In visual experience, the way things look is dependent on where you are looking at them from. (A plate, for example, will appear differently depending on whether you are viewing it straight on or at an angle.) But how should we account for this incontestable fact? Many philosophers have held that part of the explanation lies in the fact that in vision, we are always aware of perspectival properties, though we are not necessarily always attending to them. That is, these philosophers hold that in addition to your awareness of the ordinary objective features of things, such as the circular shape of the plate, your visual experience always contains features corresponding to the shapes cast by those objects in your visual field, such as a tilted plate’s elliptical profile.
There are lots of disagreements over the details of this position, but I hope that the above will suffice for now. My evaluation of the question will wait for a further post. Right now, what I want is just to conduct a Very Unscientific investigation of popular the position at issue presently is. Will you help me out, by answering the question below and telling me a bit about yourself?