The Visual Presence of Determinable Properties

This chapter explains and defends a way of understanding the idea that properties of things, such as their shapes and colours, are visually present to a subject of experience. One central challenge to this idea concerns the discrimination of visible properties which, like shape and colour, admit of continuous variation. In response to this challenge, it is argued that the idea of the visual presence of a property is coherent, well-motivated, and empirically plausible, provided that we reject two traditional assumptions: (i) that maximally determinate properties, rather than just determinable properties, are visually present; (ii) that we can tell through introspection exactly which properties are visually present to us.