Abstract

Sensory experiences, such as visual and auditory experiences, have a representational content: they represent the experiencer's environment as being a certain way. It has recently been alleged, by Christopher Peacocke and others, that a characterization of sensory experiences in terms of their representational content leaves out an important qualitative dimension to the experiences, one Peacocke calls "sensational." The postulation of sensational qualities is motivated by cases of sensory experience that differ in subjective character but, supposedly, not in representational content. The cases of interest involve "aspect" switches in both visual and auditory experiences, where the latter include experiences of music; I call these the puzzle cases. ;My goal is to show that the puzzle cases can indeed be accounted for in terms of differences in representational content, given an adequate conception of content. I set forth a functionalistic conception of representational content that is based on the work of Armstrong, Harman, and Pitcher and has achieved currency among cognitive psychologists. My task is then to characterize the content, in this sense, of the puzzle cases; I focus on those that involve music. Music theory, I argue, is of help here: although music theory does have functions unrelated to perception, a musical analysis can reflect the representational content of a listener's experience of a musical work. I cite empirical evidence that this holds for traditional tonal analysis and Schenkerian analysis. ;On this interpretation of Schenkerian theory, we experience passages of music as they are related to simpler background passages, ones neither present nor heard as present. In the musical puzzle case, the given sounds are heard in relation to different background passages; hence the experiences differ in their representational content. This approach can be extended to the visual puzzle case, as well: we see objects as they are related to objects neither present nor seen as present. I conclude that the puzzle cases do not require us to postulate sensational qualities of experience, since the given experiences can be differentiated in terms of their representational content