Seeing Others as Objects: Perceptual Objectification
Year: 2025
Type: article
Abstract: 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.
Source: Apollo (University of Cambridge)
DOI: 10.17863/cam.121178
Authors: McClelland, Thomas, Sliwa, Paulina
Language: English
Subfield: Cognitive Neuroscience
Field: Neuroscience
Domain: Life Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W7080580185
FWCI:
Cites:
Cited by:
Related to: