GESTALT THEORY, DOI 10.

2478/gth-2022-0022
© 2022 (ISSN 2519-5808); Vol. 44, No. 3, 213–242

Original Contributions - Originalbeiträge

Achille C. Varzi

On Perceiving Abs nces

1. A fishy experiment
Take a sheet of paper, cut out a hole in the middle in the shape of (say) a fish,
throw away the fish-shaped cut-out, and hold up in front of your friends the
sheet of paper with the fish-shaped hole. Ask them what they see. So long as you
did a decent job (ideally, using a sharp cutter or a pair of scissors rather than bare
hands), everyone is going to give the same response. They’ll say they see a fish—
not the fish you threw away, of course, but the missing fish in the middle of the
paper. They’ll see the hole as figure and the surrounding paper—the thing you are
actually holding up in front of them—as ground.

Fig. 1. A fishy hole.

There are lots of good reasons why people react this way. The salience of holes
in figure-ground organization has been a fertile field of research at least since
Rudolf Arnheim’s analysis of the sculptures of Henry Moore1 and we now have
a good understanding of the Gestalt principles at work in cases such as this.
We have robust evidence, for example, that the perception of a hole is influenced
by such factors as convexity, contour relationship, grouping (e.g. via color or
texture similarity), or pattern entropy (Figure 2), and we understand how these
factors relate to others, such as shape and shading (Figure 3).

1
In Arnheim (1948).

Open Access. © 2022 Achille C. Varzi, published by Sciendo. This work is licensed under
the Creative Commons Attribution NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 License.
GESTALT THEORY, Vol. 44, No. 3

Fig. 2. Convexity, contour relationship, grouping, and entropy in hole perception.2

Fig. 3. Shape and shading interaction in hole perception.3

Still, there is something fishy about the experiment, isn’t there? Everyone says
they see a fish; but how could that be, if the fish is exactly what is missing from
the scene? Surely everyone sees the piece of paper you are holding up in front
of their eyes; how could they see also the hole within? Traditional wisdom says
that perception is grounded in causation, and presumably all causation must
­originate in what is out there, what is present. Yet holes are a paradigm example
of ­absences. How can they be seen?
There are several thoughts one could offer in response. For one thing, perhaps the
causal theory of perception is simply false. The theory has a long and distinguis-
hed pedigree and is widely held among contemporary philosophers,4 but it’s not

2
From Bertamini and Casati (2015), fig. 14.3, with reference to the studies of Arnheim (1948, 1954), Bozzi
(1975), Nelson and Palmer (2001), and Gillam and Grove (2011), respectively. The perception of a hole is
stronger in the top figures. Bertamini and Casati’s article provides a useful overview of other relevant studies,
which form a large literature.
3
Adapted from Bertamini and Helmy (2012), fig. 2.
4
Mainly under the influence of Grice (1961) and Strawson (1974).

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 Varzi, On Perceiving Abs nces

the only option and it may be open to counterexamples; the perception of holes
would be one.5 Jenny Teichman, for instance, draws exactly this conclusion from
the fact that we seem to see holes along with other absences:
That which is truly seen does not have to be the originator of [the relevant]
physiological processes.6

A second response would be to hold to the causal theory and reject the
­assumption that only things present can be causally efficacious. There is indeed
a large l­iterature on so-called causation by absence. Most of it has focused on
the ­apparent causal relevance of “negative” events, as when we say that the main
cause of a fire was lack of rain, that one’s failure to water the plants killed them,
or that my omitting XYZ from the bibliography made the referee angry.7 It is
not obvious that statements such as these are genuine causal reports, as opposed
to causal explanations;8 but if you think they are, then it is a short step to think
that all sorts of absences can be causally efficacious, holes and voids being among
them. As David Lewis put it:
That is how the void causes death. It is deadly not because it exerts forces
and supplies energy, but because it doesn’t.9

Third, one could deny that holes are genuine absences. I am not thinking of the
fact that every hole comes filled with some matter or other (air, liquid, silver
amalgam—whatever); the filling isn’t the hole. Nor am I thinking of revisionary
accounts whereby holes may be identified with some other material substance
that is present to the senses. Lewis himself, in his classic paper with Stephanie
Lewis, actually offered such an account: a hole would simply be a “hole-lining”,
i.e., the (vaguely defined) portion of matter that surrounds what we ordinarily call
a hole.10 That would put the hole in the wrong place.11 I am thinking, rather, of
the possibility of treating holes as genuine chunks of nothingness that are literally
present wherever we seem to see them. Kurt Tucholsky famously wrote:
A hole is where something isn’t.12

This suggests that every hole is, in one important sense, an absence, viz. the
­absence of something else. But it does not follow that holes are absences tout

5
Locke himself, to whom the theory is generally credited, was troubled by that possibility; see Locke (1690),
II, viii, 6.
6
Teichmann (1970), p. 41.
7
For an overview of the issues, see e.g. Birnbacher and Hommen (2012).
8
See e.g. Beebee (2004), with whom I agree (Varzi, 2007).
9
Lewis (2004), p. 277.
10
Lewis and Lewis (1970), pp. 207ff.
11
Or so I think; see Casati and Varzi (1994), ch. 3. For a recent defense of the hole-lining view, see Mollica
(2022).
12
Tucholsky (1931), p. 389; Eng. trans. p. 123.

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court, i.e., absent things. On the contrary, they would be where something isn’t,
something that was supposed to be there but turns out to be missing, and they
would therefore have a spatiotemporal location like ordinary things. It’s just that
they would be immaterial and, thus, sui generis.13
I think each of these lines of response is legitimate and worth taking seriously.
However, each of them calls for metaphysical decisions that seem foreign to the
visual experience everybody has when you show them the fishy hole. It is true
that we cannot determine whether they are really seeing a hole short of an e­ xplicit
account of what holes are and of how seeing works. But the visual experience
­itself—the experience we all have when we seem to see a hole—is a datum that
cries for recognition as such, prior to any theoretical account. In the words of
Susanna Siegel, it does not “take a stand” on metaphysical matters.14 Its puzzling
character must be taken at face value, not explained away.
Besides, holes are but one puzzling case and vision is only one mode of p ­ erception.
You don’t have to perform the little experiment with which we started to r­ ealize
that we often find ourselves describing perceptual experiences that involve a
­puzzling interplay between what is present and what is absent from the scene. We
seem to see shadows, hear silences, feel the not-thereness of the keys in our pocket.
Surely a case-by-case metaphysical account of the relevant absences is not a good
way to approach the vivid phenomenology of such experiences. What is needed
is, rather, a clearer characterization of that phenomenology, puzzling as it may be.
We need an account of the general phenomenon that the ­various cases illustrate.
Or perhaps there is no general phenomenon and we are just m ­ isdescribing our
own experiences. What exactly is it that we are experiencing? The literature under
the general rubric of absence perception is actually quite rich. What exactly is it
about?

2. Sartrean experiences
With reference to holes, I mentioned Arnheim’s classic study on Henry Moore.
Arnheim was eager to apply Gestalt principles of figure-ground “to the third
dimension” and firm in asserting that the holes in Moore’s sculptures “are not
merely dead and empty intervals between the material parts of the figure but
peculiarly substantial”.15 Arnheim was not, however, the first to reflect upon the

13
This is the view I defend in my joint work with Roberto Casati (1994). Other authors view holes as negative
parts of their hosts (Hoffman and Richards, 1984), as regions of space-time (Wake et al., 2007; Miller 2007), as
spatio-temporal states (Martin 2006), as properties (Meadows, 2013), or as relational modes that enjoy “being
by courtesy” (McDaniel, 2010).
14
Siegel (2009), p. 539. The same point is stressed by other authors, e.g., Calabi (2019).
15
Arnheim (1948), p. 32 and p. 31. Cf. also his analysis of the “visual paradox” of windows in Art and Visual
Perception (1954), pp. 192–193; 2nd ed. p. 240.

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 Varzi, On Perceiving Abs nces

perceptual salience of absences. Even more classic is Jean-Paul Sartre’s discussion

in the first chapter of Being and Nothingness, where he pinpoints a case that is
significantly different yet equally vivid:
I have an appointment with Pierre at four o’clock. I arrive at the café a quar-
ter of an hour late. Pierre is always punctual. Will he have waited for me? I
look at the room, the patrons, and I say, “He is not here” [. . .] This does not
mean that I discover his absence in some precise spot in the establishment.
In fact Pierre is absent from the whole café; his absence fixes the café in its
evanescence; the café […] makes itself ground for a determined figure; it
carries the figure everywhere in front of it, presents the figure everywhere to
me. This figure which slips constantly between my look and the solid, real
objects of the café is precisely a perpetual disappearance; it is Pierre raising
himself as nothingness on the ground of the nihilation of the café.16

There is a lot going on in this passage, but the experience that Sartre reports is
­certainly a familiar one and—pace my fondness for holes—is generally c­ onsidered
the archetype of an absence perception. Roy Sorensen, for example, takes it as
paradigmatic of the Gestalt switches that substantiate “the ­phenomenological
­difference between seeing a scene in a purely positive fashion and seeing it as ­having
absences”.17 And indeed it is remarkable that Sartre describes his “­discovery” in
terms of figure-ground contrast, with Pierre’s absence emerging as figure like the
fishy hole in our piece of paper. The context of his remarks is a rather abstract
discussion of the relationship between negation and nothingness, yet Sartre does
not hesitate to delve into the strictly perceptual character of his experience.
Sorensen himself brings attention to several other interesting cases of this sort,
the most remarkable of which relates to the stealing of Leonardo’s Mona Lisa
from the Louvre museum in Paris on August 21, 1911.18 The museum closed for
a week, and as soon as it reopened, seeing the absence of Mona Lisa became the
most exciting attraction for Parisians and visitors alike. As the daily newspaper
Le Matin reported on August 30:
All visitors wanted to know where the Mona Lisa used to be. They did not
look at the other paintings. They gazed at length at the dusty space where
a week ago the divine Mona Lisa was smiling. And feverishly, they took
notes. It was much more interesting, for them, than if La Joconde had been
in her place…19

The photos on the first page of The Excelsior (figure 4) are equally eloquent,
­offering us a graphic illustration of the crowds and of what they saw.

16
Sartre (1943), pp. 44–45; Eng. trans. pp. 9–10.
17
Sorensen (2015), pp. 552.
18
Ibid., pp. 544ff.
19
Anonymous (1911), p. 2.

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Fig. 4. The crowds staring at the missing Mona Lisa in the Louvre.

Other examples abound. Consider the abrupt disappearance of an object. Whe-

reas Sartre and the Louvre crowds experienced the absence of something that
was evidently somewhere else, when an object suddenly vanishes we seem to
witness directly its transition from presence to absence. Anna Farennikova brings
our attention to several cases of this sort: a friend disappearing into the crowd, a
coin vanishing from the hand of a magician, a balloon bursting.20 As a concrete
illustration, she also mentions what happened at Bilbo’s 111th birthday party in
Tolkien’s The Fellowship of the Ring, after the hobbit delivered his speech to his
party guests:
He stepped down and vanished. There was a blinding flash of light, and
the guests all blinked. When they opened their eyes Bilbo was nowhere
to be seen. One hundred and forty-four flabbergasted hobbits sat back
speechless.21
The hobbits are speechless because they suddenly perceive Bilbo’s absence.
As Farennikova notes, they do not experience “a mere absence of seeing of an object
that’s gone”; the object itself is “experienced as gone”.22 And this sort of experience
has striking phenomenology. Here is another example:
You’ve been working on your laptop in the café 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! […] You do not infer that the
laptop is missing through reasoning; you have an immediate impression
of its absence.23

20
In Farennikova (2013), p. 442.
21
Tolkien (1954), p. 39.
22
Farennikova (2018), p. 133.
23
Farennikova (2013), p. 430.
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 Varzi, On Perceiving Abs nces

Stephen Mumford is probably counting on a similar phenomenology in his book

Absence and Nothing.24 The book consists of ten chapters, with the first five num-
bered 1 through 5 and the others 7 through 11. Chapter 6 is missing altogether.
When you first look at the table of contents, you might not notice it, but sooner
or later you will. And when that happens, the absence will hit you suddenly. You
will not infer that the chapter is missing (though it may take some reasoning to
figure out why it is missing, and you will be pleased to realize that it would have
come right before a chapter entitled “Perception of Absence”); you will have a
sudden, immediate impression of the gap.
All these cases involve visual perception. But the phenomenon has parallels also
for other sense modalities, including auditory, tactile, and even olfactory. The
auditory case, where the relevant absence manifests itself as a silence, is perhaps
the most conspicuous. One might think of the audience’s reaction when John
Cage’s 4’33” premiered the Maverick Concert Hall in 1952, with David Tudor
closing the piano lid to mark the beginning of the piece, or of earlier instances of
completely silent performances such as Alphonse Allais’s Marche funèbre of 1897
and Erwin Schulhoff’s In futurum of 1919. However, these might not be good
examples. Allais wrote his piece for the obsequies of a deaf man, Schulhoff’s score
was full of fermatas and exclamation marks, with an opening instruction that
reads “Tutto il canzone con espressione e sentimento ad libitum, sempre, sin al
fine!”, and Cage was adamant that his piece was not four minutes and thirty-three
seconds of silence: for him “there is no such thing as silence”,25 or rather silence
is “ambient noise”,26 and 4’33” was meant to be “full of accidental sounds”27
(the wind stirring outside, the raindrops pattering the roof, the coughing and
­shuffling of the audience, etc.).

Fig. 5. Three scores for silent performances: Allais’s, Schulhoff’s, and Cage’s.

24
Mumford (2021).
25
Cage (1961), p. 45.
26
Ibid., p. 80.
27
In conversation with John Kobler (Kostelanetz, 1988, p. 65).

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So none of these cases would seem to serve as genuine examples of absolute silence
perception, i.e., perception of sound absences. On the other hand, surely imperfect
silence is good enough for a Sartrean experience. If it is true that Sartre saw the ab-
sence of Pierre, it may be held that the audience at Maverick Concert Hall heard the
silence of music. And just as the hobbits may be said to have suddenly felt Bilbo’s
absence, rather than suddenly failing to see him, it may be held that hearing a silence
is phenomenologically different from a mere non-hearing. As Sorensen puts it:
Hearing silence is successful perception of an absence of sound. It is not a
failure to hear sound. A deaf man cannot hear silence.28

This view, or some variant thereof,29 is shared by other authors. Błażej Skrzypulec,
for example, says that perceptual experiences of silence can be so vivid as to have
egocentric spatial content, e.g. by presenting empty spatial directions like “right”
or “left”.30 On the other hand, Ian Philips finds that it is hard to vouchsafe the
perception of silence tout court, but we can at least hear certain forms of silence,
such as pauses, “in virtue of experiencing contrastive sounds”.31 As a case in point,
he cites Axel’s testimony in Jules Verne’s Journey to the Interior of the Earth:
It might have been, as I guessed, about ten at night. The first of my senses
which came into play after this last bout was that of hearing. All at once
I could hear; and it was a real exercise of the sense of hearing. I could hear
the silence in the gallery after the din which for hours had stunned me.32

Parallel considerations apply to tactile perception of absences. H. H. Price, for

instance, noted that there can be “after-images” of touch:
When my hat is taken off my head, I still continue to feel it there for a
time; and the same is true if some small object such as a matchbox is placed
on one’s head for a minute or two and then removed.33

More to the point, Dan Cavedon-Taylor mentions the case of a person running
their tongue along their teeth after a dental a procedure to have a tooth removed.
When the anesthetic wears off,
you have a tactual perception, via your tongue, of the absence in your
mouth of an object that was once present: your tooth.34

28
Sorensen (2009), p. 126.
29
One complication, here, is that a lot depends on how exactly one understands the nature of sounds, and
whether sounds (and hence silences) are spatial or aspatial; see e.g. Nudds (2001), O’Callaghan (2011), and
Meadows (2020).
30
See Skrzypulec (2022).
31
See Phillips (2013).
32
Verne (1864), pp. 304–305; Eng. trans. pp. 172–173.
33
Price (1932), pp. 29–30.
34
Cavedon-Taylor (2017), p. 355.

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 Varzi, On Perceiving Abs nces

Similarly, Sorensen brings our attention to the fact that if we run our fingers over
the books on a bookshelf we can “feel gaps” in the sequence, as we can feel “the
spaces between the teeth of the comb” if we comb our hand in the dark.35 He also
reminds us that, for years, tourists would visit Jesse James’s house in Missouri to
“touch the bullet hole” supposedly made by Bob Ford’s gun when he shot Jesse
on April 3, 1888.36
Finally, similar cases have been discussed also in the domain of olfaction. Just as
one can experience ordinary objects by seeing, hearing, or touching them, one
may smell their presence. Thus, if it is true that we can have Sartrean perceptions
of an object’s absence on the grounds of visual, auditory, or tactile experiences,
it would seem that we may also perceive an object’s absence on the grounds of
olfactory experiences, e.g., by experiencing the absence of an odor typically asso-
ciated with the object. Here the most basic notion of odor absence is the olfactory
counterpart of silence, i.e., fresh air. As Tom Roberts writes, one may smell “the
absence of a lingering odor that one has expected to find in a familiar location”,
or “the welcome influx of fresh air that follows prolonged exposure to a foul
effluvium”.37 Yet those are limit cases. Phenomenologically, the absence of specific
odors may be striking enough, as with the absence of specific sounds. In joining
a blind party, you may perceive the absence of Pierre by perceiving the absence of
his distinctive voice. Similarly,
an absent-minded chef may sniff his casserole to check whether he has
forgotten any ingredients, and perceive an absence of oregano in virtue of
smelling an absence of its distinctive bouquet.38

Moreover, generally speaking an olfactory Sartrean experience would not require

the perception of an odor absence. Sometimes it is the presence of certain odors
that may deliver the experience of an object’s absence. You return home after a
trip. You expect to find your roommate, but as you enter the apartment, you are
struck by the stuffy smell of the place. Your roommate loves fresh air, and it hits
you that no one has ventilated the rooms for days. You say, “She is not here”. You
smell her absence by virtue of smelling the stuffy air.

3. Perceiving an absence vs. perceiving something absent

Do we really have Sartrean perceptual experiences of absences? We have seen
that the phenomenon seems widespread; but are the cases we have mentioned
genuine cases of absence perception? As I said, I am not interested in the

35
Sorensen (2015), p. 543.
36
Sorensen (2018), p. 117.
37
Roberts (2016), pp. 406–407.
38
Ibid., pp. 413.

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metaphysical underpinnings of this question; I am interested in the ­adequacy

of the descriptions under which we tend to present those ­experiences. To
address this aspect of the question, we need to be clear about a ­number of
­important matters. I will focus on four: (i) the difference between p ­ erceiving
an absence and perceiving something that is absent; (ii) the difference b­ etween
perceiving an absence and an absence of perceiving; (iii) the ­difference ­between
perceiving an absence and perceiving something as an absence; and (iv) the
difference between perceiving an absence and perceiving that something is
absent.
The first distinction is especially important if we want to be clear about the re-
levant class of phenomenal experiences. In this regard, the main clue lies in an
important feature that I take to be characteristic of the very notion of an absence.
We may put it as follows:
(1) Every absence is an absence of something.

Thus, for example, Pierre’s absence in the café is exactly that, the absence of
Pierre. It isn’t a generic absence but a specific, object-relative absence. And what
goes for the absence of people, or of objects more generally, goes for qualitative
absences: holes are the absence of matter, silence the absence of sound, fresh air
the absence of smell, and so on. In other words, all absences are ontologically
dependent.
Given (1), we can immediately appreciate the first distinction, i.e., the difference
between perceiving an absence and perceiving something that is absent, which is to
say not present. Focusing on visual perception, consider, for instance, those situa-
tions where the figure-ground configuration of what we see is unstable: things that
are actually present may recede to background and a portion of the background
becomes figure. A good case in point are Nathaniel Currier’s lithographs of Geor-
ge Washington and Napoleon “among the trees” (figure 6). Here we are not seeing
the absence of Washington or the absence of Napoleon; we are seeing an absent
Washington and an absent Napoleon. The empty space between the trees is no
more an absence of those men than it is an absence of Pierre. It’s just that from
the point of view of the observer, as capably captured by the artist, the objects in
the scene are organized in such a way as to return the optical illusion of seeing
specifically the silhouettes of those men, Washington and Napoleon. Ditto for all
sorts of similar cases where the optical illusion delivers, if not the silhouette of
a person or an object known to the observer, at least the silhouette of a distinct
someone or something. Rubin’s ambiguous vase/face figure and its many artistic
variations and predecessors, such as Pierre Crussaire’s L’urne mystérieuse, are typi-
cal examples (Figure 7).

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 Varzi, On Perceiving Abs nces

Fig. 6. Washington and Napoleon among the trees.39

Fig. 7. Rubin’s vase and variants.40

For similar reasons, it is important to distinguish genuine absence ­perception

from the visual phenomenon of illusory contours and ghostly surfaces, as
­famously e­xemplified by Schumann’s square and by Kanizsa’s triangle and its
­variations (figure 8). In such cases, what we see is the result of our tendency

39
‘Shade and Tomb of Washington’ and ‘Shade and Tomb of Napoleon’ (both undated, but c. 1860), from the
drawings and prints collections at the Indianapolis Museum of Art at Newfields and at the Brooklyn Museum
in New York, respectively.
40
Left: from Rubin (1915), fig. 3, and an installment at the Science and Technology Museum in Daqing
(photo: Jason Zhang, Wikipedia Commons); right: Crussaire’s ‘L’urne mystérieuse’ (c. 1793), from the prints
collection at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.

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to articulate reality in terms of figures possessing continuous and sharp con-

tours even when these, as Schumann put it, “objectively are not there”.41 Since
such contours “may be confused with the effects of stimulus discontinuities”,
­Kanizsa would add that they have modal character and should not be regarded as
“­merely thought ­margins” or “virtual lines”, whose perceptual presence has only
an amodal ­character.42 ­Moreover, their modal perceptual character is supported
in each case by the strong subjective transformation in brightness and hue of the
corresponding region, which is why we see a square, a triangle, etc. But then, pre-
cisely for that reason, it’s clear that the phenomenon has nothing to do with the
visual perception of an absence. Here the modal completion makes us perceive
something that is absent, not the absence of something.

Fig. 8. Schumann’s and Kanizsa’s ghostly presences.43

4. Perceiving an absence vs. an absence of perceiving

The second distinction is somewhat more controversial. Is the perception of an
absence really anything over and above the mere absence of a perception?
With reference to the case of Bilbo’s disappearance, I cited Farennikova’s remarks
to the effect that the answer must be in the affirmative: the hobbits did not
suddenly experience a mere failure to see Bilbo; they had a visual experience of
Bilbo’s sudden disappearance. And that experience would seem to have come
with a striking phenomenology, a phenomenology that seems to characterize eve-
ry experience of something missing. Similarly with Sorensen’s remark to the effect
that hearing a silence is not a mere non-hearing but a successful perception of
an absence of sound. Some authors, however, disagree. For instance, Jean-Rémy
Martin and Jérôme Dokic have argued that such experiences are best described as
comprising a “feeling of surprise or unexpectedness”:44 the surprise we all feel when
we are not seeing, hearing, etc. something that we expected to see, hear, etc. Since
such a feeling would not be perceptual, belonging instead to the category of me-
tacognitive feelings, absence experiences would be “neither strictly perceptual nor
strictly cognitive”.45 In other words, we would not perceive absences; we would
just feel surprised when there is an absence of perceiving.

41
Schumann (1900), p. 14; Eng. trans. p. 26.
42
Kanizsa (1955), pp. 18 and 16; Eng. trans. p. 44.
43
From Schumann (1900), fig. 7, and Kanizsa (1955), figs. 11, 10, and 15.
44
Martin and Dokic (2013), p. 121.
45
Ibid., p. 118.

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 Varzi, On Perceiving Abs nces

The emphasis on surprise is indeed important in the present context. Consider

again the theft of Mona Lisa. As Sorensen notes elsewhere,46 on the day of the
theft no one noticed the absence of Mona Lisa. The theft was discovered only
the next day, when Louis Béroud, a French artist who had made a special trip to
make a copy of the painting, was surprised not to see it hanging in its place. In-
deed, Sartre himself described his experience in the café in terms of contravened
expectations.
Pierre’s absence supposes an original relation between me and this café;
there is an infinity of people who are without any relation with this café for
want of a real expectation which establishes their absence. But, to be exact,
I myself expected to see Pierre, and my expectation has caused the absence
of Pierre to happen as a real event concerning this café.47

The observation seems to generalize. Not only is every absence an absence of so-
mething, as per (1); an absence can be perceived as such only insofar as something
is expected to be present but is not. This points to a second important feature of
absences, which we may put as follows:
(2) Absences manifest themselves through frustrated expectations.

The question is whether this important feature is enough to justify the thought
that perceiving an absence is nothing over and above an absence of perceiving,
i.e., a non-perceiving.
Martin and Dokic answer in the affirmative. And their reason is that the feeling
of surprise that we experience when there is an absence of perceiving would not
possess any distinctive or proprietary phenomenological character: phenomeno-
logically, absence experiences would be like any other experience of surprise. In
particular, any frustrated expectation would give rise to the same sort of affective
experience. Here is the argument:
You are presented with two series of 15 successive boxes. In the first series,
the first 10 boxes contain red marbles but the 11th box surprisingly reveals
a green marble while you implicitly expected a red marble. The second
series is like the first, except that the 11th box surprisingly reveals nothing
while you expected a red marble. […] Both series elicit similar affective
phenomenological experiences, that is, a [feeling of surprise], suggesting
that absence situations are not associated with a peculiar ­phenomenology.48

46
See Sorensen (2022), pp. 276, 305.
47
Sartre (1943), p. 45; Eng. trans. p. 10. As Abath (2019), n. 12, notes, it is actually curious that Sartre puts it
this way: he was late and knew of Pierre’s punctuality, so why did he expect Pierre to still be there? In the text
quoted earlier, he reports asking himself, “Will he have waited for me?”; so Sartre may have been disappointed
that Pierre didn’t wait, but why surprised?
48
Martin and Dokic (2013), p. 119.

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Is it really so? Never mind the fact that the disturbing presence of the green m
­ arble
in the first series may also be described as an absence, namely, an absence of the
expected red marble; as Martin and Dokic recognize, in that case the experience
of incongruity is still “fully explained by the presence of a marble with a different
color from the one that was expected”.49 The question concerns the feelings of
surprise elicited by the two series; are they phenomenologically indistinguishable?
I do not know the answer.50 Presumably, this is a hypothesis whose confirmation
or refutation calls for more than a simple thought experiment, so I can only issue
an invitation to envision suitable empirical tests. For my part, I checked a few
­cases comparable to the first series described by Martin and Dokic, where the
frustrated expectation does not involve genuine absences, and my inclination
would be to say that the feeling of surprise they elicit is, if not phenomenolo-
gically different from the feeling elicited by the second series, at least formally
different. The cases I checked are familiar to everyone and are well illustrated
by the many “You had one job!” posts to be found on the internet (often asso-
ciated with “fail” image macros). The pictures in figure 9 are a randomly chosen
­sample. When confronted with such poor jobs, we feel surprise and perhaps even
irritation, but it is clear that this feeling is elicited by how things are; it reflects
a frustration concerning how we expected things to be. In the putative Sartrean
cases, by contrast, the feeling of surprise is elicited by what there is; it reflects an
ontological frustration, a frustration concerning what we expected there to be.
Whether this difference is phenomenologically salient is precisely the question.
But a difference it is, and it might suffice to justify the claim that the perception
of an absence is not merely the absence of a perception.

Fig. 9. You had one job!

There are in fact experiments in developmental psychology that lend support

to this thought. A classic example comes from Fei Xu and Susan Carey’s work
on infants’ metaphysics and numerical identity.51 Building on earlier results by

49
Ibid.
50
For some discussion, see Cavedon-Taylor (2017), §5, Gow (2921a), §3, and Mumford (2021), §7.3.3 and
§7.5.
51
See Xu and Carey (1996).

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Elizabeth Spelke and Roberta Kestenbaum,52 their findings confirm the conjec-
ture that infants use spatiotemporal information to trace identity before they start
relying on property information.53 More exactly, they reveal that infants develop
a general sortal concept object well before they come to rely on specific sor-
tals such as cat or truck (figure 10). Since the criterion Xu and Carey used to
analyze their experimental data was precisely the infants’ surprise reaction at the
unexpected outcome of one object rather than two—taking longer looking time
as indicative of greater surprise—it seems reasonable to infer that the ontological
frustration that comes with an absence experience has different origins than a
purely qualitative frustration concerning how things are, i.e., the properties exhi-
bited by the objects under observation.54

Fig. 10. Xu and Carey’s comparative experiments. 55

Be that as it may, thesis (2) has a few important corollaries that are worth stres-
sing. First of all, the link between absences and frustrated expectations allows us
to explain why Sartre supposedly saw the absence of Pierre but not, as he himself
notes, the absence of Wellington or of Paul Valéry.56 As a matter of fact, neither
was in the café. But since Sartre did not expect them to be there, he did not see
their absence.
Second, (2) also explains why only Sartre, as we may suppose, saw the absence of
Pierre. Many other people were in the café, perhaps even people who ­entered the
café with Sartre; why did they not have the same absence experience? E­ vidently,
because they had no expectation that Pierre be there. Only Sartre had that

52
See Kestenbaum and Spelke (1986).
53
For an early formulation of the conjecture, see Bower (1974).
54
Interestingly, the surprise shown at the unexpected outcome of a “magical” disappearance is not confirmed in
the event of a magical appearance; see Wynn and Chiang (1998).
55
From Xu and Carey (1996), fig. 1 (left) and fig. 3a (right).
56
See Sartre (1943), pp. 45–46; Eng. trans. pp. 10–11.
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expectation and only he felt frustrated by its contravention. Thus, not only are
absences always absences of something, as per (1); since expectations are subjec-
tive, we can add that they are always absences for somebody. (One might worry
that this feature makes absences inescably “cerebral” or “anthropocentric”,57 but
insofar as we are interested in the phenomenology of their perception, we can set
this worry aside58).
Third, (2) actually supports a better reading of (1) than we might otherwise be
tempted to endorse. As Sorensen notes,59 at the time when the Mona Lisa was sto-
len there was a rumor that the painting at the Louvre was not Leonardo’s original
masterpiece, which had gone lost, but a copy (as there were copies elsewhere, e.g.
at the Prado Museum in Madrid). If that rumor were correct, the painting stolen
on August 21, 1911, would not have been the Mona Lisa and (1) might suggest
that Louis Béroud was struck by the absence of something else. Moreover, (1)
might suggest that earlier visitors would not have seen the Mona Lisa but, in fact,
its absence. Neither of these suggestions seems plausible, and both are ruled out
by (2): in both cases, the expectation concerned the painting actually on display in
the Salon Carré under the title Mona Lisa, regardless of whether it was Leonardo’s
original, an expectation that was fulfilled when the early visitors entered the Salon
but not when it was Béroud’s turn. In short, given (2), the something mentioned
in (1) must be something that is expected to be present (but isn’t).
Fourth, (2) also explains why we may occasionally have the impression of seeing,
not the absence of something concrete, but the absence of an absence. Following
again Sorensen,60 suppose that on August 29, when the Louvre reopened, the
crowds that flocked to the Salon Carré found the Mona Lisa (or its copy) han-
ging on the wall, exactly where it had always been. Surely they would have been
surprised. Their expectation to see the absence of the Mona Lisa would have been
frustrated, and so it would seem appropriate to say that they experienced the
absence of the absence of the Mona Lisa. This sort of “double absence” is actually
much more common than it might seem. Just as a regular arrangement of bricks
might involve a frustrated expectation when we see a missing brick, a wall with a
regular pattern of missing bricks might involve a frustrated expectation when we
see a brick where there should be a void. If our job is the production of hole-based
patterns, this is something we may even intentionally watch out for. In the field
of photopolymer science, for instance, the use of extreme-ultraviolet lithography

57
Thus Sorensen (2021), p. 308. Sartre himself would not mind, of course; for him, “non-being always appears
within the limits of a human expectation” (1943, p. 41; Eng. trans. p. 7).
58
A related worry: if the subjective character of one’s expectations reflects one’s normative beliefs, does it mean
that all absence perception is value-laden? See Farennikova (2016).
59
See Sorensen (2022), p. 303.
60
Ibid., p. 279.

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 Varzi, On Perceiving Abs nces

Fig. 11. A missing missing brick and a missing-hole production defect.

in high-volume manufacturing lines may result in what technicians call “missing

hole” production defects, and their detection and avoidance is a major area of
research.61
Nor are double absences a prerogative of visual perception. If someone has a
tooth removed, and months later has it replaced by an implant, they may have
a tactual perception, via their tongue, first of the absence of the tooth and la-
ter of the absence of that absence. This is also how double negation works on
those theories according to which a negative truth calls for a negative entity, as
in the Navya-Nyāya school of Indian logic. Just as the absence of a certain pot
on the floor is a truth maker for the negation of “The pot is on the floor”, the
absence of its absence is a truth maker for the negation of “The pot is not on
the floor”.62
Lastly, note that (2) allows us to pin down the difference between the Sartrean
­cases we have been discussing and other cases where we might still want to say that
we perceive or feel an absence. An example would be the absence of a d ­ emised
friend or relative. We miss them badly, and in some circumstances we may even
feel inclined to say that we literally feel their absence.63 Moreover, we may occa-
sionally feel frustrated by their absence, as when we look at the desk where they
used to sit, or we listen to a song they used to love. This sense of ­frustration can
be intensely acute and distressing; yet it is not a sign of an ­unfulfilled expectation,
as we sadly know that we cannot expect to see them anymore. André Abath calls
such cases “frustrating absences”, taking them to constitute a counterexample
to (2).64 One may instead take (2) as a criterion for identifying a sort of absence
perception that is distinctly different.

61
See e.g. Hidetam et al. (2020), where the production defect in figure 11, right, is presented as a “headache
problem” (p. 139).
62
See Matilal (1980) and Shaw (1988) and the relevant discussion in Vaidya et al. (2016).
63
See Gamino et al. (2002) for striking data.
64
Abath (2019). See also Richardson (2023).

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5. Perceiving an absence vs. perceiving something as an absence

Suppose we insist that a Sartrean experience is not a mere failure to perceive.
It still isn’t clear whether we are really perceiving an absence. Perhaps we are just
seeing whatever is present and, because we expected something else, we see wha-
tever is present as the absence of what we expected. This is the third distinction
we need to examine.
In discussing a version of (2), Richard Gale says that it delivers an “attitudinal
theory of negative events”, akin to how the Scholastics conceived of privations:
absences would be nothing more than the result of our intellect forming in itself
“some sort of image of a thing lacking”.65 Gale makes explicit reference to Sartre,
but also to Henri Bergson, who in fact was more direct about the psychological
aspect of the phenomenon. He wrote:
The unreality which is here in question is purely relative to the direction
in which our attention is engaged, for we are immersed in realities and
cannot pass out of them; only, if the present reality is not the one we are
seeking, we speak of the absence of this sought for reality wherever we find
the presence of another.66

This is certainly in line with (2), and it is compatible with (1). However, it also
suggests that the attitudinal account is ultimately antirealist: the distinction in
question would collapse and absence perception would reduce to a frustrated way
of perceiving what is present.
In my opinion, this is where the issue becomes strictly philosophical. No
­experimental test will ever establish whether Bergson was right. From a general
ontological perspective, his account is actually rather attractive. After all, absences
are “spooky things”, as David Lewis once said,67 and one may want to resist the
temptation to reify them on psychological grounds. But whether we are in fact
dealing with a mere temptation is a matter of philosophical debate. Unfortuna-
tely, this means that the question can hardly be addressed in its own right. Sartre
himself was in the business of developing a “phenomenological ontology”, as the
subtitle of his book says,68 so his own arguments about Pierre’s case are driven
crucially by that agenda. Bergson’s arguments, in turn, were part of his much

65
Gale (1976), p. 60. For the Scholastic view, see e.g. Aquinas, De ente et essentia.
66
Bergson (1907), pp. 296–297; Eng. trans. p. 273. On the similarities and differences between Sartre and
Bergson in this regard, see Richmond (2007).
67
Lewis (2004), p. 283.
68
The full subtitle, in French, is Essai d’ontologie phénoménologique. In the original English translation listed
in the References it was rendered as An essay on phenomenological ontology, which became A phenomenological
essay on ontology in the paperback edition and later reprints. As the translator eventually acknowledged, neither
translation is fully adequate and a better rendering would have been An essay in phenomenological ontology (with
the hope the reader would hear “a fuller echo of the French essai as ‘attempt’, which English ‘essay’ has mostly
lost”); see Barnes (1995), pp. 55–56.

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wider project to revive evolutionary orthogenesis against Darwin’s account of

natural selection, so again it is difficult to assess them on independent grounds.
Are there any unprejudiced arguments that can be offered to determine whether
all this talk of absence perception is fundamentally a misguided way of describing
our perception of things present and in contact to the senses?
I am not optimistic. The literature that followed is actually quite rich, but when
stripped from their broader motivations, philosophical contributions tend to
turn into a battle of raw intuitions. It is not even clear whether focusing on sim-
pler, schematic cases can help. Richard Taylor, for example, introduced a scenario
that is as simple and schematic as one might hope: two small circles, one with a
dot in the middle, the other without.69

Fig. 12. A dot’s presence vs. its absence.

His point was that a straightforward comparison will reveal that the absence of
the dot in the second figure is perceived as immediately as the dot’s presence in
the first.
The only “evidence” we could cite for the fact that there is no dot in the
circle is simply the fact that there is none, which amounts to saying that
there is no inference here at all, that the perception of this fact is as imme-
diate as the perception of the circle itself.70

Alas, he felt compelled to add a footnote: “Provided, of course, that we look for
a dot”.71 That seems to undermine the whole point, leading others to endorse the
opposite view. After all, as George Molnar pointed out, the circle on the left is
not only empty of dots; it is also empty of dashes, crosses, and whatnot (as Sartre’s
café was empty of Wellington, Valéry, etc.). Thus:
The perception of the circle’s being empty of dots is in fact the result of an
inference from our direct perception of the circle together with our failure
to perceive the looked-for dot in the circle.72

69
Taylor (1952).
70
Ibid., p. 445.
71
Ibid., n. 42.
72
Molnar (2000), p. 79.

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Whether there is indeed an inference involved in the process is perhaps something

that can be tested experimentally. But even so, in the end we are left wondering:
do we see the dot’s absence, or do we simply see a white, encircled region that (in
this context) we conceptualize as a missing dot?73
There are also arguments based on less schematic but more concrete illustrations.
My favorite example is due to Tyron Goldschmidt, who recently published an
article aimed at demonstrating that absences have causal power.74 The article
consists, literally, of blank text, except for the title and the author’s details. It is
actually not the first time that someone succeeds in enriching their academic CV
with humorous effortlessness. Previous cases include Robert Fiengo and How-
ard Lasnik’s ‘Nonrecoverable Deletion in Syntax’,75 Dennis Upper’s ‘The Unsuc-
cessful Self-treatment of a Case of “Writer’s Block”’ (published along with the
“Comments” of a referee and followed by several “Replication” studies),76 and, in
a way, Alexander Goldberg and CJ Chemjobber’s ‘A Comprehensive Overview of
Chemical-free Consumer Products’.77 But the point of Goldschmidt’s “article” is
not just academic humor, or sarcasm. The point is that the surprise with which
the readers react when they see the blank page would demonstrate that the ab-
sence of text has genuine causal powers. Of course, the publication of the article
had its own causal consequences; among other things, it spawned some debate
on the internet and a few official replies, including Michael Della Rocca’s equally
blank ‘Tractatus Parmenideo-Philosophicus’.78 However, that is irrelevant: the
article’s publication is a perfectly positive event. Goldschmidt’s point is that it is
the absence of text in the article that has causal efficiency.
Unfortunately, also in this case there seem to be good reasons to think otherwise.
One could equally argue that it isn’t the absence of text that has causal efficiency
but, rather, the white page. The readers see it as an absence of text, but what ma-
kes them blink in surprise is their perception of the page itself, which is perfectly
present.79 In fact, I suspect people would blink just as much if the page were in a
different color. (Such was the rejoinder I submitted, though it was rejected). The

73
The case is amply discussed in the philosophical literature. See e.g. Kukso (2006), Sorensen (2008), ch. 13,
Richardson (2010), Mac Cumhaill (2018), and Payton (2021), §6.2.3.
74
Goldschmidt (2016).
75
Fiengo and Lasnik (1972).
76
See Upper (1974) along with Molloy (1983), Skinner et al. (1985), Didden et al. (2007), Artino (2016), and
Ampatzidis (2021), inter alia.
77
Goldberg and Chem­job­ber (2014). Strictly speaking, here the empty text (two pages) is preceded by an abs-
tract. Moreover, the article didn’t quite make it to publication, in view of the fact that printing is not chemical-
free, though it was made available in print-like format on the journal’s online blog. It was then published “in
German” as Goldberg et al. (2016).
78
Chapter 12 of Della Rocca (2020), p. 291, though Della Rocca says the chapter was conceived i­ ndependently.
For a more canonical reply, see Oderberg (2019).
79
O’Shaughnessy (2000), p. 330, makes a similar point, though his example is different: a letter where the
signature is missing.

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 Varzi, On Perceiving Abs nces

Fig. 13. Goldschmidt’s article (left) and my would-be rejoinder (right).

journal readers would blink at the unexpected presence, i.e., a white or colored
expanse, conceptualizing it as an absence of what they expected.
This is not to say that the perceiving-as account is unproblematic. Indeed, one major
worry is precisely that it seems to necessitate conceptual content.80 With ­reference
to Farennikova’s stolen-laptop scenario, for instance, Laura Gow writes:
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 dis-
appeared, and the perceptual experience we have when looking at the table
on an occasion where we have not brought our laptop?81
This is not necessarily a problem in the case at issue, as it isn’t in Goldschmidt’s case
or other cases we have been discussing: we do have the concept laptop, and surely
every reader of an academic journal possesses the concept text. But aren’t there also
cases where a subject may be said to have an absence experience even if they do not
possess a suitable concept under which to categorize it? For example, the infants
in Xu and Carey’s experiments lack the concept cat, yet they show surprise when
one of the two cats disappears (Figure 10, left); how could we possibly explain their
surprise in terms of their seeing the one cat as an absence of the other cat? Perhaps
one answer is that we need not explain it that way; we could simply say that they
see it as an absence of the other object. After all, that infants possess the general
sortal concept object is precisely the intended moral of Xu and Carey’s findings.

80
It is actually an open empirical question whether perceiving something as an F always requires the posses-
sion of the concept F (see e.g. Brewer, 2007, and Orlandi, 2011); here the issue concerns the perception of
something as an absence of F, which may work differently.
81
Gow (2021), p. 173.

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Alternatively, and more generally, one might respond that the worry is misplaced;
it doesn’t concern the conditions for successful as of perceptions but the very phe-
nomenology of expectations. Can we have a frustrated expectation about an F if we
lack the concept F altogether? This question would seem to arise for the direct per-
ception view just the same. Either way, it’s clear that the issue is crucial. (It becomes
even more pressing if we think that non-human animals, too, can have Sartrean ex-
periences, as when a dog runs to its food bowl at the usual time and finds it empty).
On the other hand, the perceiving-as account may claim certain advantages in
cases that would otherwise seem intractable. Suppose that when Sartre enters the
café, Pierre is in fact there, but disguised as a bartender with fake mustache and
beard. Sartre does not recognize him and, after inspecting the room, finds himself
saying, “He is not here”. In this scenario, what Sartre says is false, whereas it is
true in the original scenario. Nonetheless we may want to claim that he has the
same experience in both cases. Principles (1) and (2) do not suffice to warrant this
claim, unless the notion of (frustrated) expectation is relativized to the mode of
presentation of the expected item: Sartre expects to see Pierre qua Pierre. It is not
clear how or even whether such a qualification could be incorporated in a good
theory of direct absence perception. On the perceiving-as account, however, it
would be easy enough: in both scenarios, Sartre sees whatever is present as the
absence of what he expected—rightly so in the first case, wrongly in the second.
(Here the absence-of-perceiving account might also claim adequacy: in both ca-
ses, Sartre is equally struck by his failure to see Pierre—because Pierre is in fact
absent or because he is present but not recognizable).

6. Perceiving an absence vs. perceiving that something is absent

The last distinction I listed is even more controversial. Did Sartre see Pierre’s ab-
sence or did he rather see that Pierre was absent? When Louis Béroud and the Lou-
vre crowds “gazed at the dusty space” where the Mona Lisa used to smile, did they
see the absence of the painting or did they simply see that the painting was gone?
The difference is not negligible. As Fred Dretske famously argued, seeing-that re-
quires suitable epistemic states whereas bare seeing does not.82 You can see an apple
without seeing that it is an apple (you might think you are looking at a t­omato),
and conversely, you can see that an apple has been bitten without ­having seen anyo-
ne take the bite. Similarly, one might have seen Pierre leave the café w
­ ithout seeing
that he was leaving (e.g., because he was in disguise) as one might have seen that
Pierre had left the café without actually seeing him leave. The opposition, here, is
different from the opposition between seeing and s­ eeing-as of the previous section.
The latter is perhaps conceptual, but it is g­ enerally not epistemic: we can see the

82
See Dretske (1969).

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moon as a yellow disk even though we know that it isn’t. By contrast, seeing-that
is always epistemic: to see that P is to hold a belief that P based on what one sees
(a belief that must be true, since seeing is factive).83 So the present opposition is
genuinely different from the previous one, and the question legitimate: might all
putative Sartrean experiences be, at bottom, experiences of epistemic seeing?
Sartre himself was well aware of the issue. His remarks are hardly helpful, though.
He wrote:
Is there an intuition of Pierre’s absence, or does negation indeed enter in
only with judgment? At first sight it seems absurd to speak here of intuiti-
on since to be exact there could not be an intuition of nothing and since
the absence of Pierre is this nothing. Popular consciousness, however, bears
witness to this intuition. Do we not say, for example, “I suddenly saw that
he was not there”.84

It is puzzling that the cited sentence is not followed by a question mark. But
even more puzzling is that the sentence itself does not quite vindicate the alleged
intuition: the object of “suddenly saw” is a that-clause, so the negation does enter
with a judgment (albeit not the main judgment).85 Similar considerations apply
to the writings of other authors I have mentioned. For example, after discussing
the laptop case, Farennikova writes:
Our life is replete with more mundane examples. We discover that there
is no milk in the fridge, notice an absence of a colleague in a meeting, or
see that the keys are missing from the drawer. These are routine cases of
perceiving an absence.86

Note the double switch in language from epistemic perception to straight percep-
tion to epistemic perception again. Of course, Farennikova is perfectly aware of
the difference, and her overall account is in fact meant to do justice (among other
things) to our natural inclination to express absence perception in terms of factive
perceptual contents. Still, it is telling that the inclination is so natural and one may
be inclined to take the inclination seriously: to see the absence of something just is
to see that something is absent.
As Farennikova herself notes, there are several arguments one could offer against
this conclusion. For example, one could argue that sometimes we seem to
have ­experiences of absence that feel completely “instantaneous and lacking in
­conscious effort”.87 Moreover, the phenomenology of absence exhibits a certain

83
This is the accepted view. Some authors actually hold that all seeing, including bare seeing and seeing-as,
reduces to seeing-that; see e.g. Kvart (1993). For a recent discussion, see Overgaard (2022).
84
Sartre (1943), p. 44; Eng. trans. p. 9.
85
Mac Cumhaill (2018) analyzes the issue in detail.
86
Farennikova (2013), p. 430.
87
Ibid., p. 435.

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“resilience to change of belief ” that seems to elude a purely epistemic account.

The perceptual experience elicited by those curious photographs in which a
­performing gymnast appears headless (because of the camera’s angle) would be a
case in point: the effect is so striking that the appearance persists even if we do
not believe what we see. Similarly with real-life illusions. In the 1930s there was
a popular sideshow featuring Olga, a “headless lady” miraculously kept alive by
“doctor” Egon Heineman and his assistant: people knew that it was a trick, yet
they were struck by the apparent absence of Olga’s head.

Fig. 14. A “headless” gymnast and Heineman’s “headless lady” illusion.88

Once again, however, such arguments are hardly conclusive.89 The first is
open to empirical confutation; the relevant perceptions might be computed
at a ­subpersonal level. The second, in turn, may be rebutted by appealing to a
­different, more resilient epistemic state than the one implicit in the argument—
not a belief about how things are (which may change upon learning the facts) but
a belief about how things look (which persists).
Similar considerations apply to the non-visual cases of absence perception ­mention
earlier. Daniela Šterbáková, for example, is skeptic about the non-­epistemic ­nature
of silence perception and Brian O’Shaughnessy explicitly argues that h ­ earing
a silence is merely a coming-to-know of an absence of auditory experience.90
Or consider tactual perception. With reference to the bullet hole on the wall of
Jesse James’s house, Sorensen says the visitors were actually touching the hole wit-
hout knowing what it was. They believed it was the hole made by Ford’s gun after

88
Left: from the FIG Artistic Gymnastics World Championships in Doha, Qatar, 28 October 2018 (credit:
Noushad Thekkayil/Shutterstock); right: from McKennon (1972), p. 137 (courtesy: Harvey Doc Cann).
89
As Farennikova (2013), pp. 436–437, acknowledges.
90
See Šterbáková (2020) and O’Shaughnessy (2000), p. 329.

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the bullet passed through Jesse James’s skull, but a 1995 exhumation revealed
no exit wound in the skull; the hole must come from a collateral shot by Ford’s
brother, Charley. Thus, “the tourists felt Charley’s hole but did not feel that it
was Charley’s hole”.91 This is a compelling argument. However, granted that the
visitors did not feel that it was Charley’s hole, it does not follow that they felt the
hole; one could still describe the situation by saying that they were touching the
wall and feeling that it had a hole (a hole about which they had false beliefs).

7. Concluding thoughts
Let us recap. Do we have good reasons to think that sometimes we undergo
Sartrean experiences of absence perception? It seems clear enough that such an
experience would enjoy a phenomenological character that makes it different
from (i) the illusory perception of something absent, and presumably also from
(ii) the mere absence of a perception. However, it remains unclear whether the
candidate cases involve anything more than (iii) perceiving whatever is present as
an absence (the absence of something we expected to be present) or (iv) percei-
ving that something is absent. Admittedly, the cases we considered form a mixed
bag. But even the most striking examples discussed in the literature appear to be
underdetermined with respect to (iii) and (iv).
These remarks apply also to our starting case, the fishy hole. When people say
they see a fish, i.e., effectively, a fish-shaped hole, they report a certain visual
experience. Clearly, they are not merely experiencing an optical illusion. Nor are
they experiencing a mere failure to see something; they do fail to see the fish that
you cut out and threw away, but that is not what they are telling us. They are
reporting a successful visual experience. Nonetheless it remains unclear whether
their report is to be taken literally. Might their experience be described more ade-
quately in terms of their conceptualizing what they are actually seeing—the paper
you are holding up—as a fish, i.e., a fish-shaped hole? Might it be described as the
experience of seeing that there is a fish-shaped hole in the paper you are holding
up? Figure-ground considerations do not by themselves settle these questions.
They tell us that the hole is visually salient, but its peculiar figural status—it is a
see-through figure after all—leaves it open whether its perception involves con-
ceptual or epistemic elements.
In the opening section, I said there is an important sense in which these questi-
ons must be addressed independently of any metaphysical theory concerning the
nature of the relevant absences (the nature of holes, for example). We are dealing
with perceptual experiences whose variety, while wide ranging, appears to share a
vivid phenomenological character that must be taken at face value. At the same

91
Sorensen (2018), p. 117.

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time, we have seen that their assessment involves arguments and decisions that
are fundamentally philosophical, especially with regard to (iii) and (iv). I have
tried to remain neutral, though I trust it’s clear that I feel rather skeptical about
the possibility of resolving the matter on neutral grounds. I am also skeptical
about the possibility of resolving the matter on empirical grounds. As I said in
relation to Bergson, we can hardly count on experimental findings to determine
whether his view, or any other philosophical position, is correct. However, this
is not to say that there is no room for progress based on empirical data. So let
me end on a positive note. Philosophical arguments and decisions rely largely on
intuitions; yet intuitions can be educated, and in the present case their education
can surely benefit from the empirical data we accrue (as we saw, for example, in
relation to Xu and Carey’s findings). This is generally true of the philosophy of
perception. It is especially true, I think, and very much worth considering, when
it comes to the elusive phenomenon that goes under the elusive rubric of the
perception of absences.

Acknowledgements
This article is based on my keynote presentation at the 22nd Scientific Conference of the
Society for Gestalt Theory and its Applications (GTA) held in Trieste, Italy, on June 7–9,
2022. I am thankful to the Conference organizers, particularly Tiziano Agostini, Walter
Coppola, and Serena Cattaruzza, and to the audience for their constructive feedback and
engaging discussion.

Abstract
Can we really perceive absences, i.e., missing things? Sartre tells us that when he arrived
late for his appointment at the café, he saw the absence of his friend Pierre. Is that really
what he saw? Where was it, exactly? Why didn’t Sartre see the absence of other people
who were not there? Why did other people who were there not see the absence of Pierre?
The perception of absences gives rise to a host of conundrums and is constantly on the
verge of conceptual confusion. Here I focus on the need to be clear about four sorts of
distinctions: (i) the difference between perceiving an absence and perceiving something
that is absent; (ii) the difference between perceiving an absence and an absence of per-
ceiving; (iii) the difference between perceiving an absence and perceiving something as
an absence; and (iv) the difference between perceiving an absence and perceiving that
something is absent.
Keywords: Absence, perception, figure-ground, seeing-as, seeing-that

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Author’s Biography
Achille C. Varzi (b.1958) is John Dewey Professor of Philosophy at Columbia U­ niversity,
New York, where he has been teaching since 1995. He has published widely on metaphys-
ics, philosophical logic, and the philosophy of language and literature. His first book,
Holes and Other Superficialities (with Roberto Casati), appeared with MIT Press in 1994.
His most recent book, Mereology (with A. J. Cotnoir), was published by Oxford Univer-
sity Press in 2021.
Address: Department of Philosophy, Columbia University, 1150 Amsterdam Avenue, New York, NY 10027,
U.S.A.
Website: http://www.columbia.edu/~av72
E-mail: achille.varzi@columbia.edu
Orcid: 0000-0001-9410-0405

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