Looks Unhelpful

Abstract By looking at it you come to know that a thing is an apple. How? A natural answer is that this is down to how it looks—its superficial visual appearance. Looks Views treat our acquaintance with such looks as accounting for how visual knowledge is secured. Here I argue that for many pairings of properties and perceivers, Looks Views will turn out not to work. We can visually track many properties through huge variation in things’ visual appearances. For such properties, no kind of look will play the explanatory role Looks Views demanded. Sometimes, then, you might secure visual knowledge that something is an apple but not by way of its superficial visual appearance. That conclusion may seem difficult to swallow. I argue that at least many of our intuitions about the roles of looks can nonetheless be assuaged.