Talking about Looks.
Review of philosophy and psychology January 1, 2017 Kathrin Glüer 13 citations
The word 'looks' in English has several distinct meanings: epistemic (inference from appearance), comparative (resemblance), and phenomenal (direct description of visual appearance). This paper argues these are genuinely different senses (polysemy). For phenomenal 'looks', the author contends it does not express a propositional attitude (like 'seems to me that...') but directly ascribes a relational property to an object—a 'look' that is ultimately phenomenal, involving the subject's experience. The paper endorses an argument that phenomenal 'looks' can apply to a wide range of properties beyond color, shape, and distance, raising a puzzle about how this works compositionally. These linguistic findings support phenomenal intentionalism, the view that visual experiences themselves are propositional attitudes with contents about how things look.