2020 - Gow - A New Theory of Absence Experience

Received: 14 March 2020 Revised: 18 May 2020 Accepted: 6 July 2020
DOI: 10.1111/ejop.12577
ORIGINAL ARTICLE
A new theory of absence experience
Laura Gow
Department of Philosophy, University of

Liverpool, Liverpool, UK
Abstract
Ordering your morning coffee and then realising that your
Correspondence
wallet is missing from your bag triggers an experience of the
Laura Gow, Department of Philosophy,
University of Liverpool, Mulberry Court, absence of your wallet. Familiar cases like this one provide
Liverpool L69 3BX, UK. good evidence for the idea that we frequently experience
Email: l.gow@liverpool.ac.uk
absences. According to one popular view, we experience
absences by perceiving them. I argue that there are a number
of problems with the perceptual view, and propose an alter-
native, cognitive account. Now, a cognitive account of
absence experience has already been widely discussed and
unequivocally rejected by participants in the debate. How-
ever, arguments against it depend upon the important, yet
mistaken assumption that cognitive accounts must appeal to
beliefs or judgements. I argue that the phenomenology
involved in absence experience is not that associated with
belief or judgement, but is instead an intellectual seeming.
This renders my account immune to the objections that have
been made against the existing cognitive view.
1 | I N T RO DU CT I O N
You've been working on your laptop in the cafe for a few hours and have decided to take a break.
You step outside, leaving your laptop temporarily unattended on the table. After a few minutes, you
walk back inside. Your eyes fall upon the table. The laptop is gone! (Farennikova, 2013, p. 430).
Anya Farennikova claims that in the situation she describes one will visually perceive the absence of one's laptop.
She provides other examples of cases where (allegedly) we perceive absences in the visual modality: discovering that
there is no milk in the fridge, noticing that one's colleague is not present at a meeting, and searching for (and failing
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GOW 169
to find) one's keys in the drawer. She also gives examples from other modalities: smelling the absence of exhaust in
the air, tasting the absence of chlorine in water, or the sensation of missing a step while going down the stairs.
(Farennikova, 2013) (For other olfactory examples see Roberts, 2016, and for other tactual examples see Cavedon-
Taylor, 2016.) Sorensen (2008) and Phillips (2013) provide auditory examples, and argue that we can hear silence.1
I agree that we can experience absences—the examples we find in the literature are extremely compelling. How-
ever, I do want to take issue with the idea that we can perceive absences. I will argue that absence experience is best
understood as consisting in a type of cognitive experience. Many philosophers now subscribe to the idea of cognitive
experience (which includes thought experience, understanding experience and so forth), in addition to sensory expe-
rience. (Horgan & Tienson, 2002; Jorba, 2016; Kriegel, 2011; Montague, 2016, 2017; Pitt, 2004; Siewert, 1998;
Strawson, 1994) They have already made a persuasive case for the reality of cognitive phenomenology, and it is not
my primary aim to add to this general debate over its existence. My primary aim is to point to a certain kind of cogni-
tive experience which I will argue best explains our absence experiences. Those who are sceptical about the very
existence of cognitive phenomenology are unlikely to be sympathetic to my account initially, but I hope that by
explaining why the alternative accounts of absence experience fail, and by describing the advantages of my view, the
hitherto unpersuaded may look on cognitive phenomenology more favourably.
Now, the idea that absence experience can be explained with reference to cognitive rather than sensory pro-
cesses has already been widely discussed and rejected outright by the participants in the absence experience debate.
However, the arguments against the existing cognitive view depend upon an important, and mistaken, assumption.
The assumption is that cognitive accounts must appeal to beliefs or judgements (and therefore, that the cognitive
phenomenology involved must be phenomenology associated with beliefs or judgements). It is easy to see why this
assumption has been made, for the phenomenology involved in absence experience is belief or judgement-like inso-
far as it involves representing the world as being a certain way. However, I will argue that the cognitive phenomenol-
ogy which explains absence experience is not belief or judgement phenomenology, but an intellectual seeming. This
makes my account immune to the objections that have been made against the existing cognitive view.
I should emphasise here that although intellectual seemings are very familiar within epistemology and have been
called upon to play an important justificatory role in certain theories, my interest in intellectual seemings lies solely in
the phenomenological role I will argue that they play in explaining absence experience. (For more on the use of intellec-
tual seemings within epistemology, see Huemer, 2007, Reiland, 2015, Tucker, 2013) Incidentally, the significant atten-
tion intellectual seemings have received from epistemologists has, it seems to me, somewhat hindered our recognition
of the important phenomenological role they play in our mental lives. In this article, I will be restricting my focus to
absence experience, but in previous work I have argued that intellectual seemings are required to account for other
experiences which have traditionally been considered wholly perceptual. (Gow, 2019) I am also currently developing a
project within the philosophy of action investigating the role intellectual seemings play in our decision making.
The plan for the rest of the article is as follows: in the following section, I will distinguish between two different
ways of understanding the claim that we can perceive absences, describe some current concerns, and provide new
arguments against both disambiguations of the perceptual view. In section three, I will consider and reject the main
alternative to the perceptual view: the metacognitive theory. In section four, I present my own account, describe
how it accommodates the various examples of absence experience discussed in sections one to three, and explain
how it escapes the objections to the existing cognitive view.
2 | THE PERCEPTUAL VIEW
We can distinguish two ways of understanding the view that we perceive absences, although this distinction has not
been recognised explicitly in the literature. According to the first interpretation, the claim that we perceive absences
should be understood as the claim that we can veridically perceive absences. I call this version of the perceptual view
‘the strong perceptual view’ since its proponents are committed to two claims, one concerning the kinds of
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perceptual experience we can have (we can perceptually experience absences), and one concerning the kinds of enti-
ties that exist. For the idea that we can have veridical perceptual experiences of absences demands realism about
absences. The alternative way of understanding the claim that we can perceive absences is as a claim about percep-
tual experience rather than veridical perception. This is a weaker position since the proponent of this view is not
committed to realism about absences. Their claim is just that we can have perceptual experiences as of absences. In
this section, I will argue that both versions of the perceptual view of absence experience are inadequate, but for
rather different reasons.
2.1 | The strong perceptual view
According to the strong perceptual view we can veridically perceive absences. Since we can only veridically perceive
entities if they actually exist, this view requires realism about absences. As the two ways of understanding the claim
that we perceive absences have not been distinguished in the literature, it can be difficult to place the various propo-
nents of the perceptual view into their respective camps. Those involved in the debate have not always made it
explicit whether they understand their claim that we perceive absences to be committing them to realism about
absences, and sometimes their claims are ambiguous between the strong and weak views. For example, Farennikova
is keen to emphasise that her view is that we ‘literally’ see absences (2013, p. 429) and that our absence perceptions
are ‘accurate’ (2013, p. 431), which may seem to commit her to the strong perceptual view. On the other hand, her
account is a representationalist account—she talks in terms of perceptually representing absences (2013, p. 429)—
and this is at least compatible with the weak perceptual view. Towards the end of her 2013 Farennikova considers a
possible objection to her positive account, and her response might help us decide the issue. She says:
Even if [my view] shows that experiences of absence belong to the visual domain, the fact that we
can visually experience absences does not imply that we can actually see them. Unlike ordinary
objects, absences of objects cannot reflect light and so cannot be seen in the way ordinary physical
objects are seen. So, they cannot be literally seen, and it is their capacity to be literally seen that I
wanted to establish. I think that this objection reveals a bias, rather than an argument, against the
possibility of seeing absence. Theories of seeing have been tailored to the perception of material
objects, so it is no surprise that absences fail to satisfy their criteria. But what justifies the assignment
of genuine seeing only to material objects? (2013, p. 451)
This response seems to commit her to the strong perceptual view and realism about absences. In any case, we
can put such exegetical issues aside for present purposes; proponents of the perceptual view must endorse one or
other of the disambiguations I have delineated, and it is for individual theorists to come down on which version they
want to adopt.
Let us turn instead to a consideration of the drawbacks which come from endorsing a view which requires real-
ism about absences. To begin with a very general concern, it would seem that a realist attitude towards ‘negative
entities’ is going to complicate one's ontology. Anyone with physicalist leanings would be wise to avoid a theory
which posits such entities.2 But deep metaphysical questions aside, proponents of the strong perceptual view are
forced to adopt a rather idiosyncratic view of the causal process involved in perception, which many may find
implausible.3 Note, my objection is not that proponents of this view must reject the causal account of perception;
the idea that there is a causal requirement on veridical perceptual experience is very widely accepted, and denying
this would be a serious mark against any theory. Unless there is a causal requirement on veridical perception, we will
not be able to distinguish between veridical perception and veridical hallucination. (A veridical hallucination is an
experience which exactly matches the scene in front of the subject; it is hallucinatory rather than a case of ordinary
veridical experience precisely because it does not have the right kind of causal relationship with the local
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environment.) Those who endorse the strong perceptual view typically accept the need to include the causal require-
ment within their theory. In other words, they claim that absences can be causes, and regard as part of their chal-
lenge the need to explain precisely how absences can be causally relevant to our experiences. (See Lewis, 2004;
Mellor, 1995; Sorensen, 2008)
This is no mean feat, but the problem I want to highlight here (which comes through in the quotation from
Farennikova above) is that an account of absence perception which has absences playing a causal role will have very
little in common with our account of most ordinary veridical perception. Veridical visual perception involves objects
reflecting photons which then interact with the photoreceptors which compose the retina, and veridical auditory
perception involves vibrating objects causing sound waves which enter our ears, and so forth. It hardly needs to be
said, but absences do not, of course, reflect photons, nor do they produce sound waves by vibrating.
It is true that we see dark objects even though they absorb light; they do not reflect photons onto our retinas.4
However, it is the fact that the object absorbs light which accounts for our perception of it. In other words, our per-
ception of dark objects still depends essentially upon the object causally interacting with light, just as with the visual
perception of all other objects. It's just that the visual perception of dark objects only involves a relation between
the object and light rather than with the object, light and our receptors. The situation with absences is entirely differ-
ent: they cannot reflect photons, but neither can they absorb them. Of course, one might simply agree with Far-
ennikova's point that existing theories of perception are biased towards explaining the perception of material
objects. On the other hand, the fact that the causal story for absence perception is going to be so different from the
causal story for regular perception may instead make us hesitant about classifying absence experience as a genuinely
perceptual phenomenon.
There is another, more serious problem with allowing absences to be causes in the perceptual process. Absences are
not physical entities, and so if absences can be causes, then it looks like we have to reject that much lauded principle: the
causal closure of the physical world.5 Some might think that this is a price worth paying; after all, it is true that many of our
common-sense explanations of causal processes seem to appeal to absences (the absence of oxygen in the brain causes
brain death, for example. (Aranyosi, 2009). Those who want to restrict causation to the physical domain must offer alterna-
tive explanations which appeal only to positive entities. Another strategy advanced by Helen Beebee is to make use of
Davidson's distinction between causation and causal explanation (Davidson, 1967). This allows us to preserve our everyday
causal explanations without permitting absences as causes: ‘absences can figure in causal explanation even though they do
not cause anything.’ (Beebee, 2004, p. 293) Arguing that this project can be accomplished successfully is outside the scope
of this article (although see Tang, 2015), so I will limit my claim to the following: anyone who considers the rejection of
physical causal closure to be more serious than the rejection (or re-working) of some of our common-sense explanations
should be in favour of looking for an alternative to the strong perceptual view of absence experience.
One final worry with this view stems from thinking about how perceptual experience has evolved, and whether
absences are the kind of entity to which our perceptual systems could be sensitive.6 Farennikova argues that seeing
absences would be advantageous to our survival, as it is important for us to be ‘reliably and efficiently informed
about what is absent from the world and where it is absent’. (Farennikova, 2013, p. 435) Of course, she is quite right
about this last point. What is more, we can all agree that it is almost always our perceptual experiences which are
responsible for us coming to know what is absent from the world—our not seeing the laptop when we look at the
table is fundamental to our knowing that the laptop is not there. (Not seeing x can occasionally cause an absence
experience, which on my view is to be explained in terms of an intellectual seeming—more on my positive view in
due course.) But, crucially, not seeing x is not the same as seeing x's absence, and the former is sufficient to confer the
adaptive advantage of knowing what is and is not present in our local environment. In other words, not seeing certain
objects enables us to know which objects are not present without entailing or requiring the much stronger view that
we literally see the absence of objects. It is difficult to understand how our perceptual systems could have become
sensitive to absences understood in this strong sense.
The objections I have raised against the strong perceptual view are not conclusive—proponents may simply be will-
ing to take on the challenge of producing an explanation compatible with the theory of evolution by natural selection
172 GOW
of how a perceptual sensitivity to absences has developed. They may also be willing to bite the bullet when it comes to
accepting a non-physicalist ontology, rejecting physical causal closure and endorsing a highly idiosyncratic account of
the causal processes involved in absence perception. However, that's quite a challenge, and a lot of bullets! If we can
develop a theory which allows us to preserve the very intuitive claim that we frequently have absence experiences
without committing us to realism about absences (with all of its concomitant problems), then so much the better.
2.2 | The weak perceptual view
The weak perceptual view may appeal to those who are attracted to the idea that absence experience is fundamentally
a perceptual phenomenon, yet are unwilling to take on the ontological baggage that comes with the strong perceptual
view. The reasons for being sceptical about the strong perceptual view do not apply to this weaker version, since those
reasons stemmed from taking a realist stance towards absences and permitting them a role in the perceptual process.
Proponents of the weak perceptual view need only claim that we can have perceptual experiences as of absences.
Unfortunately, denying realism about absences has its costs as well as its benefits; and it turns out that the costs
are more considerable for a perceptual view of absence experience than for other accounts of absence experience
(such as cognitive views). Let me explain this in more detail. If the proponent of the weak perceptual view is going to
avoid the problems of the strong perceptual view, they must claim that absences do not exist. But perceptual experi-
ences as of entities that do not exist are, of course, non-veridical. Therefore, according to the weak perceptual view
our absence experiences (which are analysed as being perceptual experiences as of absences) are non-veridical.
However, when we consider the examples of absence experience given in the literature, there certainly seems to be
something correct about them. It is true that one's laptop is no longer on the table and that one's keys are not in their
usual drawer. Now, it may seem that any theory which denies realism about absences, thus avoiding the problems
faced by the strong perceptual view, is going to have to deny that our absence experiences ‘get the world right’.
How could absence experience be correct if absences do not exist? In fact, I think that cognitive accounts of absence
experience have a response available to them which is not available to the perceptual theorist. I will explain my own
cognitive account in more detail later on, but let me give a brief indication of the kind of move that is available on a
cognitive view in response to this issue.
If absence experiences are cognitive states of some sort—beliefs on the standard view, and intellectual seemings
on my view—then they have fine-grained content which represents the world and is therefore assessable for truth or
accuracy. Now, if we can explain so-called ‘negative facts’ in terms of ‘positive facts’ then one's absence experiences
can get the world right even though absences do not exist. Of course, there is much controversy over whether nega-
tive facts can be explained in terms of positive facts (see Armstrong, 2004, Molnar, 2000 and Russell, 1919 for dis-
cussion) and it is outside the scope of the present article to enter into this debate. I will therefore restrict my claim
to the following: there seem to be possibilities open to proponents of a cognitive view for having our absence experi-
ences come out as correct, even though absences do not exist. Since these possibilities are not available to the per-
ceptual theorist, cognitive accounts would seem to have an advantage here.
My opponent might wonder whether the weak perceptual view can try to piggy-back on the cognitive theorist's possi-
ble solution to this problem. Proponents of the view could say that even though our absence experiences themselves do
not get the world right (they are non-veridical perceptual experiences after all) our perceptual experiences as of absences
cause beliefs, or other cognitive states which get the world right. However, this certainly diminishes the appeal of the view.
First, it seems to us that our absence experiences themselves get the world right, not just the beliefs we make in response
to our absence experiences. Second, this response on behalf of the weak perceptual view involves true beliefs systemati-
cally resulting from non-veridical perceptual experiences. This is atypical to say the least, and if proponents of the weak per-
ceptual view wished to make a response along these lines, further explanation and defence would be required.
I would like to offer one further reason for being sceptical about the weak perceptual view. While it seems per-
fectly possible for a subject to have an experience (veridical or non-veridical) of red (say) without occurrently
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deploying the concept ‘red’, it is questionable whether it would be possible for a subject to have a perceptual experi-
ence as of an absence without deploying the concept ‘absence’ during her experience. First let me explain why I
think that this is true, and then, why it is significant.
Without delving too deeply into the debate over whether perceptual experience has conceptual and/or noncon-
ceptual content, it is at least intuitive to suppose that one can have perceptual experiences of colours, shapes and
other low-level properties without concepts playing any essential role. And if our experiences of ordinary macro enti-
ties like tables and chairs and trees are, in some sense, composed of experiences of such low-level properties, then
we can have perceptual experiences of these entities (including non-veridical ones) without the essential deployment
of concepts. Indeed, many philosophers are nonconceptualists about perceptual experience. (See Tye, 1995,
Burge, 2010, Crane, 1992.) This cannot be the case for absence experience. Which low-level properties would be
involved in our perceiving an absence? Absences do not seem to have colour properties, for example. Nor do they
seem to have timbre, volume, pitch, motion, sweetness, sourness and so forth.7 This is one reason for thinking that
perceptual experiences as of absences would have to have conceptual content.
Here is another reason: if perceptual experiences as of absences can be entirely nonconceptual, then how can
we distinguish between the perceptual experience we have when we return to our table in the café to discover that
our laptop has disappeared, and the perceptual experience we have when looking at the table on an occasion where
we have not brought our laptop? Without the help of concepts, it is difficult to see how the weak perceptual view
can accommodate the significant phenomenological difference between these two experiences.
Proponents of the weak perceptual view will, it seems to me, have to classify absence experience as a kind of ‘seeing-
as’ experience. We can helpfully distinguish two kinds of seeing-as experience—the first involves categorisation (when we
see a chair as a chair) and the second involves our capacity for recognising and identifying objects (when we see animal
shapes in the clouds, faces on tree trunks or the duck/rabbit as a duck). It is not entirely clear that the second kind of see-
ing-as experience must depend on concepts (see Brewer, 2007; Gauker, 2017; Orlandi, 2011), but it is relatively uncon-
tentious that the first kind, the kind involving categorisation, must. It is also clear that a perceptual experience as of an
absence would need to go into the first category if classifying absence experiences as seeing-as experiences is going to
allow proponents of the weak perceptual view to distinguish the case where we see the empty table top (and have an
absence experience since our laptop is missing) from the case where we see the empty table top but do not have an
absence experience (because we did not bring our laptop). This is because distinguishing the two cases requires cate-
gorising the empty table top in the first case as ‘a table top devoid of one's laptop’.
Now, Michelle Montague has argued that having the experience of seeing a chair as a chair (say) requires more
than just the possession of the concept ‘chair’, one must occurrently deploy the concept in order to have that experi-
ence. Since concepts are part of the cognitive architecture of our minds, Montague claims that if the phenomenal
character of an experience (at least partly) consists in concept deployment, then this experience is (at least partly) a
cognitive experience. (Montague, 2017) If absence experience is a kind of ‘seeing-as’ experience on the weak percep-
tual view, and if Montague is right that ‘seeing-as’ experiences essentially involve cognitive phenomenology, then
absence experience will turn out to be a type of cognitive phenomenology after all. In other words, the weak percep-
tual view collapses into a version of the view I claim we should endorse once we have rejected the perceptual view.
To summarise the argument so far: I have provided reasons for thinking that the perceptual view does not pro-
vide an adequate account of absence experience. The strong version of the view, according to which we can veridi-
cally perceptually experience absences, is committed to realism about absences, and so is forced to choose between
rejecting the idea that causation is essential for the perceptual process, and rejecting the physical causal closure prin-
ciple. Neither of these options are appealing. The weak version of the view (which avoids the problems with the
strong version by claiming that our perceptual experiences are only as of absences) has the counter-intuitive and
undesirable consequence that our absence experiences are always non-veridical. That is, we have perceptual experi-
ences of absences which (according to the weak version of the view) do not exist. This is problematic since our
absence experiences seem, on the contrary, to get the world right. I have also given reasons to suspect that the weak
version of the perceptual view may ultimately collapse into a type of cognitive account.
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3 | THE METACOGNITIVE VIEW
Although the perceptual view is probably the most popular contemporary account of absence experience, there is an
alternative view which must be assessed before I describe my own account. Jean-Rémy Martin and Jérôme Dokic
have developed the metacognitive view, according to which the phenomenology of absence is affective, more specif-
ically, it is the feeling of surprise. (Martin & Dokic, 2013) Although this view avoids the problems discussed above, it
has problems of its own relating to the fact that a feeling of surprise can only occur when our expectations are disap-
pointed. Martin and Dokic's account invites counter-examples, situations where it is plausible to hold that we have
absence experience even though we do not have a feeling of surprise (because we did not have a relevant
expectation).
Farennikova asks us to imagine visiting a desert and being struck by the absence of trees, even though one did
not expect to see trees in the desert. Martin and Dokic acknowledge and address this potential problem with their
account. In short, they persist in their assertion that all genuine absence experiences depend on a violation of expec-
tation at some level, and suggest that one's perceptual system may generate an implicit expectation of seeing trees
in the desert, particularly if one has lived in densely filled environments. (Martin & Dokic, 2013) This response is not
very convincing. Even if one's perceptual system does generate some sort of implicit expectation of seeing trees in a
desert, this is unlikely to manifest itself as a personal-level feeling of surprise. Dan Cavedon-Taylor has come up with
an interesting scenario which perhaps presents more of a challenge:
Dentist: You are at the dental surgery, undergoing a procedure to have a tooth removed. After the
tooth's extraction, and once the anaesthetic wears off, you run your tongue along your teeth and
arrive at the gap where once a tooth was located. The gap is experienced as unnerving, and not
merely on its initial probing… Something once experienced as present within your mouth is now expe-
rienced as lacking. (Cavedon-Taylor, 2016, p. 1)
This seems to be a clear example of an absence experience which does not involve a feeling of surprise. Indeed,
one would be extremely surprised if, after having had a tooth extracted one discovered that the tooth was still there!
I find Cavedon-Taylor's example pretty convincing. However, disputes about whether or not a subject's experi-
ence has a certain kind of phenomenology are hard to adjudicate—perhaps Martin and Dokic will simply insist that
the subject in ‘dentist’ will feel something like surprise. For this reason, I'd like to add a further objection to the meta-
cognitive view. My objection targets the fact that the affective phenomenology posited to account for absence
experience is contentless—it is akin to a raw feel. Absence experiences are therefore non-specific on this framework.
Interestingly, this feature of their view is considered by Martin and Dokic to be a benefit. On the perceptual view,
absence experience involves a phenomenology which is specific to the particular situation—so one perceives the
absence of one's laptop. Part of Martin and Dokic's argument against the perceptual view is that the phenomenology
involved in absence experiences is in fact entirely unspecific. Indeed, not only do they deny that the absence experi-
ence one has in a particular situation is specific to that situation, they deny that there is a kind of phenomenology
absence experiences share in virtue of being absence experiences. Martin and Dokic claim that the phenomenology
involved in absence experience is shared amongst different kinds of experiences: ‘a unified type of phenomenology
is at stake in both absence experience and, for instance, our experience of mere unexpected changes.’ (Martin &
Dokic, 2013, p. 119)
Of course, Martin and Dokic need to account for the fact that there will be phenomenological differences
between, say, the experience of finding that one's laptop is missing and the experience of finding no cookies in the
cookie jar. Since the phenomenology responsible for absence experience is non-specific, this difference cannot be
accounted for in terms of absence experience phenomenology. The likeliest solution is to account for it in terms of
the different perceptual phenomenology involved. So the phenomenological difference between experiencing the
absence of one's laptop in the café and experiencing the absence of cookies in the cookie jar is solely the difference
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between the different perceptual phenomenology involved in the two cases (the first involves perceptual phenome-
nology of a table top, the second involves perceptual phenomenology of the inside of the cookie jar).
This response can only take us so far. It can handle cases where different absence experiences have different
accompanying perceptual phenomenology, but what about situations where the perceptual phenomenology is the
same? Consider, for example, searching for (and failing to find) one's keys in the drawer and searching for (and failing
to find) one's keys and one's wallet in the drawer. The perceptual phenomenology will be exactly the same in both
cases, and one will experience the contentless feeling of surprise in both cases too, and yet we surely want to allow
that these are different experiences. Because Martin and Dokic construe the affective state which is responsible for
absence experience as an affective, contentless state, they do not seem to have the resources to explain the differ-
ence in phenomenology between the two cases I have described.
Perhaps Martin and Dokic will respond to my challenge by appealing to their solution to a different but similar
worry. Although they claim that there is no proprietary ‘absence experience’ phenomenology which all and only
absence experiences share (the feeling of surprise also characterises experiences of unexpected changes), they still
want to be able to differentiate an absence experience from an unexpected change experience. They do this by
appealing to different ways the feeling of surprise can be interpreted; it will be interpreted differently depending on
whether one is surprised by an absence or by an unexpected change. (2013, pp. 122–123). The problem with this
response is not so much that it cannot explain the difference between the experience of failing to find one's keys
and the experience of failing to find one's keys and wallet (perhaps it can), the problem is that we seem to have aban-
doned the idea that absence experiences are to be explained in terms of the feeling of surprise. If we are to take this
new proposal seriously, it turns out that absence experience is not just the feeling of surprise coupled with percep-
tual phenomenology after all, it requires interpretation by a cognitive state. This gives rise to two concerns. First, it
seems that Martin and Dokic's account is in danger of simply collapsing into a cognitive account. Second, the cogni-
tive state Martin and Dokic call on to do this interpretative work is a belief or judgement. As we will see in the fol-
lowing section, there are insurmountable problems with appealing to beliefs or judgements to explain absence
experience. By making essential use of such states, Martin and Dokic's account would fall prey to these problems.
4 | COGNITIVE ACCOUNTS
I have argued that neither the perceptual view nor the metacognitive view are able to explain our absence experi-
ences—we are in need of a new theory. In this section, I will outline my own account, according to which absence
experience is a type of cognitive phenomenology. But before I do, I want to point out an important assumption
which seems to be widely made and which has significantly distorted the debate over absence experience. The
assumption is that cognitive accounts must appeal to beliefs or judgements, and that cognitive phenomenology must
be belief or judgement phenomenology.
4.1 | The cognitive view
Proponents of the accounts discussed so far contrast their theories with ‘the cognitive view’, the view that absence
experience comprises perceptual phenomenology of present entities plus a belief or judgement. The perceptual phe-
nomenology (of the empty table top, say) plus the belief (that one's laptop is no longer there) jointly explain the
absence experience of the subject in the missing laptop case. (See O'Shaughnessy, 2002, p. 330 for an account along
these lines.) Some of the reasons given for rejecting this kind of cognitive view are not particularly convincing: we
experience absences immediately, and it is argued that if a belief was involved then it would have to be inferred from
our perceptual phenomenology, and this would take a certain amount of time. In addition, there does not seem to be
any conscious effort required for having absence experiences, as one might expect if a belief or judgement was
176 GOW
involved. Since it could be argued that there can be immediate beliefs and judgements too—or at least ones which
seem to be immediate and do not require a lengthy inferential process (Evans, 2008), these reasons aren't at all deci-
sive. However, I think that the following reason is decisive: absence experience exhibits resilience to a change of
belief. If you are told that your laptop is still on the table and a magician is playing an elaborate trick with mirrors,
you will still experience the absence of your laptop even though you now believe that your laptop is not absent. A
proponent of the belief/judgement version of the cognitive view must therefore allow that a subject can simulta-
neously (and consciously) believe or judge p and not p.8 (These reasons are described in Farennikova, 2013 and dis-
cussed in Martin & Dokic, 2013.) The fact that these reasons are typically thought to be sufficient for refuting
cognitive accounts demonstrates that the assumption I described earlier has indeed been made. It is only if the cogni-
tive state in question is a belief or judgement that the reasons for rejecting the cognitive view have any application.
4.2 | The intellectual seeming view
I suggest that we reject the assumption that all cognitive phenomenology involves belief or judgement. I propose that
absence experiences are a type of intellectual seeming.9 As I mentioned in the introduction, intellectual seemings (as I am
using the term) are mental events which have phenomenology. They have a belief-like or judgement-like phenomenology,
and the same direction of fit as beliefs and judgements. They are directed at the world, and represent the world as being a
particular way. Consequently, their content can be true or false/accurate or inaccurate depending on whether the world
really is the way it is represented by the intellectual seeming. Some construe intellectual seemings as inclinations to believe
(Sosa, 1998; Swinburne, 2001). However, I am persuaded by arguments given by Michael Huemer against this version of
the view (summarised in Tucker, 2013, p. 4) and think that intellectual seemings are best understood simply as being expe-
riences with propositional content, and a characteristic belief-like or judgement-like phenomenology. (See Bealer, 2000,
Cullison, 2010, Huemer, 2007, Skene, 2013, Tucker, 2010.)
The best way of clarifying the kinds of experiences I have in mind is to give some examples which everyone
should be able to identify from their own first-person experience. These examples highlight the belief-like or judge-
ment-like phenomenology of intellectual seemings, but also the fact that intellectual seemings are not beliefs or
judgements. Let us first consider those intellectual seemings which constitute ‘folk physics’. Most of folk physics is at
odds with our actual beliefs. I am sure that most of us believe that ordinary material objects are composed mostly of
the empty space between constantly moving atoms, and that objects of different masses will fall at the same rate in
a vacuum. However, it probably seems (to those of us who are willing to admit it!) that material objects are solid in
the common-sense sense, and that the heavier object will fall faster. This is explained by our having intellectual
seemings with the content that material objects are solid, and that heavy objects fall faster than lighter objects.
Our theory of ‘folk mathematics’ is also composed of a set of intellectual seemings. Take the following puzzle
from Kahneman (2012) as an example: a bat and a ball cost $1.10 and the bat is $1 more expensive than the ball—
how much does the ball cost? The answer most people give to this question is ‘10 cents’, which is incorrect—the cor-
rect answer is 5 cents. Interestingly, even when we are familiar with the puzzle it may still seem to us that the answer
is 10 cents. If so, this would be an intellectual seeming. It cannot be a belief, since we know and believe that the cor-
rect answer is 5 cents. Similarly, even to those of us who are convinced that we should switch doors in the famous
Monty Hall problem,10 it will probably intellectually seem as if switching should not make a difference to our chance
of winning the prize.11
Now that we have a relatively secure grip on the idea of intellectual seemings, let me first explain how these
kinds of cognitive experience can explain absence experience, and then describe the benefits of the view. According
to the intellectual seeming version of the cognitive view which I am defending here, upon returning to the table in
the café and discovering that one's laptop is missing, one has a perceptual experience of the empty table top (and so
on) and one also has an intellectual seeming, the content of which is something like ‘my laptop has gone!’.12 Although
one's absence experience—an intellectual seeming—seems to occur simultaneously with one's perceptual experience
GOW 177
of the empty table top, in fact the former is caused by the latter. Indeed, this causal process need not always be so
fast that the experiences seem simultaneous. One may return to one's table in the café deep in thought, and look at
the table for a moment before experiencing the absence of one's laptop.13
At this juncture, it is worth highlighting the relevance of the fact that these are intellectual seemings. Berit
Brogaard has provided a cursory outline of a view of absence experience which utilises seeming states. However,
her account is different from mine in that the seeming states she draws upon are perceptual seemings rather than
intellectual seemings. (Brogaard, 2013) She says:
‘If I walk into a room expecting you to be there but you are not, I may see that you are not there. But
in this case I don't have a visual experience that represents you as absent. I just have a visual experi-
ence of the room and the people in it. This visual experience together with my expectations generates
the visual seeming that you are not there.’ (Brogaard, 2013, p. 285)
There are a number of reasons why absence experiences are better accounted for by intellectual seemings rather
than perceptual seemings. First, we frequently have absence experiences which are either unrelated to perceptual
experiences, or they are triggered by perceptual experiences, but have contents which are otherwise unrelated to the
contents of the perceptual experience. The following is an example of the first kind: imagine receiving birthday wishes
from your friends and family over the course of your birthday—phone calls, cards, text messages, emails, and posts on
social media. However, you do not receive a message from your closest friend. You will probably experience the
absence of their birthday greeting. It is difficult to see how a perceptual seeming account of absence could account for
this experience, which does not seem to have any perceptual phenomenology relevantly associated with it at all.
Indeed, the absence experience seems purely cognitive. To give an example of the second kind, a visual experience of
the bus we are about to board may trigger the realisation that we have forgotten our wallet, and this may give rise to
an absence-of-our-wallet experience. It seems clear that no perceptual seeming is suitable for explaining the absence
experience in cases like this. Although a perceptual experience triggered the absence experience, the content of the lat-
ter (‘I haven't got my wallet’) goes beyond, and is (phenomenally speaking), unrelated to the content of the former - a
visual experience of a bus. Again, the absence experience seems purely cognitive: we need an intellectual seeming.
Second, the perceptual seeming account is far less intuitive when we move away from visual cases and consider
examples from other modalities, such as feeling for (and failing to find) one's phone in one's bag. In this case, the per-
ceptual seeming would be tactual rather than visual, and yet it simply does not seem right to say that one feels the
absence of one's phone. After all, all one feels are the items that are actually in one's bag. It's true that feeling the
items that are in one's bag will trigger an experience of the absence of one's phone—and so one will have an absence
experience—but to say that we feel the absence of our phone does not seem to capture the phenomenology. A tac-
tual perceptual seeming just does not seem capable of doing the job here—we need an intellectual seeming with the
content ‘I haven't got my phone!’
Now to consider some further advantages of my view. One of the main benefits is that it allows our absence expe-
riences to be correct without requiring a commitment to realism about absences. Earlier, we saw that the weak percep-
tual view has to say that absence experiences are all non-veridical. Quite simply, any perceptual experience which is as
of some entity that does not exist is, by definition, non-veridical. This is a problem since many of our absence experi-
ences seem, on the contrary, to get the world right. On my view, so long as we can make sense of ‘negative facts’ in
terms of ‘positive facts’, the content of the intellectual seeming which is responsible for our absence experience can be
perfectly accurate. For example, the content of the intellectual seeming involved in the missing laptop example—‘my
laptop has gone!’—accurately represents the world. It says something true, and so our experience gets the world right.
This is the result we want. Importantly, it gets the world right without positing a relation to an actual absence.
Although in many situations the content of the intellectual seeming will typically match the content of one's
beliefs, the fact that intellectual seemings are not beliefs explains how the content of our intellectual seemings some-
times conflicts with the content of our beliefs. Consider the ‘magician’ alternative to the missing laptop situation:
178 GOW
one has a perceptual experience of the empty table top (and so on), an intellectual seeming with the content ‘my lap-
top has gone!’ and a belief that the laptop has not really disappeared (and a clever trick is being played). I hope it is
clear from the example just given why my view is not vulnerable to the decisive objection levelled at the belief/
judgement version of the cognitive view, which centred on the fact that absence experience is resilient to a change
in belief. Intellectual seemings can persist even when our beliefs change.14
One of the shortcomings of Martin and Dokic's metacognitive account stemmed from the fact that the feeling
of surprise they posit to account for absence experience is contentless. Because of this, Martin and Dokic are unable
to explain how two experiences with the same perceptual phenomenology and the same feeling of surprise could
nevertheless have different phenomenologies. It should be clear how my account can accommodate this fact about
our absence experiences. To return to the key vs. key and wallet example I gave in section three—according to the
view I endorse, when one is only looking for one's keys one will undergo an intellectual seeming with content (like)
‘my keys are not here’ and in the second situation, when one is looking for one's keys and one's wallet, the content
of the intellectual seeming will be something like ‘neither my keys nor my wallet are here’. Since both the perceptual
and the affective phenomenology will be the same in these situations, we need the intellectual seeming to account
for the difference in phenomenology.
Now let me explain how my account can deal with another class of absence experience—those which are
entirely expected, such as failing to see trees in the desert and failing to feel one's tooth with one's tongue after one
has had it extracted. Assuming for the sake of argument that we will, indeed, have an absence experience upon view-
ing a desert landscape, according to my account our perceptual experience will give rise to an intellectual seeming
with content like ‘how empty it is here’ or ‘there are no trees here’ (or something similar). Although I think that Mar-
tin and Dokic are wrong when they say that expectation must be involved in absence experiences, I do think that the
explanation of this particular absence experience involves the fact that one's perceptual experience of the desert will
be atypical. (Anyone familiar with desert landscapes will be unlikely to have an absence experience in this situation.)
The unfamiliarity of the perceptual experience is involved with explaining why one's perceptual experience gives rise
to the intellectual seeming, nevertheless, it is the intellectual seeming state itself which constitutes the absence
experience.
When it comes to Cavedon-Taylor's ‘dentist’ scenario, the content of our intellectual seeming will probably be
(something like) ‘there should be a tooth here!’ which occurs as a result of one's tactual perceptual experience of the
surrounding teeth. Because this is an intellectual seeming and not a belief, one can concurrently have the intellectual
seeming even though one has a belief with a conflicting content. After all, one knows that one has had one's tooth
extracted, and so one will have the belief that there should not be a tooth present between the two teeth one expe-
riences feeling with one's tongue. In ‘dentist’ the intellectual seeming which realises the absence experience is
entirely expected, although one recalls the kind of tactual experience one would have had before one had one's
tooth extracted. Indeed, something like ‘this tactual experience is very different from the tactual experience I had
yesterday, before visiting the dentist’ could very well be part of the content of the intellectual seeming which realises
the absence experience.
5 | C O N CL U S I O N
I have pointed out a number of problems with the main views of absence experience (the perceptual view, the meta-
cognitive view, and the standard cognitive view) thus motivating the need for a new theory. I have provided a new
account of absence experience and have explained how it avoids the problems which beset the existing views.
According to my view, our absence experiences consist in a contentful intellectual seeming which is often (although
not necessarily) the result of a perceptual experience.
My account is able to accommodate absence experience as a phenomenally salient feature of our mental lives
while having the following positive features: first, we are not forced into accepting realism about absences, so we
GOW 179
can continue to preserve a causal account of perception alongside the physical causal closure principle. Second, we
can maintain the idea that we only veridically perceive positive entities. Third, because intellectual seemings have
content, we can account for subtle differences between absence experiences, such as the difference between
looking for one's keys in the drawer and looking for one's keys and one's wallet in the drawer. Fourth, because the
content of our intellectual seemings is the kind of content that can be assessable for truth or accuracy, my account
can allow that many of our absence experiences get the world right, even while denying realism about absences.
Fifth, although absence experiences are often the result of having a prior expectation which proves to be disap-
pointed, this need not be the case. Since it is possible to have an intellectual seeming without previously having had
an expectation, my account can deal with examples like ‘dentist’. And finally, because intellectual seemings are not
beliefs, one can continue to experience the absence of an object even if one believes (because one knows one is the
victim of a magic trick, say) that the object is not really absent.15
ORCID
Laura Gow https://orcid.org/0000-0002-7521-8480
ENDNOTES
1
Note, I will not be discussing experiences of empty space. Although the consensus in the literature is that empty space
experience is essentially an absence experience, I think that this view is mistaken. I defend my position on this issue in
Gow MS.
2
It is important to distinguish absences from so-called dependent entities, such as holes and gaps. (See Casati, 2006; Casati
& Varzi, 1994; Lewis & Lewis, 1970) Although a realist attitude to any of these entities will complicate one's ontology to
some extent, accommodating absences will be more difficult, purely because they do not seem to depend upon ‘positive’
entities in the way that (say) the hole depends upon the doughnut.
3
Indeed, Brian O'Shaughnessy argues that it is part of the nature of perception that it can only involve ‘positive entities’:
perception is ‘positivity all the way’. (O'Shaughnessy, 2002, p. 334)
4
I would like to thank an anonymous reviewer for raising this issue.
5
I take the claim that absences are not physical entities to be pretty uncontroversial, so I will not offer any defence of the
idea here. Of course, the project of defining what counts as physical is a difficult one—see Stoljar's (2001) for an interest-
ing discussion. Note, absences fail to qualify as physical on either of the two options Stoljar considers.
6
I'd like to thank Matthew Soteriou for this point.
7
Sometimes absences will be experienced as being located in a reasonably specific region of space—the laptop is not on the
table and the keys are not in the drawer. So spatial location may be one low-level property we attribute to them. (See Mar-
tin, 1996 for further discussion.)
8
This is usually where the argument against the cognitive view ends. However, the objection only works as a refutation of
the view if one endorses the principle that a subject cannot occurrently and consciously believe two contradictory propo-
sitions. There are many reasons for thinking that this principle should be endorsed; believing p and not-p seems to violate
a number of epistemic, pragmatic and semantic norms, and norms of rationality and assertion. Perhaps more importantly
(given the aims of this article) the idea that we believe both that our laptop is on the table and that it is not on the table
simply does not fit with the phenomenology. For this reason, I want to develop an alternative cognitive view. (However,
see Mandelbaum, 2014, Byrne, 2009 and Quilty-Dunn, 2015)
9
My response to the customary objection that animals and infants do not possess these cognitive mental states is to advise
against over-intellectualising intellectual seemings. Just as animals and infants have sufficient concept possession to expe-
rience food as food (say), so they have sufficient cognitive abilities to experience the absence of food.
10
The Monty Hall problem is as follows: you are on a game show and have to choose which of three doors to open. Behind
one is the prize (a car) and behind the other two are goats. You choose a door, but before you open it the host (who
knows what's behind the doors) opens one of the other doors to reveal a goat. You can then either stick with your origi-
nal choice or switch doors. Although counter-intuitive, you are in fact more likely to win the prize by switching doors.
11
Incidentally, these examples also serve to distinguish intellectual seemings from Tamar Szabo Gendler's ‘aliefs’ (Gen-
dler, 2008) First, although Gendler claims that aliefs aren't necessarily related to behaviour, their behavioural role forms
part of her definition of paradigmatic aliefs. Intellectual seemings, on the other hand, have no particular links to behaviour
(which is not, of course, to say that they cannot influence behaviour). Many intellectual seemings have a purely
180 GOW
theoretical content as illustrated by the examples from ‘folk mathematics’ and ‘folk physics’. Second, aliefs are affective
whereas intellectual seemings are not (although they might sometimes be accompanied by affective states).
12
I do not wish to suggest that the content of one's intellectual seeming state must involve tokening a sentence in inner
speech.
13
This is why I do not subscribe to a ‘dual component’ view, according to which perceptual experiences themselves have
two components—a sensory aspect and a conceptual aspect. (See Quilty-Dunn, 2015; Smith, 2002) I find it difficult to
make sense of the idea that our perceptual experiences can cause our absence experiences if we hold absence experi-
ence to be a component of the perceptual experience. Another reason to prefer my account to the dual component view
is that the latter is a kind of perceptual view. It will therefore be open to the objections I discussed earlier.
14
Indrek Reiland makes a similar move to this in his contribution to the high-level content debate in the philosophy of per-
ception. He posits phenomenal seemings, which he defines as being ‘quasi-sensory and quasi-cognitive’, to account for
the fact that someone who can recognise pine trees would continue to see an object as a pine tree even if they have
been told (and believe) that it is in fact a hologram. (Reiland, 2014, p. 180)
15
I'd like to thank audiences at Birkbeck, University of London, The London Mind Group, Reading University and Warwick
University for feedback on earlier versions of this article. I'd also like to thank Dan Cavedon-Taylor, Craig French, Grace
Helton, Michelle Montague and an anonymous reviewer for their helpful comments.
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How to cite this article: Gow L. A new theory of absence experience. Eur J Philos. 2021;29:168–181. https://
doi.org/10.1111/ejop.12577

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Received: 14 March 2020 Revised: 18 May 2020 Accepted: 6 July 2020

A new theory of absence experience

Department of Philosophy, University of

168 wileyonlinelibrary.com/journal/ejop Eur J Philos. 2021;29:168–181.

2 | THE PERCEPTUAL VIEW

2.1 | The strong perceptual view

2.2 | The weak perceptual view

3 | THE METACOGNITIVE VIEW

4.1 | The cognitive view

4.2 | The intellectual seeming view

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