When philosophers call a concept promiscuous, they don't mean it's sleeping around, but they do mean it has the potential to wreck certain relationships by spreading its consequences without due concern or consideration. The relationships that matter in philosophy are the ones a concept keeps with its neighbours, for example the relation between the concepts of image and reflection, information and cause, presence and absence. A carefully handled concept is respectful of those contrasts and doesn't switch their bed partners. A promiscuous one is less fussy about whom it goes home with, and the trouble isn't any single encounter but the cumulative damage.
Psychologists have a lovely example. Ask young children why rocks are pointy and many will tell you it's so that animals have something to scratch their itches on. Clouds are for raining, and the sun is for lighting us up and keeping us warm. Deborah Kelemen, who studied this, called it "promiscuous teleology": the idea that things exist for some end or goal (telos is Greek for "end"), applied to anything. It's charming in a five-year-old, but notice what it does. If everything has a purpose, then saying a spade is for digging no longer tells you anything special about spades or digging. A concept only does useful work when there are things it doesn't apply to. There are counterfeit coins only because there are genuine ones, and if everything were an image, say, the word would have no work left to do, no contrasts to make, no conceptual itches to scratch.
Some years ago Jonathan Trigg reviewed Alva Noë's Varieties of Presence. Noë had argued that perceptual presence is a matter of availability: things are present to us when we know how we would have to move to bring them into view. He went so far as to say that a friend living abroad is very faintly present to him, perceptually, because he has a sense of what he would have to do to see him. Trigg's reply was simple and devastating. If that were right, "the whole perceptible universe would be faintly perceptually present to me at any moment, since I have, at any moment, a 'sense' of what I would have to do to 'come to grips' with any particular bit of it (get in a space ship etc. etc.)." And he added, drily, that he suspected Noë might take this "as an engaging 'discovery'."
I was struck by this, because I'd arrived at the same reductio by a different route, in a piece I've been writing in the form of a playful letter to Bertrand Russell. In the first chapter of his shortest book, Russell walks around his table and concludes that its shape and colour vary with his viewpoint, so that what we see is not the real table. But if an object that fills our view recedes to a vanishing point, then it follows that everything else must grow to fill the space it vacates. You can't have one isolated change without the whole universe changing to accommodate it. In both cases a perfectly reasonable thought, applied to its logical limit, ends up taking in everything. That's promiscuity, and however entertaining and seductive it is at first, it always does damage in the end. Home-wreckers are at least somewhat more local in their infidelities.
So I was interested to find Noë, in a recent lecture on love and consciousness, insisting that pictures are made, not found: they are artifacts, with makers and histories. So far so good. But he goes on to say that every picture implicitly "comes with a caption," as if what a picture is of depended on what someone might say about it, and he endorses the art historian Anne Hollander's claim that "the picture gives the standard by which the direct awareness is assessed." I couldn't disagree more. People set and settled the standard long before anyone reached for a picture. What a picture is of usually needs no caption at all, and while pictures sometimes serve well enough when we check what we see, they were never the standard. When a dispute needs settling, it is the method closest to reality that settles it, not the most sophisticated form of representational artifice. Disregard that important point and a judge and jury might disabuse you even before the satirists do.
The real trouble, though, comes when Noë insists that pictures must be distinguished from images, and that images are natural phenomena. "They are very common. Indeed, they're cheap." There is an image of the sky in the surface of a pond. There is an image on the retina, though nobody ever sees it. And then the floodgates open: "it's not unreasonable, I think, to imagine that every point in space is a point to which rays of light focus and thus can be thought of as creating images. Images that don't matter." That's an infinity of images invoked and summarily dismissed in one stroke of loveless disregard.
Images that don't matter, at every point in space. This is promiscuity of cosmic proportions, and it's exactly the same error Trigg caught in 2013. Consider the reflection in the pond. There is no single image lying on the water waiting to be found. What you see there depends entirely on where you stand, how high your eyes are, the angle of the light, the stillness of the surface and the aperture you look through. wait a moment or move a step and it's a different reflection. Bring a second person and there are two. Put a camera on a tripod and there's a third. The reflection isn't a thing in or on the pond at all. It's a state of affairs: sky, water, light and a viewer arranged in a particular way. Multiply the possible viewers by every point in space in just one chosen instant and you have infinitely many "images," none of which anyone sees and none of which, by Noë's own admission, matters. A word stretched that far has stopped meaning anything. The retinal "image," which no one has ever seen or could see, is the most neglected of them all: the lovechild of a brief affair between optics and pictorial practice, and pressed into the service of misleading theory.
The difference between a reflection and an image is worth spelling out, because ordinary speech blurs it. If you see your lover standing behind you in the mirror, it is them you see, not an image of them, however casually we might say we caught their image in the glass. Try to kiss that image, as we might kiss a photograph of someone we love, and you won't even find yourself kissing their reflection, only the cold hard surface of the mirror, with your own reflection staring back in disappointment.
Reflection is ordinary and widespread, so Noë isn't wrong that it's common. But he doesn't even attempt to distinguish between specular reflection, the mirror-like kind we see in a still pond, and diffuse reflection, the scattering of light from every matte surface around us. Most of the light that reaches our eyes is diffuse, and diffuse light forms no image at any point in space. It arrives from every direction at once, and only an aperture or a lens can sort it into a projection. Light doesn't simply "focus" at every point in space; something has to focus it. And even then it only ever does so by degrees, as anyone who has spent time buried in a little optics knows. Every aperture and every lens blurs what it projects: a lens brings one distance into focus and softens the rest, and even its sharpest plane is softened by diffraction. Noë's perfect points of focus, scattered throughout space, are something no optics has ever delivered.
The contrast with the projection inside a camera obscura is also telling, because that is extremely rare in nature outwith eyes, apart from the odd dappled shadow beneath a tree, where gaps between the leaves throw little discs of sunlight onto the ground. When light is channelled through an aperture into a darkened chamber, with a wall or screen to catch it, the result is what made it possible to capture, fix and share photographic images. But the projection itself is live in a way no image ever is. It changes as the scene changes, moment by moment. Images are fixed in a medium; reflections and projections are not. That's why we trust a mirror, or the light thrown through a pinhole, in a way we never quite trust an image, even a live moving image, which is itself necessarily a succession of fixed stills.
The irony is that Noë has the tools to put this right in the very same lecture. His second distinction is between relations and relationships. Relations, he says, are cheap and hold in spite of whatever anyone thinks: being older than the hills, say, or the solar system for that matter. Relationships, on the other hand, are made, fragile and hard-won. By his own lights, then, an optical projection is a relation, cheap, everywhere and unattended. But what makes something an image, as the rest of us agree, is a relationship: someone looking, using, comparing and sometimes making. It's captured in in our language, in the word image, and is not something Noë can simply redefine in order to seduce us into his way of thinking. Noë mistakes the projector beam for the image it projects. The word itself comes from pictorial practice, and it brings that practice with it wherever it goes. Had Noë applied his second distinction to his first, his countless images of little matter would never have been fathered.
And love? Noë argues that consciousness is the work of making relationships, and that love is the dedication to that work. I have a good deal of sympathy with the idea that seeing is an achievement and doesn't come free. In fact I think the ability to communicate our perceptions, as many animals clearly do, is what distinguishes perceiving from mere sensing, which makes perception a relationship, not merely a relation. But a lover who loves everyone loves no one in particular, and a concept that takes in everything picks out nothing. Noë himself raises the awkward question, whether we must then love everything we are conscious of, even what we hate, and leaves it hanging. He ends his lecture by observing that a computer "can never have an itch it can't scratch." True enough. But a concept that scratches every itch in sight has no itches left of its own. The answer is in the title of his own talk. Love is selective, effortful and faithful to its object. Promiscuity is none of these, which is why there's no love in it.
Sources:
Jonathan Trigg, review of Alva Noë, Varieties of Presence, Essays in Philosophy 14:2 (2013), 303–322.
Deborah Kelemen, "Why Are Rocks Pointy? Children's Preference for Teleological Explanations of the Natural World," Developmental Psychology (1999).
Alva Noë, "Love's Work: Consciousness and Love," Forum Humanum Lecture, The New School for Social Research, New York, 5 September 2025.
