The "Transparency" of Experience

Matthew Kennedy
Notre Dame

Many philosophers have argued that visual experience is "transparent" or "diaphausnous" in the following sense: when we try to become aware of our experiences, the only things available for inspection are the objects of experience (the things that experience makes us aware of); aspects of our experiences are not to be found. In my talk I will review some central statements of the transparency thesis, and suggest that while the experiential phenomenon is genuine, its nature and implications have been misunderstood. Properly understood, transparency provides phenomenological support for naive realism.

Possible background reading: the first two sections of M.G.F. Martin, "The Transparency of Experience," Mind and Language 17: 376-425 (2002), available online at the "Background Readind" page of Martin's homepage, http://www.homepages.ucl.ac.uk/~uctymfm/