Are arcane features of causal relations represented in experience?
Someone might doubt the causal thesis on the grounds that causal relations are the wrong kind of thing to be represented in visual experience, given the nature of our perceptual apparatus. Causation, the thought goes, is a kind of counterfactual dependence, or a kind of energy transfer, or a kind of lawful necessitation – and none of these things can be represented in visual experience. I will criticize two specific instances of this doubt, and then respond to the doubt in its general form. This doubt about the causal thesis has a two-part structure. The first part identifies a factor X, such that to experientially represent that one thing is causing something else to happen would be to represent factor X. Factor X could be a relation that (some true theory in metaphysics tells us) is the causal relation, or it could be a related property such that any instance of causation is also an instance of X. The second part provides what is supposed to be a principled reason to deny that factor
