here, without supposing that there need be any difference in the sense of the
verb ‘look’ or indeed other appearances verbs, at least as it holds between the comparative use and an
17
alleged phenomenal use. Given the parallel with ascriptions of weight, we have suggested that the role
of the appearance verb is to introduce a way of appearing which is to be ascribed to the subject, which
way of appearing is further to be specified through the complement phrase, adverbial or infinitival. So
one could hold that the appearance verbs, ‘looks’, ‘tastes’, ‘smells’ all have a constant interpretation
across the different uses that Chisholm and Jackson try to highlight; the difference in sense across
these different uses comes in the way that the way of appearing is further specified for the audience.
In effect, then, the idea that there should be a variation of sense here would amount to the proposal
that the complement predicate may be taken to modify the appearance verbs in different ways. With
this structural proposal in mind, one might then look for evidence that the complement predicate of an
appearance statement can be read as qualifying the appearance verb in different ways.
Independently of these syntactical considerations, one might think anyway that there are
broader concerns which should lead us to posit a phenomenal use of looks statements. One can sum
up the idea so. When I say of Fido that he looks to be a dog, or I say of Mary that she looks like a
ballet dancer, I seem to be saying that there is a look (i.e. way of looking) which Fido has, and that
look gives me evidence for concluding that Fido is a dog, and that there is look which Mary has, and
that that is a similar look to one that characteristically ballet dancers have. But, one might now
suppose, if there are these looks which can stand evidence for facts and which can be more or less
similar to each other, then what are they? Is there any way of specifying directly the looks which Fido
has, or which Mary has, such that in the one case one can conclude something about Fido’s species
and on the other what kind of role Mary’s appearance matches? And it does seem as if, when pressed,
you can say more about Fido in virtue of which you can conclude that he is a dog. And when you so
specify you seem to be reporting on how Fido looks, but not thereby indicating simply that there are
ways that you can conclude that Fido is on the basis of looking some way. In that case, what you
would be reporting on is Fido’s phenomenal look.
If we shift sense modalities for a moment, it is fairly easy to find examples which fit the role
of telling us which appearance it is that the object is said to have. For example if we say
(14) This wine tastes sweet
Then it is perfectly natural to understand ‘sweet’ here as qualifying the way in which the wine tastes.
Wines count as sweet in virtue of being disposed to manifest sweet tastes, so ‘sweet’ here qualifies the
taste which the wine produces primarily, and applies to the wine as the substance which produces or is
associated with the taste only secondarily. The same seems true in the case of smells. In complaining
of the person in the railway carriage next to you
(15) He smells rank
‘rank’ here is most easily understood as an epithet for the odour given off by the gentleman, rather
than offering an evaluation of the man himself. In both of these cases, in the relevant sense of
ascribing the taste or the smell, it is not appropriate to question whether it is really sweet or whether
he is really rank. (That (15) and indeed (14) admit of multiple readings is something we’ll alight on
further below.) Of course, that is not to deny that the sweet smell of the one or the rank odour of the
other might not be misleading as to the nature of the wine, or the character of the gentleman. In these
cases, then, we seem to have examples where the complement is used directly to qualify the manner
of appearance.
18
There certainly are some examples of ascriptions of looks which can be understood in terms
of such specifications. So for example, one might say:
(16) The arrangement of these columns looks graceful
And commenting on a regular of Soho one might say
(17) His face looks lived in15
In both cases, we need to understand the ascription as telling us something about the manner of visual
appearance alone, and as not going beyond that in any way. As with the cases of taste and smell, the
possibility of contrasting appearance with the way things are seems to be absent. It doesn’t make
sense to question whether someone’s face really is lived in. Again, that is not to deny that such an
appearance may not yet be misleading. Imagine an eleven year old choir boy with the face of late
middle-aged Auden: the look of his face would certainly be a lived-in one, in as much as that is to say
it has a certain arrangement of features and elements, but it would mislead as to his character and
experience. But to raise these cases is also to highlight quite how rare such specifications of visual
appearance are where the aim of the ascription is manifestly to qualify the manner of visual
appearance.
Returning for a moment to the ascriptions of taste and smell, I suggest that we can find in
such statements evidence for the kind of structural ambiguity in the manner in which complements of
appearance verbs qualify the manner of appearance ascribed. When I introduced the example (14) I
suggested that we could hear it as telling us what the taste of the wine was, noting that so understood
it claims that the taste of the wine is sweet, and that as so understood it makes no sense to ask whether
the taste really is sweet. However, it also does clearly make sense to ask in response to some uses of
(14) whether the wine really is sweet. How can that be? One might suggest the following: ‘sweet’ as
used in (14) primarily applies to tastes; but given this application to tastes, it also has a secondary
sense applicable to those things which have a sweet taste. There is no reason to suppose that our only
understanding of what it is for a substance to be sweet is for there to be some occasion or other on
which it produces a sweet taste. One might rather have an understanding of sweet on which that
substance should be liable to produce sweet tastes. In that case, while there may be no question that
on this occasion the wine produces a sweet taste, and it can yet be open whether the wine itself is
sweet.
If this is the right way to respond, then we not only have with (14) an example of a
phenomenal use of an appearance sentence, but we also have an ambiguity between a comparative
and a phenomenal sense, and that ambiguity lies both in the sense given to the adjectival complement
and the structural interaction between the complement and the appearance verb. Read one way, (14)
involves a complement which is true or false of tastes, or ways of tasting, and we are to understand
the complement as predicating something of the way of tasting and thereby specifying the way the
wine tastes on this occasion.16 On the other reading, (14) involves a complement true of objects,
The example is Gisborne’s, as too is the test for the non-evidential use. Charles Travis pointed out to me that
this is not clearly a case of non-comparative use, unpacking the metaphorical application of ‘lived in’ quickly
takes us back to a relevant comparison.
16
In other constructions adverbial modification plays a parallel role. Although, as noted above, Davidson
himself in discussing the ontological implications of use of action verbs and adverbial modification
15
19
individuals, liquids or substances, and in that sense the adjective is not to be predicated directly of the
way of tasting. In this sense, the way of tasting is specified indirectly and comparatively, it is that
which is similar to that characteristic of sweet things.
Once we see the possibility of these structural ambiguities, then I suggest it is easy to find
such in the case of looks talk and thereby provide a (partial) vindication of Jackson. Consider, for
example:
(18) The spread looks splendid
On one way of taking this we are concerned simply with the look of the repast, the way in which it is
laid out on the table and makes a pleasing spectacle. We are appraising the look itself as one which is
splendid. In this sense it would be parallel to saying of the view from across the gardens from the
back of Blenheim Palace that it is a splendid view. And it makes little sense here to suppose that one
can question whether given the splendid look, it really is splendid, where that is to question whether
there is a splendid look, since that has already been settled.
On the other hand, when evaluating something as splendid, one may more be concerned with
ways in which the food itself could be; one might think that the visual appearance of food, although
important, is not the most important factor. For a meal really to be splendid in itself it must entice the
palate with interesting and complementary tastes, it must be nutritious, and not too cloying or heavy.
Its visual appearance may be indicative of this, and it may be an appearance shared by splendid meals
in general; so one may pick out that way of appearing by saying that the meal looks splendid. And in
this case it makes sense to grant that the meal looks splendid and still ask whether it is splendid. So
we seem here to have with (18) the possibility of two different senses, circumstances in which read
one way (18) must be true, and read another, it is false. Moreover, in this example, there seems no
reason to suppose that we need multiple senses of the evaluative adjective ‘splendid’. The variation
rather comes from evaluating on the one hand just the visual appearance of something, or on the other,
the meal as a whole. In the forms we introduced above we can understand these two readings so:
(18*a) s (Has (the meal, s)  (Look(s)  (Splendid (s)))
(18*b) s (Has (the meal, s)  (Look(s)  SIM(C(Splendid, Look, k), (s)))
So any ambiguity in (18) itself will derive from a structural feature: that the adjectival phrase which is
complement to the appearance verb comes to qualify or modify that verb in different ways. Read one
way, it modifies the verb directly providing a specification of the way of looking in question, namely
that it is a splendid one. Read the other way, it modifies it only indirectly, by means of a comparison:
the way of looking is the one which splendid meals have.17
recommended seeing verbal adverbs as predicates of events, it is much more plausible in examples such as
‘John runs swiftly’, to treat ‘swiftly’ as qualifying the way of running which the event exemplifies, rather than
directly qualifying the event as a swift one which is also, in fact, a running.
17
Note that if we take the approach through pragmatic enrichment of the lexicon, then strictly speaking there is
no structural ambiguity here but only a lexical ambiguity: between a use where one understands ‘splendid’ as
normally used, and another where one extends the lexicon with ‘splendid*’, which is understood by meeting the
comparative condition.
20
This vindicates Jackson’s and Chisholm’s suggestion that we need to find non-comparative or
phenomenal uses of looks statements in addition to comparative ones. We have found an example,
and an easy recipe to generate a host of cases, where we need to posit a structural ambiguity, and in
some cases a shift in sense, in order to understand a shift in truth conditions. Moreover, in fixing on
appropriate examples, we can see that acknowledging the shift in sense here need not lead to positing
a radical shift in the logical form of sentences, or even the hypothesis that appearance verbs like
‘look’ are themselves ambiguous.
Nonetheless, this result also only offers a partial vindication of Jackson. When he insists that
there is a phenomenal sense of ‘looks’ statements in contrast to comparative ones he makes clear that
he means this explicitly to hold for statements which talk of the colour, shape, distance and movement
of objects. He does not introduce or discuss evaluative terms, nor does he make any comparison with
appearance verbs for other senses. So now, one should ask, can the same point be applied to examples
such as (10)?
I suggest that the way that we have just introduced the possibility of an ambiguity between a
comparative and phenomenal sense of appearance statements won’t easily extend to the case of looks
statements about the colour and shape of objects. The concern here is not with questions about logical
form, for I take it examples such as (14) and (18) are sufficient to establish that there can be
ambiguities of the general form that Jackson needs. The problem is rather with what we already know
about the nature of looks, and the contrasts between them and appearances in other sense modalities.
There are contrasts in what we can do with appearance statements across the sense modalities which
echo something in the different natures of the objects of those sense modalities, and hence the status
of appearances with respect to taste, smell, and indeed hearing on one side, and vision on the other
(touch raises a further issue as well, but not one I will pursue here).
The idea that there is something proper discovered by each sense modality is often put in
terms of the Aristotelian contrast between special sensibles and common sensibles; according to
Aristotle, the special sensible of sight is colour, as that of hearing is sound and that of taste flavour
(touch is separated out as having no unique determinable special object, but many distinct ones). In
current discussion this is commonly interpreted in terms of the idea that certain qualities of objects are
discernible only by one sense and not others. So understood there is a symmetry among all of the
traditional five senses, with the exception of touch with which there is an absence of any overarching
determinable quality. The symmetry breaks down, however, when we interpret it not in terms of what
qualities or properties we can perceive objects as having, but what the objects of perception are.
As Berkeley was keen to stress, we think of the proper object of hearing to be the sounds that
we hear: we take ourselves to hear objects through hearing the sounds that they produce, reflect, or
reproduce. Although we often characterize sounds in terms of the kinds of events or objects that
produce them (for instance singling out a sound as a dog’s barking), the sound itself is nonetheless an
object of sensory awareness and attention. One can select a sound to attend to without thereby
selecting any concrete object to attend to as well. So we need not listen to sounds as simply qualities
or properties of objects.
What is true of sound perception here holds also for olfaction and taste or flavour. We can
certainly perceive concrete objects through smelling them, but we do so through smelling the smells
21
associated with them. And those smells we can detect and fix on without necessarily locating an
object as bearer of the smell. Walking into the room you may catch the rank odour, without thereby
being aware of the person whose odour it is. Likewise tastes can linger in the mouth without one
thereby tasting it as the taste of some particular liquid or substance. There are commonalities here but
also differences. The sounds we hear we tend to treat as individuals: it makes perfect sense to suppose
that distinct sounds can be qualitatively identical; if I make the sound ‘water’ through uttering [wɔ:ʔə]
and you mock my accent by mimicking perfectly the noise I make, then we suppose that there are two
sounds, albeit identical in auditory properties, rather than just one sound presented by different events
of production. In contrast, however elaborate the mixing and production of Chanel No. 5, we consider
it to have just the same smell as some cheap perfume sold under that name on Oxford Street by a
barrow boy if the two scents are absolutely indiscernible to the finest nose. It matters not at all that
Chanel No. 5 is associated with glamour and has no bad side effects, while the cheap perfume causes
a rash: that speaks to the fact that the two substances are different, and is quite consistent with them
having the same smell. So we think of identity of smell as a matter of qualitative resemblance among
olfactory qualities. Smells are pure universals or qualitative stuffs. And as with smell, so too with
taste: a perfect artificial substitute for sugar has the taste of sugar, if it is qualitatively the same.
All of this contrasts sharply with the case of vision, despite Aristotle’s claim that colour is the
special object of vision. The problem here is not that we can see some things which lack colour at all,
although that is often an issue raised for Aristotle. If one means just by ‘colour’ chromatic colour,
then objects which are black or white are not coloured. Even if one accepts that these are coloured,
one may question whether objects which are transparent or which simply blaze with light (an example
Aristotle himself notes), or which lack a surface, such as holes or shadows are coloured. But perhaps
Aristotle does not mean by ‘chromatous’ anything quite as restricted as the English ‘colour’, and so
one might still claim that there is a determinable quality that the transparent and brightly illuminated
share with the matte and only partly reflective surfaces that we think of as coloured. 18 This would be
to acknowledge a range of qualities which all visible objects share as special to the realm of sight,
even if there is no special English word quite to pick it out, just as Aristotle claims. The problem
arises rather when we think not only in terms of what qualities the objects perceived may have, but
rather in terms of the objects that can be perceived. What puts vision apart from hearing, smell and
taste is that we do not conceive of the visible world as offering us objects of visual awareness and
attention distinct from (but coincident with) the concrete objects which we also see. Normally when
we see the colour of some object, say a patch of bright scarlet along one side of a sleeve, we see the
object and see it as being coloured in this way. The colour does not float off the sleeve as a distinct
object of attention that we think of as produced or associated with the concrete material that we may
come to know through the colour.
One can make some sense of the idea of an audible world containing just the sounds that one
hears or could hear. Such a world would stand apart from and in contrast to the physical realm of
concrete objects and the happenings which befall them. In part, the fantasy of the sound world that
Strawson employs in Individuals ch. 2 exploits the intelligibility of this. For Strawson supposes that
we cannot make sense of the ordinary world around us other than in terms of its being spatially
ordered, but he thinks it a potentially open question whether a world simply of sounds would need to
For an introduction to the differences in import of ancient Greek ‘colour’ words and modern English see
(Lloyd, 2006), ch. 1.
18
22
be spatially ordered. This connects, I suggest, with the intelligibility of the idea that we can single out
just the sound among the things we hear, without thereby supposing ourselves to have latched on to
the object or event which has produced it.19 In contrast to this, the visible world seems to contain both
purely visual objects together with the concrete entities that we suppose are the medium sized dry
goods of the material world. We see lights, we see shadows, we see highlights, we see rainbows, we
see the sky, and we can see mirror images or holograms; all of these things seem to be creatures solely
of the visual world, nothing about them reveals how they would extend into physical space in
dimensions beyond that we can detect visually.20 Alongside these visual ephemera, we see tables and
chairs, rocks and sparrows, fires and hurricanes: entities which we can single out among visible
phenomena, but which also have an existence and an impact well beyond the visible realm.
This is not to say that we could not imagine how the visible world might be were physical
objects to be excluded from it. For example, when we see rainbows on the horizon, it is not clear that
we can identify them directly with any physical phenomenon. We know what their (main) physical
basis is, the refraction of light through rain droplets, but we don’t see rainbows to be exactly where
the rain drops are; rainbows are sketched for us normally on the horizon, normally as an aspect of the
vault of the sky. They are among the pure visibilia that we encounter. Now someone convinced that
physical objects cannot have coloured surfaces might interpret our visual experience of the world so:
it is as if elements of rainbows are stretched out across the surfaces of objects. That is, we might
suppose that purely visual objects, echoing the location and shape of physical objects, take the visual
position of the physical objects we learn about through vision. A colour or a visible shape will count
as the colour or shape of a physical object, on this view, through the pure visual object being
associated with the physical entity just as a smell or a sound might be with a physical object.
Jackson nowhere makes the comparison with sound, taste, or smell, nor does he talk of visual
sense-data as being the looks of objects, despite this, we might take this fiction as a way of making
sense of the proposals he makes in his defence of sense-data. Jackson’s master argument for the role
of visual sense-data in all perception is an argument against the possession by physical objects of
colours. Assuming that we see entities which are coloured, if we see anything immediately, Jackson
concludes that we never immediately see physical objects. So we might interpret his talk of visual
sense-data in terms of the rainbows stretched over those regions of space also occupied by physical
entities. Certainly this would have the virtue of not requiring a drastic revision to the gloss we give on
looks statements when employed phenomenally. The verb ‘taste’ has associated with it the noun
‘taste’ and these are linked at least by the principle that any entity which tastes in some way thereby
has a taste. Any object which looks some way has a look, and on this proposal, the look just is a visual
sense-datum. Where we have terms for the qualities of tastes – sweet, sour, bitter, salt, ahme – we
could equally have terms for the qualities of looks. Given the exclusion of physical objects from the
visible world, these would plausibly be the colour terms and how they are spatially configured. With
this picture in mind, the relevant reading of (10) would parallel those of (14).
19
Although that is not to say that our understanding of sounds runs entirely autonomously of our interest in the
concrete world. Nudds points out the role that classifications of sounds in terms of the kinds of physical world
events which produce them plays in our understanding of auditory phenomena. See (Nudds, forthcoming).
20
Not all people agree that shadows should be thought of as creatures solely of the visual world. For a
vigorously argued contrasting view see (Sorensen, 2008).
23
While this picture offers a way of reconciling Jackson’s bold proposals about the sense of
looks statements with what we know from other appearance verbs, it comes with a cost. For this story
about looks is revisionary of how we visually experience the world and conceive of that experience. It
is part of our ordinary day to day experience that there is a contrast manifest to us between solid
objects and those which just manifest a perturbation in the visible world. Rainbows do not look solid
to us, shadows contrast with the objects which cast them and the sky is not viewed by us just as a
ceiling. It is part of our understanding of the visual world that this very thing which I can kick is also
that which I can single out and attend to in a particular region of visible space. On the proposal just
given, that would be wrong, I can only sensorily encounter its look, just as auditorily I can encounter
it through encountering the sounds it makes.
And if this picture is revisionary of our ordinary view of what is available to us in the visual
world, then the story is unlikely to make best sense of what we actually mean by our appearance talk
now, when we have not yet accepted the necessary revision to our ways of talking in the light of
allegedly scientifically revealed fact. Jackson’s defence of the sense-datum theory is not intended to
be revisionary in quite that way. He leaves open whether we already recognize the alleged fact that no
physical object is coloured, but the proposed account of the phenomenal sense of looks statements is
intended to be independent of that move in his overall argument. Jackson’s inference to the best
explanation of logical form is intended as an account of what we already say. It is a discovery for us
that concrete objects cannot be immediate objects of sight, but it is supposed already to be a
commitment for us that there are immediate objects of sight and that we talk about them with the
phenomenal sense of looks talk. That contrasts sharply with the picture that belongs with other sense
modalities.21
In taking sounds, smells, and tastes to be primary objects for audition, olfaction, and
gustation, we suppose that these entities have sensible qualities, and in attending to the sound or the
smell or the taste one can come to focus on which specific such qualities a given sound or smell or
taste has. It is no surprise then that we can use our talk of appearances in relation to taste or smell to
indicate the way in which the given taste or smell is qualified. So when we consider (14) we can see
that ‘sweet’ as an adjective holding of objects can be considered as predicated of the wine or of the
taste which the wine has and in virtue of which it tastes in some way. The predicate complement of
‘tastes’ can then easily be taken to qualify a sensible object since we conceive of the sense and that
aspect of the world it reveals in just that way.
We can make sense of there being purely visual objects, but that is not how we treat the
visible world in general: when one sees a physical object, there is no separate visual object with which
it comes to be associated. So we don’t have to hand a range of qualities which we take primarily to be
the ways such entities are qualified, in parallel to the ways in which sounds or smells are. We don’t
initially think of colour or shape in the visual domain as being primarily qualities of looks which only
secondarily apply to concrete objects; in the way that we may think of loud or sharp as being qualities
primarily of sounds and only secondarily of concrete objects or events; or the way in which we may
think of a taste as bitter, and by association as substance which typically has such a taste. That
21
More exactly, in Ch. 1 Jackson seeks to argue that we never immediately perceive opaque physical objects but
only ever, at best, proper parts of them, their surfaces. I elaborate and criticize Jackson’s arguments for that
view in (Martin, 2006).
24
explains why the range of examples which intelligibly qualify looks themselves is so meagre: various
evaluative examples, such as ‘graceful’ or ‘splendid’, and certain dead metaphors such as ‘lived in’.
Therefore, given the model of ambiguity we have articulated, one will have reason to posit a
use of a sentence in a phenomenal and non-comparative sense only where it makes sense to suppose
that the adjective or adjectival phrase in complement position qualifies directly the kind of entities
picked out by the nominalization of the appearance verb: that in the primary sense of ‘red’ or ‘square’
it should make sense to speak of a red look or a square look. Since one can talk of red looks only in a
secondary sense (i.e. that kind of look which red things have), this suggests that the examples of looks
statements which Jackson singles out as unexceptional cases of the phenomenal use are better to be
understood as employing the comparative sense.
5. Of course, the ways that we have construed (14) and (18) offer only one way in which one might
suppose that appearance statements allow of an ambiguity among different senses. So it remains open
for a defender of Jackson to try and argue that a further possibility of shift of sense is possible here,
one which shouldn’t be modelled on the example of (14) or (18). Certainly nothing a priori rules out
this as a possibility. But of course one should be happy to multiply the senses here only if there is a
compelling reason to suppose that there must be a further difference in sense, one that our discussion
has not yet captured. Well this brings us to Jackson’s own explicit argument against treating looks
statements involving colour and shape vocabulary as involving a comparative sense. Here is the key
part of Jackson’s discussion:
We noted in §2 that comparative looks-statements need to be understood in terms of the schema ‘X
looks like an F normally does in C to S.’ How might such a schema be employed to give an account of
(1) X looks red to me
Does (1) perhaps mean something like
(2) X looks the way red things normally look to me in normal circumstances…
I will now argue that (1) and (2) are not equivalent on the ground that (1) may be true when
(2) is false, and on the ground that (2) may be true when (1) is false…
…there might be a disparity between the colours objects have and those they look to have. For
example, there might be a shade of red which objects look to have at sunset but which no object
actually has… It could even be the case that there were no red objects at all, although objects looked
red on occasion. This shows that (1) may be true when (2) is false, for it shows that X may look red to
me even though nothing is red; but then X cannot be looking the way red things normally do to me, or
indeed, the way red things normally do to anyone…
The case for saying that (2) may be true when (1) is false is that someone might, like the
totally colour-blind, see the world in shades of grey, but, unlike the totally colour-blind, have extremely
good ‘grey vision’; in particular, he might be able to make among the greys the same number of colour
discriminations normal people make in the whole colour spectrum… Such a person might well see red
objects as a unique shade of grey, and for such a person it might well be true that X looks the way red
things normally look to him in normal circumstances, namely, that special shade of grey, without it
being true that X looks red to him. (Jackson, pp.34-6.)
The first half of Jackson’s argument seeking to establish that a looks-red statement can be true even
where a comparative gloss is false can be set aside immediately. Jackson’s argument for this
possibility turns on his assumption that somehow the comparative element must be tracking the actual
25
extension of a term, and hence will be problematic only if this is assumption is right. It is surely false
in general that explicit comparative claims can be made truly only where they make comparisons with
things which actually exist. There is really no problem in saying ‘Ellen is as acute as Sherlock
Holmes’ such that an audience understands a truth by it. For the more restrictive case of appearance
statements which have no explicit comparison particle, the same verdict plausibly holds, so no
challenge seems to be posed to construing all talk of colour looks comparatively just from the
possibility of there being uninstantiated colours.
The second half of the argument, seeking to show comparative looks-red statements true
where there is a reading of the looks-red statement false, is more interesting. Unlike the first
argument, the conclusion drawn about truth values of the claims depends specifically on the fact that
Jackson is concerned with relativized appearance statements, containing a modifier ‘to S’. For, of
course, Jackson is not questioning the claim that the object looks red b simpliciter when red, but rather
whether, in whatever sense we give to it, it is red to or for the sorter. Since I have explicitly made the
assumption in our discussion that we should treat the superficially simpler sentences ‘x looks F’ as
more basic than ‘x looks F to S’, and we have yet to address the role of what I am proposing should be
thought of as an adjunct and a modifier, rather than an explicit argument place, we cannot fully
address Jackson’s claim on his own terms.
Still, one can still articulate something of the argumentative position in terms of the
unmodified looks statements, now looking at what someone can grasp or convey by the utterance of
the sentence ‘That one looks red’, i.e. (10). In that case, Jackson’s ‘super-achromatic-colour-sorter’,
as might call him, or ‘Oliver’ for short, is somewhat in the position of our shop workers condemned
forever to work in the situation specified in STOREROOM. As we noted above, plausibly, there is a
claim that these workers can make using (10) which expresses a different claim from that we would
normally make with (10) with respect to an object in good daylight. Since (10) is assertible for the
workers, a suitably relativized claim, say
(10') That one looks red to me
also seems appropriate for one of them to make in that context. Nonetheless (10) as used in the
context of SHOWROOM says something different from what is said in STOREROOM, and
correspondingly used in the same way (10') would seem to say something different from its use in
STOREROOM, and as so used plausibly does not express a truth. As applied to Oliver, therefore, we
can say that on a comparative reading of (10'), there are different claims that may be made, depending
on the relevant restriction on comparison invoked, and that while it is true on one reading, there is a
natural reading on which it is false. While Jackson is right to say that there is a true reading of the
modified looks red statement when applied to Oliver, he is wrong to think that this is sufficient to
show that the claim must have a non-comparative reading: for there is more than one claim the
comparative reading can be used to make, and as we have just noted another such reading comes out
false. We do not, therefore, yet have a compelling argument on the basis of disparity of truth
conditions for the existence of a non-comparative red-looks statement.
However, this doesn’t quite capture all that Jackson (and Chisholm before him) have in mind
against reading looks statements about colour as having a comparative import. One element here, we
26
might note, is something parallel to Jackson’s later discussion of Mary in the black and white room. 22
For there is something that Oliver doesn’t know about red and the look of red when he is engaged in
his sorting, and that lack of knowledge is reflected in the intuitive falsity of (one reading of) (10').
From this one may express one concern with a purely comparative construal of (10). Suppose we can
paraphrase the comparison as roughly this:
(10#) That one has a way of looking which is similar to the way of looking characteristic of
red things in k
If we assume that Oliver can pick out the implicit restriction on comparison, k, then plausibly one
might conjecture that he does understand (10#) and so can come to know that it is true. But surely
there is something that he doesn’t know about the look of the object, and could only know if he came
to have chromatic colour vision. Moreover the fact that he doesn’t know about the look of the object
in question we can express by using (10). So that seems to suggest that (10) isn’t properly glossed, in
at least one of its uses, by (10#).
There is an important insight about what we can convey with (10) in this complaint, but it
really does not tell against supposing that (10) can be true only on a comparative use. To see that
consider an explicitly and uncontroversially comparative claim, such as one we considered earlier
about weight:
(9) John weighs as much as a sumo wrestler
Someone can certainly understand (9) and even come to know it is true while lacking any real
knowledge of what a speaker intends to convey about John’s weight in uttering (9). Someone who
knows that ‘sumo wrestler’ is true of x where x engages in wrestling of a sumo-kind may nonetheless
have no knowledge of what sumo wrestlers are like, or what would typically be taken to be
paradigmatic of them. As we stressed in our initial discussion of comparatives, for such a person, (9)
at best, offers a recipe, if taken to be true, of determining John’s weight: go and find out what is
paradigmatic for sumo wrestlers and then take John to weigh at least that much. Normally utterances
of (9) convey much more to an audience, and the point of making a comparison is often to convey
such information to the audience exploiting their knowledge of the world that goes beyond their mere
lexical competence. If that is right, then we may suppose that even when taken to be a comparative
(10) is typically used to express or convey more information than is grasped by someone who lacks
the appropriate worldly knowledge. Ex hypothesi, Oliver lacks the necessary knowledge, so cannot
grasp what we convey with (10).
That is to say, we have reconstructed Jackson’s argument as indicating that an ordinary
audience of (10) grasps a truth conveyed by it which Oliver does not. Jackson notes that there is a
truth which Oliver can come to know from understanding (10) when construed as a comparative. But
in itself that does not show that, even when construed as a comparative, a particular use of (10) does
not also mean, even if not express, a further proposition which Oliver cannot grasp, but an ordinary
audience can. To make the further move to show that there must be a non-comparative sense of (10)
from this result, Jackson needs to give us some reason to suppose that the additional information is
expressed by (10) and not just meant or conveyed in the use of (10). I suggest that this would be an
22
See (Jackson, 1982) and (Jackson, 1986).
27
extremely difficult thing for Jackson to show, since the phenomena he highlights are common to
explicit comparative sentences and general uses of comparisons. So any argument he may add at this
point is in danger of over-generalizing beyond the example of looks talk.
The only alternative move that Jackson might make at this point which would be specific to
the example of looks statements, would be to show that the additional information that ordinary
audiences grasp itself can only properly be expressed in the form of a looks statement, and hence, on
the assumption that all such communicated information is linguistically articulable, that there must be
some phenomenal looks statements to make that knowledge articulate. Jackson provides no such
argument in his own discussion, and it is unclear what further considerations might be brought to bear
in support of it. Indeed, as we will underline shortly, Jackson himself strictly speaking is committed to
denying this further lemma: given the semantics he offers for looks statements about ordinary objects,
the information we possess about the looks of things is best articulated in terms of the attribution of
phenomenal qualities to sense-data, and these sentences just do not employ the verb ‘looks’.
But if the arguments which Jackson and Chisholm offer fail to show that there is an
interesting phenomenal sense of looks sentences embedding colour and shape vocabulary that is not to
say that there no serious challenge has been raised in their discussions. The moral to draw is that our
focus here needs to shift. Chisholm and Jackson are right to claim that there are different senses of
appearance statements, both comparative and non-comparative. But that gives us no reason to suppose
that there are any true non-comparative uses of looks statements with adjectival complements
involving colour or shape. Jackson is also right to suppose that there is more that we know about the
looks of objects than just that they are more or less like the looks of other things. However, rather than
offering a speculative account of the semantics of natural language appearance talk, we should instead
focus simply on questions about what we all know about the nature of the looks of things, that
knowledge which we manage to convey to each other through some, if not all, of our talk about
appearances.
PART TWO
Our discussion in Part One highlights the following constraints on an account of the nature of looks:
a.) looks are ways objects are, states that objects have, and which we associate with kinds of objects;
b.) it is common knowledge among us that others who have normal vision know the looks associated
with properties they know of through vision; c.) someone who lacks normal vision, for example is
blind, or lacks chromatic vision, or lacks form vision, lacks knowledge of the look associated with
corresponding kinds of thing.
In the discussion that follows, I’ll argue that these constraints provide us with the material for
identifying what the looks of ordinary objects are: they are some among the properties that objects
have anyway (i.e. those properties we must ascribe them in order to understand the truth of statements
about them which are warranted through visual grounds; without yet considering any explicit talk
about the looks of things; nothing about the semantics or pragmatics of looks talk takes us beyond this
range of properties). The first part of our discussion offers some general reasons for endorsing this
picture of the nature of looks, what I labelled at the outset as Parsimony. In the second section I’ll
address a couple of concerns whether conceiving looks in this way really allows them to play the
28
general epistemic role we associate with the appearances of things. In the third section, I’ll address a
more long standing concern about the viability of supposing that looks are just some among the
properties that objects have, rather than relations between objects and perceivers, or the perceptual
states of perceivers. A particularly pressing challenge can be drawn from the ancient problem of
conflicting appearances. In responding to these worries, I will finally fill out the semantic proposals
from Part One by explaining how we can understand more complex sentences of the form, ‘o looks F
to S’ and ‘o looks F from l’, as deriving from the simpler form ‘o looks F’ with the addition of an
adjunct phrase which modifies the verb phrase of the simpler sentence. In turn, the account of these
more complex sentences offers us the basis to solve the problem of apparent change in appearance
raised by certain cases of conflicting appearance.
6. In discussion of Jackson earlier, we noted a striking contrast between vision and certain other sense
modalities. At least as far as ordinary inspection of how things are presented to us is concerned, the
visual world is not principally populated by special visual objects, such as Jackson’s visual sensedata. Pure visibilia are presented to us alongside concrete objects which have a life beyond their
visually manifest one. In itself, this settles nothing about what properties of any of these entities can
be visually manifest to us. For Jackson’s part, though, it is notable that having originally introduced a
new range of entities, non-physical, visual sense-data, the account then seeks to explain the truth of
looks talk by ascribing to them only properties we might otherwise have thought physical objects
have. On Jackson’s preferred interpretation of ‘phenomenal’ looks statements (i.e. those statements
such as ‘the table looks brown’, which we have argued ought to be treated as having comparative
import), such claims are made true by facts about the characteristics of the immediate objects of
perception. If the physical table looks brown, then there is some immediate object of perception, a
sense-datum, which is brown and in virtue of which one sees the table.
In support of Jackson’s proposals about the properties that make up the look of objects (but
not the objects which bear these properties) we might note that we cannot normally dissociate the
mere appearance of a visible object from others of its properties. It is true that one can engage with a
scene purely with an interest in its appearance and that this can make a difference in what one knows
of the scene in contrast to a case of simply seeking to give a complete and accurate description. But
even in this case, one might point out, one can’t avoid taking in, and paying attention to, such features
of objects as their colours, shapes and sizes. So there is no evidence that we can be aware just of the
visual appearance of objects independent of other ways they are. This suggests that any account which
wishes to posit appearances distinct from other properties, must seek to explain why awareness of
appearances is tied to awareness of these other properties.
Given that our concern is with our ordinary understanding of looks talk, there is a further
point to note. Some writers who wish to draw our attention to the wondrous variety of visual
appearance encourage us to take the stance of a Sunday painter attempting to frame a picture: with
careful attention one can recognize the need to deal with apparent size and shape in projecting a threedimensional scene onto a two-dimensional sketch; through blurring a scene, one may better attend to
the variegation of light, and coloured mosaic, that Impressionist painting is so often thought to evoke
for the viewer. When suitably instructed to shift one’s attention, it can well seem that the visual world
is so much fuller of features than we normally talk about. Surely, then, isn’t it this additional detail
that we should have in mind when giving an account of looks and visual appearance? The problem
with this line of thought is that both writer and reader recognize that they may come to learn
something new about their visual experience by following the instructions: so it needn’t have been
29
something that the reader explicitly knew before attempting to fix on apparent shape, or field colour.
But before this learning exercise, the reader already had a normal comprehension of looks talk. And
the author presumably employs common knowledge of what he or she can expect of a readership,
only some of whom are Sunday painters, or amateur vision scientists. Either these newly highlighted
features play their role in guiding our use of looks statements through implicit knowledge of them, or
our ordinary understanding does not require appeal to any such features.
Now, one might hypothesise that the principal reason for Jackson to introduce new entities,
and for other writers to appeal to new properties, is a concern with the problem of conflicting
appearances. For surely, the key point that everyone agrees with about looks statements is that
something can look a certain way without being that way. For example:
(19) The stick looks bent
may be true when said of a straight stick, placed partly in water. However bentness comes in to play
here, it cannot be via the stick’s being bent, since the stick just isn’t that way. Jackson deals with this
by positing some other entity which really is bent, the visual sense-datum, and other writers seek to
deal with it by suggesting that looking-bent is a distinct property from being bent. As I’ll shortly spell
out, the minimalist semantics we already have to hand throws doubts on this assumption. Given the
hypothesis above, that would remove the key reason for supposing that we need appeal to any
additional properties introduced just to interpret looks talk. Our default approach should then be to see
how far we can get just through appeal to what we need otherwise. And this is to adopt, for the
moment, Parsimony: looks statements are made true just by properties of objects that we need to
appeal to in order to explain the truth of sentences which are not explicitly looks sentences.
Why doesn’t the above consideration lead us to visual sense-data or new properties? On the
comparative reading, we have the form:
(19*) s (Has (the stick, s)  (Look(s)  SIM(C(Bent, Look, k), (s))).
This attributes to the stick a state which is relevantly similar to that characteristic of bent things. For
all we have so far said, the value of C for bent and look will be the property of bentness itself: that is,
consistent with everything so far, what everyone knows is characteristic of bent things with respect to
their look is that they have a bent shape. For (19) to be true, in that case, is that the stick have a look
state which is relevantly similar to a state of being bent. Since ex hypothesi the stick is not bent, this
look state is not a state of bentness (at least on this occasion). But that does not rule out that on other
occasions what makes (19) true just is the bentness of something; and hence that it is bentness itself
which counts as the characteristic look for bent things. Clearly for this story to be fully satisfactory
we’ll need to know how some property other than bentness which the stick possesses can be
relevantly similar to being bent. But that task I will leave for our explicit discussion of conflicting
appearances. For the moment, the only moral we need to draw is that once we see the logical form of
a comparative use we have as yet no reason to go beyond the domain of properties needed to interpret
F in ‘o looks F’ and more generally properties which o may instantiate independently of any looks
statement being true, in order to find what can make ‘o looks F’ be true.
7. Endorsing Parsimony requires us to seek for the looks of objects only among the properties they
can exemplify anyway. But that is not to say that just any property of an object, nor indeed just any
30
visible property of an object, is a suitable candidate for being a way that an object looks. Adapting the
concern that Jackson raises in his discussion of Oliver the achromatic sorter, we can see that some
properties, even if visible, cannot play the role of looks.
Start with the plausible assumption that one can, in propitious circumstances, tell just by
looking whether there are tomatoes on the stall in front of the greengrocers. One of the things about
tomatoes is that they have, or rather many varieties of them have, a look which is distinctive of just
tomatoes. Some unusual tomatoes may not be recognisable as such given their weird shapes or
colours (think of some of the heirloom tomatoes of California); but on the whole this fruit is bred to
be instantly recognizable to the choosy shopper. It is not merely the case that we can learn that there
are tomatoes at the greengrocer, it seems part of the explanation of how we tell this that some of the
things there have the distinctive look of tomatoes and it is through recognizing them in virtue of this
look that we can come to know the presence of the fruit in our environment. One further thing: we can
rely on the idea that there is a distinctive appearance to tomatoes when we teach people what tomatoes
are. A suitable picture book with drawings or photographs which highlight the way tomatoes look can
be used to teach someone how to use the word ‘tomato’ in English, and to come to know what fruit it
is we are interested in.
Now this pattern of recognition and learning relies on us having the cognitive capacities for
grouping certain appearances together as saliently similar when we come to recognize tomatoes. This
learning process, and the maintenance of the capacity acquired through it turn on the contingent fact
that predominantly only tomatoes have the appearances in question. For suppose that there was
another kind of fruit, the schmato, which although entirely different in taste and culinary application,
shared the exact same appearance and variety of appearances as tomatoes have. A linguistic
community which developed in an environment equally full of tomatoes and schmatoes would not
normally be able to tell that there were tomatoes on the stall, rather than that there were either
tomatoes or schmatoes. Likewise, they wouldn’t think in terms of tomatoes having a characteristic
look which was the look of tomatoes: the look in question would be one which belonged to the motley
of tomatoes and schmatoes. So we have a useful cognitive capacity which turns on a lack: the absence
of ringers or doppelgangeren for tomatoes in our normal intercourse with the world.
Consider now an isolated community stuck just with schmatoes and not tomatoes; one in
which the idea of a sweet-and-acidic-flavoured fruit to be used like a vegetable has never arisen. They
do have the schmato, though, and they use as best they can in cooking. Going to the greengrocer,
members of this community can tell straight off whether there are schmatoes in stock (shame) rather
than persimmons or kumquats. They associate with the schmato a distinctive appearance; and they can
train learners how to use the word, and to come to know about the kinds of produce available in their
greengrocers through using depictions which make salient this appearance. The possibility of this
community illustrates for us why we have to distinguish between the look of a tomato and the
property of being a tomato.
Ex hypothesi schmatoes share the visual appearances of tomatoes. Members of the schmatoonly community recognize schmatoes by their visual appearance. That visual appearance is the same
as that of tomatoes, although they do not think of the appearance in those terms. Members of that
community are acquainted with the visual appearance of tomatoes: as long as one picks it out as ‘the
appearance of schmatoes’, they know what you are talking about in intimate detail. But none of them
31
has ever heard of a tomato, they don’t know what one is. So we can teach one of them, William,
something new by presenting them with a tomato. William may well exclaim ‘Oh, it looks just like a
schmato, though it isn’t one!’ In this possible scenario it seems as if William has learned something
new in encountering a tomato for the first time. So his visual acquaintance with a sample tomato puts
him in a position to know about some kind or property he had not encountered before: the kind
tomato, and the property of being a tomato. Nonetheless William recognized straight off the
appearance that the sample had. So the appearance was not something new to him, it was something
he already had knowledge of and was acquainted with. Taking ‘S is acquainted with _’ here as an
extensional context, this indicates that William was acquainted with the appearance of being a tomato
but not acquainted with the property of being a tomato and consequently that the two properties are
not identical.
There is nothing particularly special about the case of tomato here. In general where we can
derive a suitable complement for ‘looks’ from a term, F, that is get an adjectival phrase involving F,
such as F-ish, or consider the nominal ‘the F look’, then we know that the way of looking here to be
picked out (which is to say that value entered as characteristic of F with respect to looking) cannot
itself be F where the following things hold: a.) it is possible that there should be some other property
G such that in suitable circumstances Gs exhibit the look that Fs in fact do; b.) that someone could
recognize the presence of Gs in such circumstances and come to be aware that Gs exhibit that
distinctive look; and c.) such a person lack all knowledge of the Fs. Parsimony will fail if none of the
properties that objects otherwise have can meet this condition. But, as has often been discussed in
relation to the theory/observation distinction, there are an important range of properties which
arguably escape this line of argument: observational properties.23
I now want to make a bit more precise the idea we have used in the tomato/schmato story of a
doppelganger, or as I will define it, a visual duplicate. In terms of this, we can explain both the idea
of the overall look of an object and that of an observational property through which we can fill out the
Parsimonious story. The idea of perfect twins or duplicates which are taken to share all their qualities
or intrinsic properties is familiar from attempts to make precise the contrast between quality and
relational property, or intrinsic versus extrinsic property. But no tomato is the perfect duplicate of any
schmato: every tomato has the property of being a tomato, and no schmato has that property; no
tomato has the property of being a schmato. Our story goes through even if plenty of intrinsic
properties differ between the tomatoes and the schmatoes. Nonetheless, one may well think that there
is an important kinship between the idea of perfect duplicates and the notion we have so far
inexplicitly employed in the story. When we consider concrete individuals to be perfect duplicates, we
restrict the range of properties which necessarily have to be the same among them: twins will differ in
their spatial relations, and properties deriving from that, and will differ in properties of being identical
to themselves, or properties which derive from that. So, we might hypothesise, to get the notion of a
visual duplicate we simply need to employ a suitable further restriction. When asking of two objects
whether they are visual duplicates of each other, our concern should be restricted just to those
properties they possess which can be detected visually. So, although the tomato is not a perfect
duplicate of any schmato, it may yet be the visual duplicate of one, since in the context of comparison,
its being a tomato is not a visually detectible difference between it and the matching schmato.
23
For key discussions of the notion of the observational on which the account here draws see (Wright 1982),
(Peacocke 1983, 1986, 1992).
32
But to put things this way is to raise a puzzle. At the beginning of the tomato/schmato story
we appealed to the plausible thought that one can in propitious circumstances tell just by looking
whether there are any tomatoes at the greengrocers.24 So that suggests that, at least in some
circumstances, whether something is a tomato is a visually detectible feature of it. Yet in the argument
we assumed that schmatoes may be visual duplicates of tomatoes, and in the gloss we have just given
of that notion we have suggested that it requires that being a tomato or being a schmato not be a
visually detectible feature of the object. Have we then contradicted ourselves in the story? And,
supposing that we had, which assumption should we give up: That on occasion one can just see
whether tomatoes are present? That there could be schmatoes which were visual duplicates of
tomatoes?
We can solve this puzzle, if we reflect a bit more on what it is for us to be able to discern
through vision the presence of one concrete individual as opposed to any other. Since individuals can
be perfect duplicates of each other, an ability to tell through vision what intrinsic properties an object
has will not necessarily settle the question which object it is that is before one’s eyes. Some writers
claim that spatial and temporal features have a constitutive role in individuating concrete individuals:
on that view, to be sensitive to the non-identity of two concrete individuals is in part to be sensitive to
the difference in their spatial-temporal histories. In a situation in which one views two identical
objects simultaneously, as when one confronts the twin rubber ducks Huey and Dewey, one can tell
that there are two ducks there and not just one, even given the fact that they are perfect duplicates,
because one can see the different locations that these objects occupy.25 In such a situation, one can
certainly distinguish what is in fact Huey from what is in fact Dewey by appealing to one’s
knowledge of the differences in spatial location between them.
However, we normally think not only that we can single out objects through perception in a
one-off way, as when we think demonstratively, but that we can, at least sometimes, re-identify the
very same individual on re-encounter, and so be thinking of it through the exploitation of a capacity
whose presence appeals to further capacities for tracking that go beyond the immediate moment.
Consider, for example, the sometimes difficult but always essential task of identifying your own
suitcase on the carousel at the airport: the ideal occasion is one where, despite the presence of various
rather similar items, your own bag leaps out at you through its distinctive appearance. Given the
theoretical possibility of perfect duplicates, one will have been successful in identifying a unique
individual through such visual inspection, only if the path of the object one takes oneself to be reencountering has not crossed with one of its duplicates. At the airport, that might be a real possibility,
if you are the kind of traveller with a brand new suitcase and the flight is full of other such rich
travellers with their own new suitcases of the same design. But often we are surrounded by objects
which don’t have such perfect duplicates so readily to hand. And for these, it seems, we can often
succeed in picking out the same one again and we recognize it as the same one again.
A concern with duplicates, then, would suggest that we need to be suitably safe from, or
sensitive to, the possibilities where a duplicate has crossed paths. Assuming the non-sceptical stance
that the logical possibility of perfect duplicates does not deprive us of having recognitional capacities
for individuals which give rise to knowledge, our correct deployment reflects such safety. Those
further factors which differentiate this particular object from any other needn’t all be entirely manifest
24
Although Peacocke takes there to be a significant observational/non-observational contrast, he argues in
(Peacocke 1983) that recognitional concepts figure in the content of sense experience too. (Siegel 2006) also
argues against the claim that natural kinds cannot be represented in sense experience, although her discussion
does not address the standard worry here, that in principle there could be duplicates of kinds.
25
However for scepticism about the role of location here see (Scholl and Pylyshyn, 1999).
33
visually for one to take in that it is none other than this individual (the lucky, old, battered suitcase)
that stands before one. So we can contrast those situations in which one relies on visual means to
determine whether an object is one’s suitcase, and those where one can’t. Any situation in which one
cannot detect or rely on spatio-temporal differences will be of the latter sort. In such circumstances,
perfect duplicates will not be distinguishable by visual means. One would not, in such circumstances,
be able correctly to deploy any recognitional capacity for that individual.
The idea of a visual duplicate can then be elaborated in this way: in conditions where one
cannot visually discriminate a concrete individual a from any possible perfect duplicate of it (i.e.
where one cannot visually exploit non-intrinsic differences to determine non-identity) any object
which is either a perfect duplicate of a or is not a perfect duplicate of a but which one also cannot
discriminate on visual grounds from a will thereby be a visual duplicate of a.
In turn that suggests that what holds for individuals can hold for kinds or properties. In
suitably propitious circumstances one can recognize the presence of a kind or exemplification of a
property by being presented with a suitable concrete individual which is saliently characteristic of
kind or property. But this ability is contingent on being safe from confounding duplicates. When such
conditions are compromised, vision will not tell apart potentially matching cases and we have the idea
of doppelgangeren or ringers.
Where two concrete individuals are visual duplicates we can say that they share an overall
look. Two points to bear in mind here. It is often suggested, on the basis of possible sequences of just
noticeable differences, that visual indiscriminability is non-transitive. If this is so, then no object has
an overall look. But the alleged examples of non-transitivity in relation to observation don’t quite
demonstrate this possibility: they exploit the thought that there are some circumstances in which a
cannot be told apart from b, and some where b cannot be told apart from c, while there is some
circumstance where a and c can be told apart. What we need for the notion of an overall look is rather
that there should be no possible circumstance in which a and b be discriminable by vision (i.e. in
circumstances where one couldn’t exploit vision to tell apart perfect duplicates) for them to share an
overall look. I’ll assume in what follows that the notion of an overall look as introduced here is
coherent. I doubt that anything for this discussion turns on it, though, other than need for
circumlocutions which track powers of visual discrimination rather than similarities among their
objects. Note also that we may induce different notions of overall look if we focus on different visual
powers: it is conceivable that someone with something like human vision might be sensitive to a
broader spectrum than ordinary human beings and thereby tell apart objects which for us are visually
indiscernible.26
We extend from visual duplicates for individuals to the idea of a kind or property being
visually non-unique. A kind is visually non-unique where there is a concrete individual which is a
member of that kind and has the look characteristic of the kind but which also has a visual duplicate
which is not a member of that kind. Likewise a property is visually non-unique where some concrete
individual has the property and has the look characteristic of the property, but at the same time has a
visual duplicate which lacks the property. (Note that these conditions are weaker than that exploited in
the tomato/schmato example. For there we considered a possible situation in which every
characteristic tomato had a double which was a member of the same kind, schmato. Clearly that
In addition, note that we don’t have here the makings of an abstraction principle: we cannot assume that the
universe is suitably populated with concrete individuals that every overall look is instantiated by some
individual.
26
34
condition isn’t guaranteed to obtain wherever a kind or property turns out to visually non-unique in
the sense here defined.)
The idea of a perfect duplicate is intended to capture the idea of pure resemblance among
individuals, and the properties or universals in virtue of which things perfectly resemble each other.
The idea of a visual duplicate mirrors the idea of visual resemblance among individuals. Overall
looks, therefore, are manners in which concrete individuals may share visual resemblances. In this
notion we are not privileging any particular vantage point or viewing condition for an object. Much
discussion of looks exploits the idea that we single out such special conditions when we say how
things look now in this situation in contrast to how it might look in some other. But the fact that we do
sometimes so contrast looks by possible viewing conditions shouldn’t obscure the fact that we also
have the notion of an overall look. For example, if I tell you that the Michelangelo slaves have a
rather rough-hewn look, I need have in mind no particular vantage point that you should take up on
the statues in order to vouchsafe my claim. The idea of an overall look, then, invites you to try as hard
as you might to take in whatever could be visually manifest from whatever angle in whatever
conditions. However rare, if some circumstance will indicate a difference, two objects will differ in
overall look and thereby fail to be visual duplicates.
And now we are in a position to specify the idea of an observational property. For,
observational properties will be those properties which necessarily are visually unique. That is to say,
observational properties are those properties for which necessarily no object which exemplifies them,
and is characteristic with respect to look for that property, has a visual duplicate. For example, being
cubic is an example of an observational property. There is no visible object which is both cubic and
visibly shaped but which has a twin, a visual duplicate, which lacks the property of being cubic.
Indeed what goes for shape such as being cubic arguably goes for Jackson’s complete list of features
by which he defined phenomenal uses of looks talk: all of them give us examples of visually unique
properties.27
Is it really so obvious that being a cube meets the condition I have laid down for
observationality? First, what of holograms? Can’t there be pure visibilia which nonetheless look
solid? There might be seemingly a perfect pink cube in front of you, which by tactual investigation
you discovered to be a pure light phenomenon. Wouldn’t this be a case of something looking to be
cubic without in fact being cubic? I suggest that we should respond to this last question negatively:
not only does the hologram look to be cubic, it is cubic. What the example of holograms show is that
there are ways of being visually shaped which are distinct from being tactually or physically shaped.
The hologram has no tactually detectible shape but that does not mean it has no shape at all.
Consider, then, another example. Suppose one is in the realm of those marvellous and
entertaining creatures, the shape shifters. These wondrous beasts typically present an amorphous,
blobbish appearance. But, now and again, when there is only one potential perceiver in the vicinity,
one of them will determine to present a visual profile which matches that of a cube to whichever
vantage point on it a perceiver has. Whatever the perceiver might do in order to catch the shape shifter
27
That surface colour meets this condition (which I would argue it does) requires settling some further delicate
issues to prove. If we are indifferent among viewing conditions, as I have indicated in the text, then we are
required to treat metamers as distinct colours, since there will be some viewing conditions under which
individuals with the same colour, say typical denim blue, will be visually discriminable if the dyes used in the
fabrics are metameric. Our normal use of colour vocabulary tracks conditions under which we have commerce
with objects – so we might well count both pairs of jeans as blue and as being of the same colour even though
there are some conditions under which the one pair will look blue and the other will look purple.
35
out by changing position or jumping around to get a glimpse of its backside, the shape shifter will
keep to the policy of only presenting to that person a profile which a cube would also present. All
other aspects of it occluded from the viewer remain, as normally, amorphous: so it never actually
takes on the form of a cube, but nonetheless for such a viewer continues to present an appearance to
their viewing position which matches that of a cube. Is this not, now, an example of an object which,
when playing such games, has the look of a cube without being a cube? Wouldn’t it then be the visual
duplicate of some cube without itself being cubic?
We don’t have to, and shouldn’t, concede this claim. For all that has so far been said, the
shape shifter is an entity which is constantly changing both its shape and its visual appearance, so it
has no constant visual appearance for the viewer to latch on to. The shape shifter’s game puts the
viewer at a disadvantage: the viewer cannot use vision to determine the overall shape of the creature,
nor can he or she take in its visual appearance. Now, it is true that throughout the viewing period the
shape shifter has a disposition which reflects a psychological fact about the viewer. For throughout
the inspection, it looks to the viewer as if there is a cube before him or her, and this fact about them is
brought about through the activity and the nature of the shape shifter. But now the question is whether
the presence of this disposition is enough to establish that the shape shifter has the visual appearance
of a cube, i.e. that we should think of visual appearances of objects as nothing more than such
dispositions to provoke sense experience. Since nothing has yet forced on us the view that the looks of
things are no more than the shadows of such psychological facts, then there is as yet no reason to
concede that the shape shifter genuinely possesses the appearance, rather than finkishly making it
seem as if it has the appearance.
But this conclusion appears to generalize to all of the properties on Jackson’s original list for
defining the phenomenal sense of looks statements. If visual shape is visually unique, then so too are
number, colour, shape, size, and spatial position or relation. And the condition of being visually
unique is sufficient to block the argument used in the tomato/schmato story concerning what William
knows. Since William could not encounter any other object with the distinctive appearance
characteristic of being a cube which was not a cube, he couldn’t come to have knowledge of that
appearance without having knowledge of being a cube. There is no possibility, therefore, of
appearance and visually unique property coming apart. So, for all we have so far said, the property of
being a cube can feature as the value of what is characteristic of being a cube with respect to looks.
This list of properties meets the negative condition of not being subject to the William
argument, but what positive reason could there be for identifying ways of looking with the
observational properties? We can bring that out by considering another reason for distinguishing the
property of being a tomato from that of the look of tomatoes. There can be individual tomatoes which
do not have the look characteristic of a tomato, while still being tomatoes. This requires, at least, that
the property of being a tomato and the property of having the characteristic look of a tomato be
distinguished. That said, one might yet suppose that for each way of looking some tomato has, that
should count as one of ways of looking belonging to tomatoes. Even if that is true, still there is still no
determinable look associated with being a tomato which all the ways of looking tomatoes might have
exemplify determinations of.
In contrast, when we consider the example of being cubic, or any other pure shape, any
visible individual which is also visibly shaped will thereby exhibit the look characteristic of being a
cube: there just aren’t any examples of cubes which are visibly shaped but which fail the test of
36
looking like a cube.28 And this, we might hypothesise, is what brings out the reason for attributing to
the observational properties the role of being the looks of things. For, in sorting objects into visual
duplicates, and hence by their overall looks, we are sorting them by ways in which they purely
resemble or differ from each other which are entirely visually manifest. A way of looking that an
object has may be conceived just as some aspect in which it resembles or fails to resemble any other
object in respect of overall look. The standard list of observational properties in the visual realm gives
us a group of properties which are such that objects can be grouped as more or less similar with
respect to them, and the presence or absence of which properties for visually perceptible objects are
visually detectible. So we might surmise that the overall look of an object is a function of its
observational properties, and the various ways of looking it may share or contrast with other objects
are just conjunctions or disjunctions of the observational properties it has.
And getting to this point reveals one further option for inclusion among the ways of looking
that objects may have. With the observational properties we have a necessary coincidence between
having the look of that property and having that property (at least when the domain is restricted to
objects which are visible, and visibly determined along dimensions relevant to each of its
observational aspects). But what matters for playing the looks-role is presumably that the property
should constitute the visual resemblance among objects with certain looks. And that raises the
possibility that some property may be such that it constitutes visual similarity or difference but may
be such that entities can visually appear to have it when they don’t. Such a property would fail to be
visually unique, and hence there would be the possibility of a doppelganger. But it might not be
subject to the William argument. For if the property in question really determines visual similarity
among objects, then in taking in the appearance of the objects visually one will be acquainted with the
property, even if one or more of the objects in fact fails to instantiate it.
The theoretical possibility of this option is perhaps best made clear through example. We
noted earlier that a key feature of the visual world as it is made manifest to us is that there are among
the visible objects some which are pure visibilia, and seem to have determinations which relate just to
the visible world, and those whose nature extends beyond the purely visual. It is not just that some
visible objects turn out to be more than features of light, but that the visible world seems to us to be
sorted into objects proper, and the pure visibilia. One aspect of this is the distinction for us between
objects and shadows: we can see both concrete objects and shadows cast by them, or over them. But
normally we do not see a shadow as just another object. Indeed, as research has revealed, it is difficult
for people to focus on or attend to what they see as a shadow. So, one might hypothesise, one aspect
of the visible world which is manifest to us, and an aspect of some objects which is also manifest, is
whether they are pure visibilia or not. That is, echoing Locke, we might surmise that a visibly
manifest feature of solidity. (Albeit, for the term to encompass the intended domain, clouds or mists
have to count as appearing solid even when thinly dispersed.)
If we suppose that solidity is a visually manifest property in this way, we must also concede
that some solid objects (i.e. ones which have a nature beyond the purely visible realm) and some
purely visible objects can take on the appearance of the other camp. An entirely solid glass arc may
cunningly be made to present the appearance of a beam of light; a hologram, on the other hand, may
appear to be the solid object whose appearance has been photographically captured. In both cases we
have something which has the appearance of what it is not. Nonetheless, one might insist, in any
28
This is not to say that there are no some examples of physical cubes which are too small to be seen as cubic in
shape; nor that there are no medium sized cubes which are invisible; nor yet some medium sized cubes which,
though visible, do not manifest their shapes visually, perhaps giving off a faint glow which does not quite
indicate the extent of the object or where its surfaces are positioned.
37
situation in which something presents the appearance characteristic of a solid object, then it must
appear to be solid. The appearance which we associate with solidity could not have been the visual
mark of any other property; to discern and appreciate that appearance within the visual world is to
grasp the way in which the world is sorted into the purely visual and those objects which have life
beyond what can play before the eyes.
Allowing that solidity has this role in the realm of visual appearances comes with a cost. For
we must suppose that there is something essentially delusive about perfect holograms or other such
visual illusions. Moreover, if it is conceivable that someone should have visual access to a world
which contained no solid objects but did contain some holograms, then we would have to grant the
possibility that someone be acquainted with the property of solidity through encounter with these
holograms, without ever having encountered an object which exemplified the property.
Rather than attempting here to settle the matter, I propose that we interpret Parsimony in a
way which does not rule out the possibility of such properties, but need not rely on them. We should
talk of the visually basic properties of objects, those by which visual resemblance is fixed. These
include the observational properties of objects: size, shape, colour, visible texture, spatial arrangement
of parts; it may also include such non-observational properties as solidity in the sense introduced
above.
With these as the most generic visible properties by which we can tell objects resemble or fail
to resemble each other, any perceiver with ordinary vision will be acquainted with these properties,
and able therefore to update their worldly knowledge associated with linguistic terms by reference to
them. Moreover, it is easy to see how it could be common knowledge among us that people do know
what these properties are. So in inviting a comparison from an audience one may reasonably expect
them to extract the information that such and such an object is similar to one with such and such
visually basic properties.
The basic elements of the role that looks need to play in order to make true our statements
about the way objects look can be satisfied through this Parsimonious account. But does it really
address all that we need the notion of look to do? In the next section, I turn to a challenge from the
epistemic role it occupies, and in the following one to the question of conflicting appearances.
8. With the bare details of Parsimony outlined we can now return to the most pressing problem: How
should we understand correct uses of (19) where the object in question is not itself bent? As made
clear earlier, the problem is not the most direct one of seeing how (19) can be true, if the relevant way
of looking characteristic of bent things is being bent, but the stick is not bent. The form of (19) taken
as comparative already allows for the possibility of this being true in as much as the sentence is used
to describe a resemblance between some way the object is and that characteristic. So the truth
conditions of (19) don’t require that the subject be the way that it is compared with, whatever our
preferred account of looks themselves. The problem is rather one of understanding what the relevant
gloss on (19) should be in this case: someone who utters (19) truly commits to there being a relevant
similarity between the stick’s way of looking and that look characteristic of bent things, namely
(according to Parsimony) being bent. But if the stick isn’t bent in what way is it relevantly similar to
something bent?
In addition, while the unavailable answer, being bent, would supply an obvious unity across
cases in which (19) can be truly asserted to indicate what they all have in common, it is not clear what
38
else need hold in common across the various situations to hand. (19) may be true when the stick is
partly immersed in water, or otherwise viewable in part through a refractive medium; but it may also
be appropriate when the lighting or shadows cast across the stick are strange; or where a surrounding
visual context distorts the appearance; or where the viewer suffers a severe astigmatism; or where he
or she has suffered an unfortunate brain lesion.
Finally, we should note those aspects of appearance talk which indicates a subjectivity, as we
noted in the introduction. Someone who asserts,
(20) The stick is bent
is open to challenge about the evidence they have for the claim as well as its correctness. The
assertion is a possible point of agreement or disagreement across interlocutors in a conversational
context. But speakers who report on their current psychological states are typically granted a certain
authority on the matter: normally their interlocutors are not taken to be in a position to disagree; and
any challenge from an interlocutor about the grounds for such a claim seems inappropriate. One might
point out that in at least some circumstances, an utterance of (19) behaves more like a psychological
self-report than a description of the shape of the stick. A speaker can retreat from potential challenge
in saying ‘the stick is bent’ to a more secure position by uttering (19) instead; and when they so
retreat, it is inappropriate normally to challenge the claim or the grounds of the claim. So, one may
suppose, that shows that (19) at least on a common interpretation comes to report the speaker’s
psychological state and is a subjective report, a report of the speaker’s perspective, and not a claim
about any object in the environment.
One way of putting these elements together is just to assume that the unity in question across
the various circumstances is one which lies in the viewer or viewers that are liable to assert (19).
Some psychological state, most saliently a visual experience, is what marks out the various
circumstances as relevantly similar and appropriate to be reported on by (19). In turn, if we
understand (19) as somehow reporting a psychological fact, then it should be no surprise that our
attitude to such an assertion is parallel with avowals of many other psychological states, such as first
person reports of belief, sensation, or desire.
But if we seek to explain the subjectivity by taking such uses of (19) to be a report of the
speaker’s psychological state, then we face a problem with certain other aspects of our talk about the
ways in which things look. First, it looks as if sentences like (19) can be true of certain circumstances
in which no relevant psychological states occur. For example, it is not obviously incorrect to claim
that the stick would have looked bent even if no one had been around to see it. And one might add as
a rider on an utterance of (19), ‘And that would still have been true had none of us been here’.
Contrast this with the oddity of claiming that there would still have been a pain had no one been
around to feel it, or of adding the above rider to someone’s complaint that they have a headache.
And the pattern of subjectivity in our talk of appearance is more complex than the simple
psychological report model would predict. It should be granted that utterances of (19) can introduce
the possibility of doubt or denial and hence reduce the speaker’s assertoric commitments in a
conversational context. But that doesn’t in itself immediately show that in making such a move one
must simply be moving to a subjective statement or psychological report. For, first, one may well
enquire of an interlocutor how something looks, and here be interested in, and partly informed by
their answer: judgements about the looks of things can be inter-subjective, and a speaker may be
concerned to come to convergence with others in their judgements. In addition, just as the move to
39
(19) may indicate a reduced assertoric commitment and a certain immunity to challenge, so too can a
move from (19) to:
(21) The stick looks bent to me
For example, one asserts (19) and then an interlocutor questions: ‘Are you sure? I think it looks
entirely straight.’ One might not quite give way on (19), but simply retreat to uttering (21). One can
well understand (21) acting as a stopping off point for further challenge. It is difficult to see how (21)
could be used to do this, if we suppose both that (21) is explicitly a report on one’s psychological
state, and that (19) in effect does the same, for then no further move would have been made in uttering
(21). And that suggests that rather than thinking in terms of a simple duality between either objective
reports which are open to third party challenge and subjective reports which are entirely immune, we
need rather to make sense of how there can be a kind of continuum, with different kinds of stopping
off point: an objective assertion like (20) at one end and a purely subjective report like (21) at the
opposite end, with different uses of (19) in between allowing for a variable claim to objectivity or
retreat to subjectivity.
A preferable approach here would be one which could both accommodate the idea that there
is some subjectivity in our appearance talk, that it reflects something about our psychological states,
or the perspective from which one makes an appearance judgement, and that allows that in making
such judgements we may be committing ourselves more or less with respect to the way the objects we
are talking about are. We can progress on this, I suggest, by filling in a bit more the details on how
(19) and (21) may differ, while on occasion having a very similar conversational role.
9. On those approaches to looks statements which take as basic the idea of reporting a psychological
state, one may suppose that the difference between (21) and (19) is simply that the modifier ‘to S’ in
(21) makes explicit an argument place which is present at least in our semantic understanding of the
appearance verbs. For some this is understood as making explicit what is already present unvoiced in
syntax. But one might think it present in what is said without necessarily being marked beyond our
semantic knowledge. Compare here what one should say of the adjectives ‘charming’ and ‘generous’.
The sentence, ‘Alfred was charming’ seems to offer a complete proposition without having to suppose
that implicitly we are indicating to whom Alfred was charming, or that he was charming to everyone;
nonetheless ‘Alfred was charming to Mary’ equally makes sense, without us having to suppose a
difference in sense in the adjective. On the other hand while ‘Gerald was generous’ is syntactically
complete, we may note that ‘Gerald was generous to Robyn’ makes explicit something in our
understanding even of the former sentence, that someone cannot manifest the disposition of
generosity without thereby being generous to some individuals or other.
On the approach we took in Part One, we sketched ways of understanding looks statements
without making any appeal to such an argument position. And given the metaphysics of Parsimony, it
is difficult to see how that which makes true objects having the looks they do should involve a
relation to some individual or some psychological state of that individual. If the ways of looking
objects have just are their basic visible properties, then it is not obvious how they possess these in the
basic case in relation to particular individuals, as in the case of generosity, nor yet how in some cases
they can simply be an aspect of the individual, and in other cases be directed towards an individual, as
in the case of being charming.
40
The alternative would be to suppose that ‘to S’ introduces additional semantic material into
the sentence to which it is added; that it modifies the sense of the sentence or some part of it. Just as
the question arose how any use of (19) could be true without (21) being true, so the question arises
how any use of (19) can simply seem to do the same work as a use of (21), if (21) has additional
material. So, if we are to suppose ‘to S’ introduces a modification, then we had suppose that what it
does is somehow introduce or make explicit some subjective or psychological aspect in making an
appearance statement. The minimal such sketch we could give of this, I suggest, is by looking to the
materials out of which one might build a conceptual role.
First, where (21) is used as an occasional sentence, (i.e. where its use is not equivalent to ‘The
stick usually/normally/always looks bent to me’ but ‘The stick now looks bent to me’), we have the
entailment that given a speaker, S:
(22) S sees the stick
On the other hand, there is no simple entailment from (21) to (19), nor (19) to (21), and hence there is
no simple measure on which the one claim is weaker than the other. At the same time there do seem to
be evidential connections between them. First, for any party, if that party determines that a speaker, S,
accepts (19) on characteristic visual evidence then that party also has grounds to accept
(23) The stick looks bent to S
And where a subject accepts on experiential basis (21) then they have defeasible evidence in favour of
(19). These two last elements play off against each other. While in some conversational contexts, the
shift from (19) to (21) can express a retreat on the part of an interlocutor, avoiding possible challenge
to what they claim, in other contexts, proffering (21) can be put forward in support of (19). Moreover,
this aspect of the behaviour of ‘to me’ is reflected in some other locutions not concerning appearances
as such, but relating to matters which involve a potential element of subjectivity. So for example we
not only have
(24) The statue is beautiful
But also
(25) The statue is beautiful to me
And, one might both utter (25) as a retreat in the face of someone’s withering scorn of one’s taste, and
alternatively as evidential support to someone in favour of accepting (24).
We want to fill out the account which respects these roles and the intuition that the judgement
both reports on the stick and some way it is while also reporting in some way how things subjectively
are with someone who sees the stick. There is some way the stick is, it has a way of looking, but this
is also to someone, and that involves the person seeing the stick. But what more can be said about the
subjective side of this report? As we noted in Part One, ways of looking are often specified indirectly
through making a comparative claim: that the way an object looks is relevantly similar to some other
condition. If we apply the same idea here then we might suppose that the subjective aspect in (23) is
carried by making a comparison between how the look is to S with how looks are paradigmatically to
perceivers.
That is to say, in Part One, we hypothesised that mundane comparative claims are often
informative through exploiting worldly knowledge of the audience of the paradigm features
41
associated with the comparisans; associated with various adjectives F we are to suppose that speakers
commonly associate certain looks as paradigmatic of Fs. The extension required for the current
proposal is that we add to our stock of worldly knowledge information about psychological states
associated with Fs. That is, just as we suggested that in your database of worldly knowledge about Fs
you have an entry for looks that Fs have, so too you can have an entry for the psychological state, the
visual experience, associated with paradigmatic cases of seeing an F. Most typically, for those things
that we suppose to be visible and have distinctive looks, we may assume that someone suitably placed
can simply recognize that an F is there when they see one. So, one element of the characteristic
psychological response to a paradigm F would simply be a disposition to judge that an F is there.
When you are invited to consider what it is for one to see some aspect of the world, the invitation can
invite imagining from the inside that point of view, or may require one simply to note the kind of
impact such seeing may have on the subject and the world. We might then want to consider that there
is a first-person entry, recording what it is for one as perceiver to see an F, and a third person entry,
what consequences there are notable for others when one sees an F.
With such information to hand, it would be possible to convey information about someone’s
psychological state in uttering (23) by indicating that the psychological state which is that of how the
stick looks to S is relevantly similar to that psychological state paradigmatically associated with how
bent things look to one. This is to say, we are to take ‘to S’ as modifying the adjectival complement of
‘looks’ and that it operates to shift our interpretation of the manner in which the way of looking is
specified. On the assumption that this (as with epistemic and comparative uses) is a form of
comparative specification, we can understand the subjectivity present in (23) as indicating a similarity
between the way of looking with respect to its psychological impact on S with the impact that bent
things have on one with respect to their look. I.e. in terms of the forms we introduced before:
(23*) s (Has (the stick, s)  (Look(s)  SIM(C(To (C(Bent, Look, k)), one), To (s, S)))
That is the look of the stick to S, how it bears on S, is claimed to be relevantly similar to that
characteristic psychological state associated with the look for bent things. If it is common knowledge
among us that looks psychologically impact on individuals through being seen, and the only relevant
way a look of an object could have a similar psychological impact on an individual is being seen, then
we will have the consequence of semantic entailment that in this case the stick is seen. But this will be
the case only given that we take synaesthesia to be non-paradigmatic.
Viewing matters this way allows that ‘to S’ has a common contribution to make across
different sense verbs: we extract for each the relevant perception verb consequence given our more
general knowledge about the appearances. The cost of the proposal, however, is that it must be
assumed that it is not epistemically possible that for example a way of looking of an object might
have the psychological impact on S through being smelled which was relevantly similar to how it
would look to a generic perceiver; or that the seeing of its look in S should be relevantly similar to
how that quality is heard in a generic perceiver. One might question whether we really have the
grounds for supposing these options ruled out just by our background presuppositions. Since it seems
clear that we do have the entailment to S’s seeing, and that in as much as the claim is comparative, we
are concerned with how S’s seeing is like other people’s seeing, one may instead suggest that the
modifier ‘to S’ when attached to ‘looks’ introduces reference to seeing, and when attached to ‘smells’
reference to the sense of smelling and so on.
Although it’s common to interpret sentences such as (23) as reporting on our psychological
states, little has been done to explain how such statements equally report on ways that objects seen
42
are, namely that those very objects look some way to us. Allowing that ‘to S’ makes explicit a
comparison between how the look of an object bears psychologically on S with how paradigmatically
it bears on us indicates how we can treat the sentence as it superficially appears to be talking about a
relation between the object and a perceiver.
10. Return now to the case of (19), the use of a sentence which lacks any explicit modifier. What now
are we to make of uses of this sentence which indicate some subjectivity and seem close in impact to a
use of (21)? The answer, I suggest, is for us to note a potential for subjectivity in the act of
comparison and in judging things to be similar. Commonly in comparing things and judging them to
be similar we respond to how they strike us as alike, or how we find them to be similar. In his
discussion of recognition-based concepts, Gareth Evans goes as far as to suggest that:
...the relation ‘looks like’ [is] what we might call a secondary relation – on analogy with the secondary
qualities of traditional philosophy, which hold of objects in virtue of the effects they have upon human
beings. According to this view, something will be objectively look like something else if it strikes
people as like that other thing; or, rather more usefully, b is objectively more like a than c is if an only
if b strikes people as more like a than c does. (Evans, p.292.)
Evans emphasises that the basis of finding things similar, or being struck by their similarity is not
itself a judgement, not in itself necessarily being open to evaluation as true or false. In general when
we make a comparative claim the objects being compared are not strictly qualitatively identical. Even
when we restrict ourselves to some relevant aspect of the object for comparison, still we need not
have strict community of properties. What is required is that as far as speaker and audience are
concerned there is a relevant measure of similarity in terms of which the two would strike one as
similar. That clearly seems to be relevant to our original example (1). The pregnant man does not have
to have a belly shape that absolutely matches the shape of a paradigm women on the second trimester,
if indeed there is any such determinate shape. Rather it has to be a shape that evokes the recognitional
response that one has to pregnant women, one has to find it similar.
We might now suggest that typically with appearance statements with a comparative element
we are inviting the audience to make a comparison based on the relevant sense associated with the
appearance verb. When one talks of the look of an object inviting a comparison by the audience, one
indicates that one finds the objects similar given one’s visual experience, and invites the audience to
do so too. I suggest that we understand the connection between (19) and (21) in terms of this idea of
finding things similar, and correspondingly in their being a similarity not only among the objects
perceived but among states of perceiving them.
Take some circumstance in which it is appropriate for me to utter (21) (say we are looking at
a stick partially immersed in water). Given the suggested treatment above, in uttering (21) I am at
least putting forward the opinion that as things are for me subjectively, it is very similar to how it is
for one when confronting characteristic bent things. A circumstance in which one did confront a bent
stick in good lighting, a paradigmatic circumstance for encountering the shape of being bent, one
would be inclined to recognise the object as being bent, it would strike one as similar to bent things,
one would find in it an obvious similarity with bent things, and a contrast with other shapes. If the
psychological situation one is in when one truly utters (21) is relevantly similar to this kind of
circumstance, then one may suppose here too one is inclined to find the shape before one as similar to
the paradigm of bent things, as more like being bent than anything else.
43
But now, if that is true, we have a simple answer to what could be in common between the
way stick is and the way bent things are: it is similar with respect to how it strikes me, or the
subjective bearing it has on me. So, we can imagine that (19) could be uttered as a way of expressing
how I find things similar, rather than directly reporting on ways that they are. This would both be a
description of the object, singling out some respect it has, and yet implicating some response on my
part. It is expressive of my psychological state since the relevant metric of similarity here is one of
how, in inspecting the object, one finds it similar to other things.
Now, if you are in much the same situation as me, that is you too are looking at the stick
partly immersed in the water, then how it strikes me is likely to be how it strikes you, and there can be
common knowledge of this, if we both happen to have knowledge of how sticks strike on in these
kinds of circumstances. As matters stand, on such an occasion, in uttering (19), I can invite you to
make the comparison in question, i.e. one that is accessible to one when in the psychological state we
have in common (that is, a psychological state relevantly similar to that one is in when the
characteristic impact of the look of bent things impacts on one). Given the possibility of agreement
here, there also seems the possibility of correction and hence disagreement. So in trading on some of
the psychological facts of the situation I can put forward a claim which is a matter of inter-subjective
accord.
Of course, if the relevant comparison to be made requires that one’s audience be suitably
psychologically similar than they are liable to find the object similar in the relevant respect, then as
speaker I may fail to express a comparison which you can directly comprehend and evaluate.
Consider a situation in which, due to the sudden onset of severe astigmatism, I see many straight
sticks as bent. In this case, no one else is liable to be in the position to verify the similarity which I
find between the stick before me and other things that I could encounter. You cannot both evaluate
similarities and differences among the visible properties of the stick and rely on how visually it strikes
you as similar or different to objects if you are to track the relevant metric of similarity that I now
employ. For the measure I now employ trades on something idiosyncratic about me. In such
circumstances there is no claim I make which you can make in quite the same way. Saying this might
suggest that what I say is literally incomprehensible to others, that since they lack my idiosyncratic
psychological state they cannot understand precisely what I say. But that is not quite the case. In
treating my statement as sincere, they can infer from that that I am in a psychological state relative to
which I find the stick similar to a bent thing, and hence that the psychological state is relevantly
similar to one that one would be in were one confronting something bent. That is, they perfectly well
understand that taking S to pick me out, (23) is true. The audience need have no difficulty in
imagining themselves into my position and so seeing how (19) would then be correct exploiting the
metric of how I find things to be.
The proposal here is that the subjectivity in (19) arises from a potential subjectivity in inviting
a comparison: one indicates to the audience that one is to consider how one finds the object similar to
the comparisans on the basis of how it strikes one visually. And it is this subjectivity, which is the
basis of explaining the near equivalence in uses between (19) and (21). Yet not all appearance
statements are comparative. We have argued that among non-evidential uses, epistemic and
comparative uses have a comparative element. But we also saw reason to admit phenomenal uses,
certainly for appearance verbs for senses other than sight, but arguably even for ‘looks’. So the
account here of the parallels between (19) and (21) will not carry over to these cases.
Is any use of (18) equivalent to
44
(26) The spread looks splendid to me?
The position taken here does not have to legislate on this matter. There is no reason to suppose that all
subjectivity in our talk has a common form or explanation. In relation to judgements of taste, an
utterance of (25) does not seem to indicate the presence of a distinctive psychological state of the
speaker, yet does implicate some kind of subjectivity or relativity. Here too, one might imagine that
evaluation of looks as splendid or not may evoke some measure of splendidness that is idiosyncratic
to the speaker, in such cases (26) makes explicit what may be implicit in putting forward (18) in the
first place.
And these are different from examples such as (14) and (15). I suggest that the explicitly
modified forms of these ‘The wine tastes sweet to me’, and ‘The man smells rank to me’ should be
treated the same as I have the modification of most looks statements: these report on one’s
psychological state and indicate its similarity to that in which one tastes something sweet or smells
something rank. On the other hand, if there is a subjectivity about (14) and (15) then there is equally
about the simple predications of taste and smell, and (14) and (15) cannot indicate any retreat from
them. In these cases, therefore, any equivalence between (14) and (15) and the modified forms
(something about which I remain agnostic) will derive just from the subjectivity of the qualities
ascribed in the first place: that one’s being in the relevant psychological state is sufficient for the
object to have the smell or taste in the first place.29
Subjectivity in a looks statement will arise on an occasion when a speaker is in a position to
exploit his or her perceptual state as the basis of finding the object seen similar in look to the relevant
comparison. Just as a speaker can convey information through a purely subjective use of a looks
statement through indicating something about his or her psychological state, so too we can talk about
these situations generically, implicating the psychological states that one would have in those
circumstances. That is, we can evaluate the claim ‘When half-immersed, the stick looks bent’ as a
generic claim which indicates that for someone viewing the stick under those conditions, a relevant
comparison groups the way the stick looks with bent things. And we can grasp that there is such a
relevant metric of comparison because we know how the stick would look to one in such
circumstances. We exploit our own knowledge of what it would be like to see the stick (imagining the
point of view from the inside).
On the model offered here, where the comparison occurs within the scope of a relevant metric
of similarity, the subjectivity does not reside in any quality attributed to the object, but rather in the
measure we employ of similarity. In this way, there is no requirement that, in a possible situation we
consider in which objects are considered which look bent there should be anyone in that situation who
sees them as bent.30
2929
The subjectivity of judgements of personal taste has recently been taken as a battleground for debates among
relativists and absolutists: cf. (Kölbel, 2002), (Lasersohn, 2005), and (MacFarlane, 2007) for defence of the
relativist position; and (Glanzberg, 2007) and (Cappelen and Hawthorne, 2009) for absolutist ripostes. The idea
here of a perspective from which one finds things similar can be accommodated by both sides: for the absolutist
we can think of it as a parameter within the judgement, the metric of similarity, as I have presented in the text;
but a relativist could as easily suggest it provides us a point of assessment, and suggest that typically we
evaluate appearance propositions employing a point of assessment relative to the psychological state of a
speaker or of a location within the relevant scene.
30
Compare here (Fara 2000, 2006) on the use of interest-relative standards in understanding the vagueness of
gradable adjectives.
45
11. How does Parsimony compare with other approaches to looks? The problem of conflicting
appearances has driven philosophical discussion since the earliest Greek discussions of the nature of
the world. In some variants of the problem we are to focus on the variation in appearance from
perceiver to perceiver: something sweet to me, is bitter to you; something hot to one hand is cold to
the other. Is the subject here (or some part of the subject) the relevant measure of reality? If so, should
we think of the truth of judgements of sensible qualities only true relative to the subject, or as
speaking of some limited element of reality accessible only to that subject (and hence with that
subject as authoritative about it). Should we think of the sensible world as one of a world of flux? Or
should we think of the empirical world as one to which we have only limited sensible access,
conveyed to us by a pattern of varying ideas, under which a constant and shared reality lies?31
Our problem is not with sensible judgements per se, the judgements about qualities of objects,
as for the appearance judgements, of how things look, smell or taste which are closely related to these
sensible judgements. And, the keenest problem, I propose relates not so much to variation in
appearance judgement from viewer to viewer, as seeming change in appearance. Consider a very
simple example. We hold the stick up in good light and all inspect it. In this circumstance, OPEN AIR,
the following seems an appropriate thing to say:
(27) The stick does not look bent
And, correspondingly, (19) does not seem correct to assert in this circumstance, and would most
naturally be heard to be contradicting (27). Suppose now that we together place the stick half in a
bowl of tap water and admiringly regard the optical results. In this context, HALF WATER (19) seems
entirely appropriate to assert and (27) seems the wrong thing to say. And conversely:
(28) The stick looks straight
is assertible in OPEN AIR and not assertible in HALF WATER and
(29) The stick does not look straight
is not assertible in OPEN AIR, seemingly contradicting (28) and is assertible in HALF WATER.
This pattern supports the simple thought that the appearance of the stick changes between
OPEN AIR and HALF WATER. Now across the two occasions, the stick does not change in any of its
intrinsic properties; it does stand in some different relations to surrounding medium and viewers; and
there are changes in the perceivers, notably certainly psychological changes in how things look to
them. In the example we have chosen there are relational changes within the stick’s environment
which match the psychological changes and which themselves may potentially be perceptible, but
there are variations on the example which need involve no other relevant alteration but a
psychological one in the interlocutors and in which the same pattern can be exemplified: for example,
suppose that I wish to illustrate the effects of a TMS device connected to certain areas of early visual
processing in both speaker and audience, OPEN AIR corresponds to the machine being off, HALF
WATER to its being on.
On the one hand, the stick need have shifted not at all in its intrinsic properties nor (in the
second example) any of its salient relations to elements in its environment between the two contexts;
on the other we are inclined to say that there is a change in the appearance of the stick between the
two contexts. Either, then, we distinguish between the appearance of the object and any properties it
31
For a classic discussion of these matters see (Burnyeat, 1979).
46
has, intrinsic or relational, and accept that a change in appearance need not be a change in the thing
itself, or we resist the intuition that the appearance has changed, although what we can say of the
appearance changes, and we continue to hold that appearances are among the ways of being that
ordinary objects have.
Treating looks statements as principally reports of our psychological states would seem to
accord well with the pattern described above: for the shift in psychological state tracks the shift in
speaker’s and audience’s psychological states. If the statements are at least in part concerned with
these psychological states that we can understand how what is reported is a change even while there is
no change in the stick itself. On the other hand, the simple approach makes it difficult to see how
looks statements can be true when there is no suitable viewer around to take the object in. But it is
plausible that (28) is true whether or not anyone is there to see the stick, and when immersed in water
(19) is true. A phenomenalist approach to looks statements can handle this by drawing on the contrast
between an occasional use of a looks statement and a generic one. But now it is unclear why we don’t
just face the problem for generic statements of the sort we have just spelled out.
Let’s leave these concerns aside for a moment and spell out the position for Parsimony.
According to Parsimony, the ways of looking that the stick has just are among its basic visible
properties, most saliently its length and shape, and potentially its surface colour. These simply do not
change when it is placed half in the water (or when the TMS machine is turned on). So whatever ways
of looking the stick had in OPEN AIR it continues to have those ways of looking in HALF WATER
and vice versa.
Of course, the way in which looks statements ascribe ways of looking to objects, as we have
spelled out above, is by making comparisons between those ways of looking and some paradigm. But
now, if by some relevant metric the way of looking the stick has when considered in HALF WATER is
similar to that paradigmatic of bent things, then it is likewise still similar in that manner in OPEN
AIR. That is to say that whatever is said by (19) in HALF WATER is, according to Parsimony, true in
OPEN AIR, even if (19) cannot itself be appropriately uttered in that context and (27) as uttered in that
context, since it is true, cannot be taken to be contradicting that. Conversely (28) as uttered in OPEN
AIR says something true with respect to HALF WATER even if the sentence cannot be correctly
asserted in that context, and hence what (29) says in HALF WATER, given that it is true, cannot
contradict that proposition.
If we endorse Parsimony, then we must reject the claim that the stick has changed in
appearance. On the other hand, we should not reject the claim that
(27) is appropriate to assert
in OPEN AIR and (19) is not. The above discussion makes a further point clear: the defender of
Parsimony cannot explain this through denying that what (19) can be used to say in context HALF
WATER is true in OPEN AIR. What else is there? In the last section, I suggested that the subjectivity
of some looks statements reflects what we might call the perspective of comparison the speaker
adopts: in verifying the claim an audience is either invited to find the similarity through exploiting the
same (kind of) visual experience as the speaker. In this way, we can see looks statements in such
circumstances as being expressive of a speaker’s psychological state, without explicitly being about
that state or reporting on a relation between it and the object to which a look is ascribed. And on this
view, (19) will be unassertible in OPEN AIR because the truth that it can express about that situation
is inexpressible in this context. Neither speaker nor hearer in OPEN AIR enjoy a visual experience of
the stick which relative to which they would find the stick similar to a bent thing. Correspondingly,
(27) does not deny what (19) says in HALF WATER because (19) in that context appeals to a
perspective of comparison which (27) does not appeal to. Either (27) as asserted in OPEN AIR invites
47
the comparison relative to the visual experiences therein enjoyed, or some measure of similarity not
specifically tied to what experience one has; and relative to that metric the look of the stick does fail
to be similar to the look for paradigmatic bent things. Equally, I suggest, we are inclined to hear (28)
as incorrect in HALF WATER and (29) correct, because we interpret them as inviting the perspective
of comparison to be that of the visual experiences enjoyed in that context: and in those circumstances
one does not find the stick similar to a paradigmatic straight object.
12. I have sketched over the last few pages an account of looks statements, and a corresponding
account of the nature of looks on which we can both explain how interlocutors can both have and
convey a large amount of information about the looks of objects. We have also accommodated the
fact that many looks statements seem explicitly to report on our visual experiences, and that others
exhibit in their use subjectivity. Nonetheless, the semantics we have offered for these statements is
minimal in at least the sense that it commits us hardly at all as to the underlying nature of sense
experience: the principal forms that we have for talking about both appearances and sensory states are
ones which indicate that things are more or less similar to each other. Likewise, in taking looks
statement to attribute properties to objects we have seen that there is no reason from the semantics
alone to attribute to objects more than the basic visible properties that we were committed to positing
anyway. Parsimony is adequate to the job of finding witnesses to the truth of the variety of claims we
make about how things appear.
The point of the account here sketched is not to offer grounds for preferring one theory of
sensory experience over another. The minimal semantics we have offered is quite consistent with a
representational or intentional theory of sense experience and with a sense-datum approach; nor has
anything been said which need compromise naive realism. The aim here has not been to favour one
such account over any other, but rather to indicate reasons for why we should not look for evidence in
favour of one of the views over the any of the others in the ways in which we talk of appearances.
Without a demonstration that a proper dress version of this approach cannot provide an adequate
semantics for English looks talk, one should remain sceptical that we can draw any substantial
conclusions about the nature of perceptual states just from observations about what we say in certain
circumstances. Settling those larger questions in the theory of perception requires that we draw on
considerations from outside the concerns of how we manage to talk to each other about how things
look, or how those looks bear on us.
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