Xxxxx’x Bat Argument. In What is it like to be a bat?, Xxxxxx Xxxxx (1974) introduced one of the most influential attacks on physicalism, which aims to show that physical theory will leave perspectives and facts dependent on perspectives out from an objective description of reality, thus failing to describe reality as such. Xxxxx chose the bat as an example because of the animal’s radically different perceptual apparatus: bats use echolocation to perceive the world and rely on sonar to detect reflected sounds and get a sense of their environment. This is very much unlike human perception2: for example, bats are capable of finely distinguishing auditory information and so perceive distance, size, shape, motion, and texture, which we do through visual perception (Xxxxx 1974: 438). Xxxxx’x proposal goes as follows: even if we have an exhaustive third-person physical account of a bat's perception, behaviour, physiology, it does not seem that this will give us knowledge of what it is like to be a bat for a bat (Xxxxx 1974: 439). To understand this in greater depth, it is important to see how this connects to Xxxxx'x conceptions of subjectivity and objectivity. He defined ‘subjective’ as that which is perspective-dependent and ‘objective’ as that which is perspective-independent. The notion of ‘perspective’ here is similar to the pre- theoretical ‘point of view’ as the locus of the ‘I’ which looks at the world, such as in the case 2 See (Xxxxxxxxxxxx & Xxxxxx 2000) for an argument that humans do use echolocation as well, although most people’s knowledge of that experience is very limited. I do not see this as undermining Xxxxx’x position in any way considering that the bat’s echolocation is just an example that can be replaced with other actual or hypothetical cases (e.g. an alien’s natural sense of pulsar proximity or the chemical communication of various animals such as deer, mules, and big cats). of someone looking at an apple in front of them, seeing its front but not its back, from the unique location that they occupy. For Xxxxx, the condition for subjectivity is having a perspective on the world, and there are facts which pertain to particular perspectives which would be missing from a purely objective description of reality. His perspective-independent conception of objectivity does not mean that a fact is completely disconnected from any particular perspective, essentially being perspective-less, as an ideal and completely impartial point of view, but rather that it is not ti...
