A Sense of the Possible: The Horizons of Visual Experience

By Jonathan Mitchell

A Sense of the Possible addresses a longstanding puzzle about visual experience: how we perceive whole three-dimensional objects despite seeing only the surfaces facing us. This book argues that the solution lies in recognising the role of a sense of the possible in perception--an implicit awareness that reaches beyond what is currently visible to the hidden parts of an object. This implicit element compensates for our limited viewpoint, allowing us to experience objects as complete.

The book opens with the work of Edmund Husserl. More than any other philosopher Husserl should be credited with putting this puzzle and the issues surrounding it at the centre stage of an understanding of visual experience. Indeed he has a distinctive term for the component of intentional experiences that 'refer beyond', namely an experiences' intentional horizon. Following an initial reconstruction of the notion of an intentional horizon, the majority of the book is given over to a systematic exploration of the character and role of intentional horizons in visual experiences as of three-dimensional objects, such that it seeks to answer just what is required to see such objects as being complete three-dimensional things. In doing so, the book critically evaluates a range of proposals, and then proposes its own original Modal-Ability view.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0198999003
• ISBN13: 9780198999003
• Release Date: October 2026
• Publisher: Oxford University Press
• Length: 248 Pages