A Brief Note on How Phenomenal Objects Relate to Objects Themselves

Highlights

“…there is just one material cat out there in the world—the “noumenal” cat which exists whether the subject perceives it or not. When the subject or the external observer looks at the noumenal cat, it is a phenomenal cat that they see. So we have a cat itself (the noumenal cat) whose existence and nature is observer-independent, and a seen (phenomenal) cat that represents the noumenal cat, whose existence and nature is observer-dependent. In everyday life we usually think of the cat we see as a “physical cat” and, for the purposes of everyday life, we usually treat it as being the cat itself rather than a representation of the cat itself. But this does not double the number of actual cats, not does it ‘smear’ any additional phenomenal cats all over the noumenal cat. Rather, the one, noumenal cat has as many numerically distinct appearances as there are views of it by individual observers.” (Velmans, 2008, p41)
“... strictly speaking ...it is always the cat itself that one is looking at although it is a phenomenal cat that one sees, which makes the phenomenal cat the observation and the cat itself the observed. In everyday life we blur these distinctions for the reason that we habitually treat phenomenal objects to be the observed objects for the reason that this is how those objects appear to us. I will return to some of these distinctions below, when they become important to the issues under discussion—and I have unravelled them in depth in Velmans (2000) chapters 6, 7, and 8.” (Ibid, p10, note 7)

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Noumenal Vs Phenomenal Objects

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