Vol.:(0123456789) Erkenntnis https://doi.org/10.1007/s10670-021-00484-9 1 3 ORIGINAL RESEARCH Visual Experience and The Laws of Appearance Mark Sainsbury 1 Received: 29 March 2021 / Accepted: 16 October 2021 © The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature B.V. 2021 Abstract Adam Pautz (Pautz, Nanay (ed), Current Controversies in philosophy of perception, Routledge, New York and London, 2017, Pautz, Philosophical Issues 30:257–272, 2020) coined the phrase “the Laws of Appearance” for some underappreciated fea- tures of perceptual experience. Pautz suggests that the modal status of the Laws pre- sents a puzzle: it is problematic to regard them as necessary, and also problematic to regard them as contingent. This paper presents possible counterexamples to the laws, suggesting that they are contingent as originally stated (Sect. 1). But the laws are readily modifed so as to express constitutive features of normal human visual experience, and thus understood they are metaphysically necessary (Sect. 2). Analo- gous pictorial laws govern representational painting, and these can be explained by appealing to the representational format of the medium (Sect. 3). This invites the question whether there might be format-based explanations of the Laws of Appear- ance. If so, can the contingency of the format facts be squared with the necessity of the Laws? The paper answers “Yes” to both questions (Sect. 4). 1 The Puzzle Laws of appearance, says Pautz, govern what kinds of experiences are possible. Three of his Laws (direct quotation, with ellipses, from his 2020: 258) are: Exclusion Law. You cannot experientially represent the same surface as pure blue and pure green at the same time. 1 Berkeley’s Law. You cannot experientially represent that something has a color quality without also experientially representing that it takes up space in some way. * Mark Sainsbury marksainsbury@austin.utexas.edu 1 Department of Philosophy, Waggener Hall, University of Texas at Austin, Austin, TX 78712, USA 1 Since a single surface can be multi-colored, we might prefer to hear this as saying that one cannot rep- resent the same area as both pure blue and pure green at the same time.