Seeing Others as Objects: Perceptual Objectification

In discussions of objectification, the use of visual language is ubiquitous. It is striking that the literature often talks about treating and seeing someone as an object in the same breath. Yet accounts of objectification focus on objectifying treatment and leave the notion of objectifying perception unexplained. This prompts the question of our paper. The Perceptual Question: What does it mean to see someone as an object? Our aim in this paper is to develop an affordance-based account of perceptual objectification. Put simply, affordances are the possibilities for action in an agent’s environment. To perceptually objectify someone is a matter of perceiving the object-related affordances they present as opposed to their person-related affordances. We argue that this account explains the close connection between seeing and treating someone as a person.