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According to the recentPerceptual Confidence view,perceptual experiences possess not only a representational content, but also a degree of confidence in that content. The motivations for this view are partly phenomenological and partly epistemic. We discuss both the phenomenological and epistemic motivations for the view, and the resulting account of the interface betweenperceptual experiences and degrees of belief. We conclude that, in their present state of development, orthodox accounts ofperceptualexperience are still (...) to be favoured over theperceptual confidence view. (shrink)

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I open my eyes and see that the lemon before me is yellow. States like this—states of seeing that $p$ —appear to be visualperceptual states, in some sense. They also appear to be propositional attitudes (and so states with propositional representational contents). It might seem, then, like a view ofperceptualexperience on which experiences have propositional representational contents—a Propositional View—has to be the correct sort of view for states of seeing that $p$ . And thus (...) we can’t sustain fully general non-Propositional but Representational, or Relational Views ofexperience. But despite what we might initially be inclined to think when reflecting upon the apparent features of states of seeing that $p$ , a non-propositional view of seeing that $p$ is, I argue, perfectly intelligible. (shrink)

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© Millar 2018This bold, provocative, and highly original book is in three Parts. Part I outlines a problem, sketches a solution, and defends a claim that is crucial to the solution—that ‘perceptual experiences and the processes by which they arise can be rational or irrational’. This claim is The Rationality of Perception. In Part II Siegel argues that the power of experiences to justify beliefs can be downgraded or upgraded by psychological precursors. Part III applies, and further develops, the (...) theoretical framework that has been outlined in the previous parts. The topics addressed there include fearful and wishful seeing, and selection effects as they bear on the character of experiences. The last chapter concerns the appraisal of culturally appropriated racial attitudes that can influence beliefs and, on Siegel’s view, visual experiences as well. The discussion throughout takes readers well off the beaten track and is to... (shrink)

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Commonsense epistemology regardsperceptualexperience as a distinctive source of knowledge of the world around us, unavailable in ‘blindsight’. This is often interpreted in terms of the idea thatperceptualexperience, through its representational content, provides us with justifying reasons for beliefs about the world around us. I argue that this analysis distorts the explanatory link betweenperceptualexperience and knowledge, as we ordinarily conceive it. I propose an alternative analysis, on which representational content (...) plays no explanatory role: we makeperceptual knowledge intelligible by appeal to experienced objects and features. I also present an account of how the commonsense scheme, thus interpreted, is to be defended: not by tracing the role ofexperience to its contribution in meeting some general condition on propositional knowledge (such as justification), but by subverting the assumption that it has to be possible to make the role ofexperience intelligible in terms of some such contribution. (shrink)

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In the last few years there has been an explosion of philosophical interest in perception; after decades of neglect, it is now one of the most fertile areas for new work.PerceptualExperience presents new work by fifteen of the world's leading philosophers. All papers are written specially for this volume, and they cover a broad range of topics to do with sensation and representation, consciousness and awareness, and the connections between perception and knowledge and between perception and (...) action. This will be the book on the philosophy of perception, a fascinating resource for philosophers and psychologists. (shrink)

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The idea thatperceptualexperience is transparent is generally used by naïve realists and externalist representationalists to promote an externalist account of the metaphysics ofperceptualexperience. It is claimed that the phenomenal character of ourperceptualexperience can be explained solely with reference to the externally located objects and properties which (for the representationalist) we represent, or which (for the naïve realist) partly constitute ourexperience. Internalist qualia theorists deny this, and claim (...) that the phenomenal character of ourperceptualexperience is internally constituted. However, my concern in this paper is not with the metaphysical debate, but with transparency as a phenomenological feature ofperceptualexperience. Qualia theorists have presented a number of examples ofperceptual experiences which, they claim, do not even seem to be transparent; these experiences involve objects or properties which seem to be internally realized. I argue, contrary to the qualia theorist’s claim, that the phenomenal character ofperceptualexperience can in fact be characterized solely with reference to externally located objects and properties, and the sense in which some features of ourperceptual experiences do not seem external is due to cognitive, notperceptual, phenomenology. (shrink)

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What is the phenomenal structure of ourperceptual experiences? In this talk, I suggest thatperceptual experiences – like consciousness in general – have a mereological structure, that is, a structure in which the most basic relation is that of parthood. I do not provide any definitive argument for this view. I just want to suggest (i) that the mereological approach is untouched by the usual objections coming from the proponents of the Unified Field Theory (James, Searle, Tye), (...) (ii) that the Unified Field Theory faces some important difficulties of its own. (shrink)

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This paper starts by distinguishing three views about the phenomenal character ofperceptualexperience. ‘Low-level theorists’ argue thatperceptualexperience is reducible to theexperience of low-level properties, ‘high-level theorists’ argue that we haveperceptual experiences of high-level properties, while ‘disunified view theorists’ argue thatperceptual seemings can present high-level properties. The paper explores how cognitive states can penetrateperceptualexperience and provides an interpretation of cognitive penetration that offers some support (...) for the high-level view. (shrink)

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According to Rorty, Davidson and Brandom, to have anexperience is to be caused by our senses to hold aperceptual belief. This article argues that the phenomenon of seeing-as cannot be explained by such a conception ofperceptualexperience. First, the notion ofexperience defended by the aforementioned authors is reconstructed. Second, the main features of what Wittgenstein called “seeing aspects” are briefly presented. Finally, several arguments are developed in order to support the main (...) thesis of the article: seeing-as cannot be explained by the conception ofexperience defended by Rorty, Davidson and Brandom. (shrink)

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Canperceptual experiences be states of uncertainty? We might expect them to be, if theperceptual processes from which they're generated, as well as the behaviors they help produce, take account of probabilistic information. Yet it has long been presumed thatperceptual experiences purport to tell us about our environment, without hedging or qualifying. Against this long-standing view, I argue thatperceptual experiences may well occasionally be states of uncertainty, but that they are never probabilistically structured. (...) I criticize a powerful line of reasoning that we should expectperceptualexperience to be probabilistic, given their interfaces with unconscious probabilistic information, with behavior responsive to it, and with credences. (shrink)

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This is an open access title available under the terms of a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 International licence. It is free to read at Oxford Scholarship Online and offered as a free PDF download from OUP and selected open access locations. Christopher S. Hill argues thatperceptualexperience constitutively involves representations of worldly items, and that the relevant form of representation can be explained in broadly biological terms. He then maintains that the representational contents ofperceptual experiences are (...)perceptual appearances, interpreted as relational, viewpoint-dependent properties of external objects. There is also a complementary explanation of how the objects that possess these properties are represented. Hill maintains thatperceptual phenomenology can be explained reductively in terms of the representational contents of experiences, and uses this doctrine to undercut the traditional arguments for dualism. This treatment ofperceptual phenomenology is expanded to encompass cognitive phenomenology, the phenomenology of moods and emotions, and the phenomenology of pain. Hill also offers accounts of the various forms of consciousness thatperceptual experiences can possess. One aim is to argue that phenomenology is metaphysically independent of these forms of consciousness, and another is to de-mystify the form known as phenomenal consciousness. The book concludes by discussing the relations of various kinds thatperceptual experiences bear to higher-level cognitive states, including relations of format, content, and justification or support. (shrink)

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A number of contemporary philosophers of mind have brought considerations from the study of aspect to bear on the ontological question howperceptual experiences persist over time. But, apart from rare exceptions, relatively little attention has been devoted to assess whether the way we talk aboutperceptual occurrences is of any relevance for discussions of ontological matters in general, let alone discussions about the ontological nature of perception. This piece examines whether considerations derived from the study of lexical (...) aspect have a significant bearing on what ontological views of perception we should endorse: I shall argue that such aspectual considerations are in fact of very little use for settling the relevant ontological issue. (shrink)

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In the last few years there has been an explosion of philosophical interest in perception; after decades of neglect, it is now one of the most fertile areas for new work.PerceptualExperience presents new work by fifteen of the world's leading philosophers. All papers are written specially for this volume, and they cover a broad range of topics dealing with sensation and representation, consciousness and awareness, and the connections between perception and knowledge and between perception and action. (...) This will be the book on the philosophy of perception, a fascinating resource for philosophers and psychologists. (shrink)

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I argue that the descriptions ofperceptualexperience offered by Kant and Merleau-Ponty are, contrary to what many commentators suppose, largely compatible. This is because the two are simply referring to different things when they talk aboutexperience: Kant to empirical cognition and Merleau-Ponty to perception. Consequently, while Merleau-Ponty correctly denies that Kant accurately describes the conditions for the possibility of perception, Kant nevertheless provides a plausible account of the conditions of empirical judgment. Further, the two approach (...)experience with different standards of normativity: Kant with the standard of justification, but Merleau-Ponty with the standard of what he calls “motivation”. I exemplify this approach through an analysis of the Second Analogy ofExperience. (shrink)

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The question whetherperceptual experiences justifyperceptual beliefs is ambiguous. One problem is the well familiar skeptical one. How canperceptual experiences justify beliefs if those experiences may systematically deceive us? Our experiences might be just as they are and yet the world might be radically different. But there is also another problem about the justification ofperceptual beliefs which arises independently of the above skeptical worry. This other problem has to do with our understanding of (...) the very notion of justification. It seems natural to think that justification can exist only in so far as what is justified is inferentially linked to the justifier. The question, then, is whetherperceptual experiences can serve as an inferential basis forperceptual beliefs. The content of experiences does not seem to be the same sort of content that is possessed by beliefs. So the nature of the relation between experiences and beliefs is far from obvious. In this paper I survey various attempts of justifying the view that there is an inferential relation between experiences and beliefs so that the latter can be justified by the former and I argue that none of those attempts is satisfactory. I also suggest that the problem which those attempts address may be illusory. Even though it seems true that experiences and beliefs possess different kinds of contents, there may be no logical gap between those contents that needs to be bridged by some philosophical reflection. (shrink)

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Philosophers have often argued that ascriptions of content are appropriate only to the personal level states of folk psychology. Against this, this paper defends the view that the familiar propositional attitudes and states defined over them are part of a larger set of cognitive proceses that do not make constitutive reference to concept possession. It does this by showing that states with nonconceptual content exist both inperceptualexperience and in subpersonal information-processing systems. What makes these states content-involving (...) is their satisfaction of certain basic conditions deriving from a general account of representation-driven behaviour that is neutral on the question of concept possession. It is also argued that creatures can be in states with nonconceptual content even though they possess no conceptual abilities at all. (shrink)

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Joint attention customarily refers to the coordinated focus of attention between two or more individuals on a common object or event, where it is mutually “open” to all attenders that they are so engaged. We identify two broad approaches to analyse joint attention, one in terms of cognitive notions like common knowledge and common awareness, and one according to which joint attention is fundamentally a primitive phenomenon of sensoryexperience. John Campbell’s relational theory is a prominent representative of the (...) latter approach, and the main focus of this paper. We argue that Campbell’s theory is problematic for a variety of reasons, through which runs a common thread: most of the problems that the theory is faced with arise from the relational view of perception that he endorses, and, more generally, they suggest thatperceptualexperience is not sufficient for an analysis of joint attention. (shrink)

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Perceptual experiences inform us about objective properties of things in our environment. But they also have perspectival character in the sense that they differ phenomenally when objects are viewed from different points of view. Contemporary representationalists hold, at a minimum, that phenomenal character supervenes on representational content. Thus, in order to account for perspectival character, they need to indentify a type of representational content that changes in appropriate ways with the perceiver’s point of view. Many representationlists, including Shoemaker and (...) Lycan, argue that such contents are best construed in terms of mind-dependent properties. Other representationalists, including Tye and Dretske, hold that these contents involve only mind-independent properties. Susanna Schellenberg has recently developed an account ofperceptualexperience that would serve these latter representationalists extremely well. She suggests that we can do justice to the perspectival character ofperceptualexperience by appeal to representations of a certain type of relational properties, so-called ‘situation-dependent properties.’ In this paper, I critically engage with Schellenberg’s proposal in order to show how mind-independent representationalists can explain perspectival character. I argue that appeal to situation-dependent properties is problematic. I then show that mind-independent representationalists can account for perspectical character by means of scenario contents in Christopher Peacocke’s sense. (shrink)

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Philosophers of perception often claim that usualperceptual experiences not only present particulars but also phenomenally present them as particulars. Nevertheless, despite the initial plausibility of this thesis, it is not clear what exactly it means to say that particularity is phenomenally presented. The paper aims to provide a deeper analysis of the claim thatperceptual experiences phenomenally present objects as particulars. In doing so, I distinguish two theses regarding phenomenally presented particularity: Generic Particularity and Specific Particularity. According (...) to the first thesis, vision phenomenally presents particularity of objects, understood as a general characteristic that may be shared by many entities. The second thesis states that vision phenomenally presents particularity of objects, understood as an individual characteristic unique to each particular. I argue that, relying on knowledge concerning the functioning ofperceptual mechanisms, vision does not phenomenally present generic particularity but it has certain abilities for presenting specific particularity. (shrink)

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The idea of nonconceptual contents proposes that there are mental contents at the level of the experiencing person that are individuated independently of ‘anything to do with the mind.’ Such contents are posited to meet a variety of theoretical and explanatory needs concerning concepts and conceptual mental contents which are individuated in terms having to do with the mind. So to examine the idea of nonconceptual content we need to examine whether we really need to posit such content and whether (...) there is a coherent, viable way of doing so. I will examine the idea of nonconceptual contents by considering Christopher Peacocke's attempt, in his Study of Concepts, to posit such contents.Three principal kinds of considerations motivate positing non-conceptual content: epistemological, phenomenological, and explanatory-psychological. A theory of knowledge might posit nonconceptual content in order to show that ourexperience contains the justificatory base for empirical thought as its own proper part. Non-conceptual content might also be posited in order to account for the finely detailed or determinate phenomenological character ofperceptualexperience. (shrink)

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How should we think ofperceptual experiences qua dynamic phenomena? Against an increasingly popular Heraclitean approach that frames them as irreducibly dynamic, the present book argues thatperceptual experiences may be described in terms of non-dynamic categories, such as properties, relations, and states.

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John McDowell and Bill Brewer famously defend the view that one can only have empirical beliefs if one’sperceptual experiences serve as reasons for such beliefs, where reasons are understood in terms of subject’s reasons. In this paper I show, first, that it is a consequence of the adoption of such a requirement for one to have empirical beliefs that children as old as 3 years of age have to considered as not having genuine empirical beliefs at all. But (...) we have strong reasons to think that 3-year-old children have empirical beliefs, or so I argue. If this is the case, McDowell and Brewer’s requirement for one to have empirical beliefs faces a strong challenge. After showing this, I propose an alternative requirement for one to have empirical beliefs, and argue that it should be favoured over McDowell and Brewer’s requirement. (shrink)

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Along with what McDowell has called the disjunctive conception ofexperience (DCE), and against a venerable tradition, the veridicalexperience that P and the subjectively indistinguishable hallucination that P are not type-identical mental states. According to McDowell, a powerful motivation for DCE is that it makes available the sole internalistically acceptable way out of a sceptical argument targeting the possibility ofperceptual knowledge. In this paper I state in explicit terms the sceptical argument McDowell worries about, and (...) show that DCE has not the epistemological merits that McDowell ascribes to it. To begin with, I join a series of commentators in arguing that the way out of the sceptical argument made available by DCE is not internalistically acceptable, and so argue that it is not a way out that an internalist about epistemic justification would have any special reason to prefer to a parallel externalist way out that does not commit to DCE. Secondly, I show that the internalist can resist the sceptical argument by denying a different premise of it that McDowell takes for granted. I conclude by maintaining that McDowell's epistemological motivation for DCE is undercut. (shrink)

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I take it for granted that sense experiential states provide reasons for empirical beliefs; indeed this claim forms the first premise of my central argument for (CC). 1 The subsequent stages of the argument are intended to establish that a person has such a reason for believing something about the way things are in the world around him only if he is in some mental state or other with a conceptual content: a conceptual state. Thus, given that sense experiential states (...) do provide reasons for empirical beliefs, they must have conceptual content. (shrink)

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A prominent number of contemporary theories of emotionalexperience—understood as occurrent, phenomenally conscious episodes of emotions with an affective character that are evaluatively directed towards particular objects or states of affairs—are motivated by the claim that phenomenally conscious affectiveexperience, when appropriate, grants us epistemic access not merely to features of theexperience but also to features of the object ofexperience, namely its value. I call this the claim of affect as a disclosure of value. (...) The aim of this paper is to clarify the sort of assumptions aboutexperience that we ought to avoid if we want to be able to argue that for the claim of affect as a disclosure of value. There are two core arguments in this paper. First, I argue that Mark Johnston’s account of affect as a disclosure of value, due to its naïve realist commitments, relapses into a position that is vulnerable to the same objection put forward by some naïve realists against intentionalist accounts ofperceptualexperience. Second, I argue that Michelle Montague’s account, due to its phenomenal intentionalist commitments, relapses into a position that is vulnerable to the same objections put forward against qualia theories of the phenomenal character ofperceptualexperience. The upshot of the paper is that the core assumptions embedded in the three dominant models ofexperience—namely naïve realism, different versions of intentionalism, and qualia theory—are problematic as found in contemporary accounts of affect as a disclosure of value. (shrink)

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According to a traditional Cartesian view of the mind, you have a privileged access to your own conscious experiences that nobody else can have. Therefore, you have more authority than anybody else on your own experiences.Perceptual experiences are selfintimating: you are aware of what you are consciously perceiving. If you report seeing a pink elephant, nobody is entitled to deny it. There may be no pink elephant, but you do have the consciousexperience of such elephant. However, (...) the progress in brain imaging might lead to the possibility that the scientist knows as well as you – or even better than you – what you are seeing, and even what you are hallucinating. What was only a thought experiment fourty years ago has become reality. Does brain reading challenge the privacy of the mind? Who has the most authority on your mind in case of conflict? You or the brain scientist? (shrink)

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This paper presents forms of multimodalperceptualexperience that undermine the claim that each aspect ofperceptualexperience is modality specific. In particular, it argues against the thesis that all phenomenal character is modality specific (even making an allowance for co-conscious unity). It concludes that a multimodalperceptual episode may have phenomenal features beyond those that are associated with the specific modalities.

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In the philosophy of perception, representationalism is the view that all phenomenological differences among mental states are representational differences, in other words, differences in content. In this paper I defend an alternative view which I call external sortalism, inspired by traditional adverbialism, and according to which experiences are not essentially representational. The central idea is that the external world serves as a model for sorting, conceptualizing, and reasoning surrogatively aboutperceptualexperience. On external sortalism, contents are construed as (...) a kind of gloss on experiences themselves. We can retain what is attractive about representationalism, namely, thatperceptual experiences can be evaluated for accuracy, without problematic commitment to the idea that they bear a substantive, representational relation to external objects and properties and that this relation determines the phenomenal character ofexperience. (shrink)

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Reflection on cases involving the occurrence of various types ofperceptual activity suggests that the phenomenal character ofperceptualexperience can be partly determined by agential factors. I discuss the significance of these kinds of case for the dispute about phenomenal character that is at the core of recent philosophy of perception. I then go on to sketch an account of how active and passive elements of phenomenal character are related to one another in activities like watching (...) and looking at things. (shrink)

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Journal of Mind and Behavior 28 no. 2 , pp. 135-156. The self-prompting theory of consciousness holds that consciousperceptualexperience occurs when non-routineperceptual data prompt the activation of a plan in an executive control system that monitorsperceptual input. On the other hand, routine, non-conscious perception merely provides data about the world, which indicatively describes the world correctly or incorrectly.Perceptualexperience instead involves data that are about the perceiver, not the world. (...) Their function is that of imperatively prompting the perceiver herself to do something (hence. (shrink)

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This paper is a constructive critical study of William P. Alston’s Perceiving God. It explores his account of perception of God, his doxastic practice epistemology, and his overall integration of faith and reason. In dealing with the first, it distinguishes some possible cases of theistic perception that have not generally been sorted out in the literature. In examining doxastic practices, it explores both the sense in which it is rational to engage in them and the epistemic status of beliefs formed (...) through them. Concerning the integration between faith and reason, it proposes a conception of faith in which, contrary to the prevailing tradition, belief is not central; distinguishes rationality from justification; and argues that the rationality of faith so conceived need not meet the same standard appropriate to the justification, or even the rationality, of the corresponding religious beliefs. (shrink)

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Much contemporary discussion ofperceptualexperience can be traced to two observations. The first is that perception seems to put us in direct contact with the world around us: when perception is successful, we come to recognize— immediately—that certain objects have certain properties. The second is thatperceptualexperience may fail to provide such knowledge: when we fall prey to illusion or hallucination, the way things appear may differ radically from the way things actually are. For (...) much of the twentieth century, many of the most important discussions ofperceptualexperience could be fruitfully understood as responses to this pair of observations. (shrink)

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The contents ofperceptualexperience, it has been argued, often include a characteristic “non-conceptual” component (Evans, 1982). Rejecting such views, McDowell (1994) claims that such contents are conceptual in every respect. It will be shown that this debate is compromised by the failure of both sides to mark a further, and crucial, distinction in cognitive space. This is the distinction between what is doubted here as mindful and mindless modes of perceiving: a distinction which cross-classifies the conceptual / (...) non-conceptual divide. The goal of the paper is to show that there can be both mindful personal levelperceptual experiences whose content cannot be considered conceptual — pace McDowell (1994)— and that there are mindless personal levelperceptual experiences whose content cannot be considered —pace Evans (1982)— nonconceptual. The resulting picture yields a richer four dimensional carving of the space ofperceptualexperience, and provides a better framework in which to accommodate the many subtleties involved in our sensory confrontations with the world. (shrink)

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A number of emotion theorists hold that emotions are perceptions of value. In this paper I say why they are wrong. I claim that in the case of emotion there is nothing that can provide theperceptual modality that is needed if theperceptual theory is to succeed (where by ‘perceptual modality’ I mean the particular manner in which something is perceived). I argue that the five sensory modalities are not possible candidates for providing us with ‘emotional (...) perception’. But I also say why the usual candidate offered – namely feeling or affectivity – does not give us the sought-afterperceptual modality. I conclude that as there seems to be nothing else that can provide the neededperceptual modality, we should reject theperceptual theory of emotion.1. (shrink)

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One of the promising approaches to the problem ofperceptual consciousness has been the representational theory, or representationalism. The idea is to reduce the phenomenal character of consciousperceptual experiences to the representational content of those experiences. Most representationalists appeal specifically to non-conceptual content in reducing phenomenal character to representational content. In this paper, I discuss a series of issues involved in this representationalist appeal to non-conceptual content. The overall argument is the following. On the face of it, (...) consciousperceptualexperience appears to beexperience of a structured world, hence to be at least partly conceptual. To validate the appeal to non-conceptual content, the representationalist must therefore hold that the content ofexperience is partly conceptual and partly non-conceptual. But how can the conceptual and the non-conceptual combine to form a single content? The only way to make sense of this notion, I argue, leads to a surprising consequence, namely, that the representational approach toperceptual consciousness is a disguised form of functionalism. (shrink)

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