In saying that the idea of our visual field
being located in our brain arose from a grammatical
misunderstanding, I did not mean to say that we could not give
sense to such a specification of locality. We could
e.g., easily imagine an experience which we
should describe by such a statement. Imagine that we
looked at a group of things in this room, and while we looked, a
probe was stuck into our brain, and it was found that if the point
of the probe reached a particular point in our brain, then a
particular small part of our visual field was thereby
obliterated. In this way we might coordinate points of
our brain to points of
14.
the visual image, and this
might make us say that the visual field was seated in
such-and-such a place in our brain. And if now
we asked the question “Where do you see the image of
this book?” the answer could be (as above)
“To the right of that pencil”, or
“In the left hand part of my visual field”,
or again: “three inches behind my left
eye”.