I am looking at an apple. The apple has a lot of properties and some, but not all, of these are part of my phenomenology at this moment: I am aware of these properties. And some, but not all, of these properties that I am aware of are part of my perceptual (or sensory) phenomenology. If I am attending to the apple’s color, this property will be part of my perceptual phenomenology. The property of being (...) a granny smith apple from Chile is unlikely to be part of my perceptual phenomenology. Here are two problems for anyone who is interested in conscious experience in general, and perceptual experience in particular: (a) How can we tell which properties are part of our phenomenology and which ones are not? (b) How can we tell which properties are part of our perceptual phenomenology and which ones are part of our non-perceptual phenomenology? I will focus on (b) in this paper. My aim is twofold: I propose a methodology for answering the question of which properties are part of our perceptual phenomenology and I provide an example for how this methodology could be applied. (shrink)

I discuss the so-called “problem of perception” in relation to the Argument from Illusion: Can we directly perceive the external world? According to Direct Realism, at least sometimes perception provides direct and immediate awareness of reality. But the Argument from Illusion threatens to undermine the possibility of genuine perception. In The Problem of Perception (2002), A. D. Smith proposes a novel defense of Direct Realism based on a careful study of perceptual phenomenology. According to his theory, the intentionality (...) of perception is explained in terms of three phenomenological features of perception: phenomenalthree-dimensional spatiality, movement, and the Anstoss. He argues that this account of perceptual intentionality can resist a central premise of the Argument from Illusion, i.e. the “sense-datum inference.” After presenting Smith’s theory, I argue that he fails to distinguish two independent tasks for the direct realist, and that he underestimates the threat of the so-called “sense-datum infection.” My contention is that even if Smith’s theory of perceptual intentionality is correct, Direct Realism has not been saved from the Argument from Illusion. To resist the Argument from Illusion, it is not enough to merely consider how to block the sense-datum inference. The direct realist must also find a way to undermine the sense-datum infection. If so, I suggest, Direct Realism cannot be defended by perceptual phenomenology alone. (shrink)

This is an excerpt of a report that highlights and explores five questions that arose from the Network for Sensory Research workshop on perceptual learning and perceptual recognition at the University of York in March, 2012. This portion of the report explores the question: How does perceptual learning alter perceptual phenomenology?

Studies on the syndrome called ‘unilateral visual or spatial neglect’ have been used by philosophers in discussions concerning perceptual phenomenology. Nanay , based on spatial neglects studies, argued that the property of being suitable for action is part of the perceptual phenomenology of neglect patients. In this paper, I argue that the studies on visual neglect conducted thus far do not support Nanay’s thesis that when patients succeed in detecting the neglected object, it’s action properties are (...) part of their perceptual phenomenology; instead, the support the view that the patients consciously see low-level properties such as color and shape. In the first section, I discuss unilateral neglect and extinction. In the second section, I analyze Nanay’s argument. In the third section, I explain why Nanay’s thesis does not follow from the studies on visual neglect. Nanay argues that when neglect patients are cued with an action-property of an object and succeed in perceiving the object in the contralesional side they are phenomenally aware of an action-property of it but they are not phenomenally aware of its low-level properties. Since the patients detect the object, they must be phenomenally aware of some of its properties. Failing to see the low-level properties, the patients should be phenomenally aware is the action-property. Against this, I argue that research on spatial neglect shows that the patients come to see the low-level properties. I also explain why my discussion also supports the more general claim that the studies on neglect and extinction conducted thus far do not establish that the action-properties are part of the patients’ phenomenology. Finally, in section four, I examine a possible objection against my account. My arguments do not entail that the action properties are not part of perceptual phenomenology; only that the neglect studies do not establish this. (shrink)

There is a recent surge in interest in agential accounts of perception, i.e. accounts where activity plays a central role in accounting for the nature of perceptions. Within this camp, Lisa Miracch...

There is a recent surge in interest in agential accounts of perception, i.e. accounts where activity plays a central role in accounting for the nature of perceptions. Within this camp, Lisa Miracch...

When you have a perceptual experience of a given physical object that object seems to be immediately present to you in a way it never does when you consciously think about or imagine it. Many philosophers have claimed that naïve realism (the view that to perceive is to stand in a primitive relation of acquaintance to the world) can provide a satisfying account of this phenomenological directness of perceptual experience while the content view (the view that to perceive (...) is to represent the world to be a certain way) cannot. I argue that this claim is false. Specifically, I maintain that the only acceptable naïve realist account of the relevant phenomenology is circular and that the content view can provide a similar account. In addition, I maintain that a certain specific variety of the content view provides a non-circular and thus more satisfactory account of this phenomenology. If so, then contrary to what is commonly assumed there are powerful phenomenological grounds for preferring the content view to naïve realism. (shrink)

In recent years there has been a revival of a theory of conscious emotions as analogous in important ways to perceptual experiences. In the standard versions of this view emotions are construed as, potentially, perceptual disclosures of values. The model has been widely debated and criticized. In this paper I reconstruct an early, qualified version of the perceptual model to be found in the classical phenomenological approaches of Scheler and Sartre. After outlining this version of the theory, (...) I examine its prospects against objections prominent in the current debate. (shrink)

The consensus in contemporary philosophy of mind is that how a perceptual experience represents the world to be is built into its sensory phenomenology. I defend an opposing view which I call ‘moderate separatism’, that an experience's sensory phenomenology does not determine how it represents the world to be. I argue for moderate separatism by pointing to two ordinary experiences which instantiate the same sensory phenomenology but differ with regard to their intentional content. Two experiences of (...) an object reflected in a mirror can possess the same spatial phenomenology while representing that object to occupy different spatial locations. So, contrary to the current consensus, the representation of spatial location is not fixed by an experience's sensory phenomenology. (shrink)

We address the thesis recently proposed by Andy Clark, that skill-mediated access to modality implies phenomenal feel. We agree that a skill theory of perception does indeed offer the possibility of a satisfactory account of the feel of perception, but we claim that this is not only through explanation of access to modality but also because skill actually provides access to perceptual property in general. We illustrate and substantiate our claims by reference to the recently proposed 'sensorimotor contingency' theory (...) of visual awareness. We discuss why this theory offers a distinctively attractive access-based approach to perceptual consciousness because it 'dereifies' experience and permits otherwise problematic aspects of phenomenal perceptual consciousness to be explained. We suggest our approach thus offers the prospect of 'naturalizing phenomenology'. (shrink)

Online therapy sessions and other forms of digital mental health services (DMH) have seen a sharp spike in new users since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic. Having little access to their social networks and support systems, people have had to turn to digital tools and spaces to cope with their experiences of anxiety and loss. With no clear end to the pandemic in sight, many of us are likely to remain reliant upon DMH for the foreseeable future. As such, (...) it is important to articulate some of the specific ways in which the pandemic is affecting our self and world-relation, such that we can identify how DMH services are best able to accommodate some of the newly emerging needs of their users. In this paper I will identify a specific type of loss brought about by the COVID-19 pandemic and present it as an important concept for DMH. I refer to this loss as loss of perceptual world-familiarity. Loss of perceptual world-familiarity entails a breakdown in the ongoing effortless responsiveness to our perceptual environment that characterizes much of our everyday lives. To cash this out I will turn to insights from the phenomenological tradition. Initially, my project is descriptive. I aim to bring out how loss of perceptual world-familiarity is a distinctive form of loss that is deeply pervasive yet easily overlooked-hence the relevance of explicating it for DMH purposes. But I will also venture into the space of the normative, offering some reasons for seeing perceptual world-familiarity as a component of well-being. I conclude the paper with a discussion of how loss of perceptual world-familiarity affects the therapeutic setting now that most if not all therapeutic interactions have transitioned to online spaces and I explore the potential to augment these spaces with social interaction technologies. Throughout, my discussion aims to do justice to the reality that perceptual world-familiarity is not an evenly distributed phenomenon, that factors like disability, gender and race affect its robustness, and that this ought to be reckoned with when seeking to incorporate the phenomenon into or mitigate it through DMH services. (shrink)

Terence Horgan and John Tienson argue that there is phenomenal intentionality, i.e., “a kind of intentionality, pervasive in human mental life, that is constitutively determined by phenomenology alone” (p. 520). However, their arguments are open to two lines of objection. First, Horgan and Tienson are not sufficiently clear as to what kind of content it is that they take to be determined by, or to supervene on, phenomenal character. Second, critics have objected that, for their conclusion to follow, Horgan (...) and Tienson would first have to establish the co-variation of phenomenology and intentional content, but even so, phenomenal intentionality would still emerge as less plausible than its converse, representationalism. I will address these two challenges by appeal to Husserlian ideas. A consideration of perceptual phenomenology (i.e., phenomenal character) shows that there is a kind of perceptual content that is, indeed, determined by phenomenal character. Such content is conceived in terms of fulfillment conditions, or what it takes to bring aspects of objects and scenes to different, and more complete, ways of givenness. We can establish the primacy of phenomenology, relative to such fulfillment-conditional content, by tracing it back to the basic phenomenology of visual and other sensations. (shrink)

Interpretations abound about Husserl’s understanding of the relationship between veridical perceptual experience and hallucination. Some read him as taking the two to share the same distinctive essential nature, like contemporary conjunctivists. Others find in Husserl grounds for taking the two to fall into basically distinct categories of experience, like disjunctivists. There is ground for skepticism, however, about whether Husserl’s view could possibly fall under either of these headings. Husserl, on the one hand, operates under the auspices of the phenomenological (...) reduction, abstaining from use of any epistemic commitments about mind-transcendent reality, whereas conjunctive and disjunctive accounts of perceptual experience, on the other hand, are both premised on some form of metaphysical realism. There seems to be a basic incompatibility between the former approach and the latter. I examine this line of thinking and argue that the incompatibility is only apparent. (shrink)

Perceptual experiences justify. When I look at the black laptop in front of me and my perceptual experience presents me with a black laptop placed on my desk, my perceptual experience has justificatory force with respect to the proposition that there is black laptop on the desk. The present paper addresses the question of why perceptual experiences are a source of immediate justification: What gives them their justificatory force? I shall argue that the most plausible and (...) the most straightforward answer to this question consists in what I call the phenomenological conception of perceptual justification. Perceptual experiences justify by virtue of their distinctive presentive phenomenology. This is a truly internalist conception that enjoys significant advantages over rival conceptions. In the course of his paper, I demonstrate the advantages of the phenomenological conception and defend it against a recent objection. (shrink)

Context: Perceptual presence is the experience wherein veridical objects are experienced as belonging to an observer-independent world. Problem: Experimental investigations of perceptual presence ….

When phenomenological descriptions of perceptual experience are given it often seems that the distinction between mode and content of perceptual experience is not given the attention it deserves and that consequently certain philosophical difficulties develop which might have been avoided. While it will no doubt be admitted that the distinction between the “how” and the “what” of appearing is of importance in the phenomenology of perception, at first sight the making of such a distinction may seem so (...) simple as to be hardly worth discussing. It may seem to involve a mere matter of distinguishing modifiers of the verb “to perceive” from this verb's direct objects and their modifiers, but further consideration shows the situation is not that simple. In some cases there are alternative ways of phenomenological description such that what one description seems to indicate to be content is what the other description seems to indicate to be mode, and yet the two descriptions are seen to be equivalent in intent. If we analyze one expression in accordance with its grammar then the alternative expression must be considered idiomatic, that is, not analyzable in accordance with its grammar, for otherwise the two expressions could not be considered compatible. (shrink)

I argue that any account of perceptual experience should satisfy the following two desiderata. First, it should account for the particularity of perceptual experience, that is, it should account for the mind-independent object of an experience making a difference to individuating the experience. Second, it should explain the possibility that perceptual relations to distinct environments could yield subjectively indistinguishable experiences. Relational views of perceptual experience can easily satisfy the first but not the second desideratum. Representational views (...) can easily satisfy the second but not the first desideratum. I argue that to satisfy both desiderata perceptual experience is best conceived of as fundamentally both relational and representational. I develop a view of perceptual experience that synthesizes the virtues of relationalism and representationalism, by arguing that perceptual content is constituted by potentially gappy de re modes of presentation. (shrink)

The paper considers how phenomenologically-minded philosophers should think about the phenomenon Susanna Schellenberg (2016) calls perceptual particularity: in perception, we experience objects in their particularity. For example, if I see a pumpkin, I do not simply see the properties it shares with other objects, such as orange and roundness. What I see is a particular pumpkin that has all these properties. Much work has been done to investigate the phenomenon, but relatively few philosophers have addressed the concern of this (...) paper: how should those sympathetic with Husserlian phenomenology approach perceptual particularity? I will explore this issue by engaging with two recent Husserlian accounts of perceptual particularity, i.e. those defended by A. D. Smith (2008) and Walter Hopp (2011). Both of them focus on a kind of perceptual particularity that Schellenberg describes as semantic. I will argue that this is not the best use of the theoretical resources offered by their theories. The Husserlian ideas invoked by Smith and Hopp are more fruitful when they are applied to a different kind of perceptual particularity, which Schellenberg describes as phenomenological. The nature of phenomenological particularity is itself a complex issue, and I shall argue that a satisfactory analysis of it can be formulated on the basis of Hopp’s Husserlian theory. (shrink)

We address the thesis recently proposed by Andy Clark, that skill-mediated access to modality implies phenomenal feel. We agree that a skill theory of perception does indeed offer the possibility of a satisfactory account of the feel of perception, but we claim that this is not only through explanation of access to modality but also because skill actually provides access to perceptual property in general. We illustrate and substantiate our claims by reference to the recently proposed 'sensorimotor contingency' theory (...) of visual awareness. We discuss why this theory offers a distinctively attractive access-based approach to perceptual consciousness because it 'dereifies' experience and permits otherwise problematic aspects of phenomenal perceptual consciousness to be explained. We suggest our approach thus offers the prospect of 'naturalizing phenomenology'. (shrink)

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 that perceptual experience 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 of perceptual experiences are (...) class='Hi'>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 that perceptual 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 of perceptual 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 that perceptual 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 that perceptual experiences bear to higher-level cognitive states, including relations of format, content, and justification or support. (shrink)

What is the epistemic significance of taking a veridical perceptual experience at face value? To first approximations, the Minimal View says that it is true belief, and the Maximal View says that it is knowledge. I sympathetically explore the prospects of the Maximal View.

Synesthesia is occasionally offered as a challenge to Husserl's claims that the sense fields are necessarily distinct. This article demonstrates how synesthesia can be approached through phenomenology. We begin with a review of synesthesia and a brief discussion of how a phenomenological analysis of synesthesia could be productive both for those who experience synesthesia and for phenomenologists. We then shift to analyses of synesthesia through Husserl's notions of association and affectivity, and in light of intersubjective communication. While synesthesia might (...) lead us to think that our individual experiences are unbridgeable, we will find instead that such autonomous experiences are relational and, further, that our different—even incommensurable—experiences are necessarily part of a shared lifeworld. (shrink)

This book describes and proposes an unusual integrative approach to human perception that qualifies as both an ecological and a phenomenological approach at the same time. Thomas Natsoulas shows us how our consciousness - in three of six senses of the word that the book identifies - is involved in our activity of perceiving the one and only world that exists, which includes oneself as a proper part of it, and that all of us share together with the rest of (...) life on earth. He makes the case that our stream of consciousness - in the original Jamesian sense minus his mental/physical dualism - provides us with firsthand contact with the world, as opposed to our having such contact instead with theorist-posited items such as inner mental representations, internal pictures, or sense-image models, pure figments and virtual objects, none of which can have effects on our sensory receptors. (shrink)

A blindfolded clairvoyant walks into a room and immediately knows how it is arranged. You walk in and immediately see how it is arranged. Though both of you represent the room as being arranged in the same way, you have different experiences. Your experience doesn’t just represent that the room is arranged a certain way; it also visually presents the very items in the room that make that representation true. Call the felt aspect of your experience made salient by this (...) contrast its presentational phenomenology. Many philosophers have observed that perceptual experiences have presentational phenomenology. In this paper I explore its nature, scope, and significance. I argue that in addition to perceptual experiences, presentational phenomenology can be found in intuitive, introspective, imaginative, and recollective experiences. I also argue that presentational phenomenology is epistemologically significant: it plays a central role in explaining why the experiences that have it justify beliefs and give us knowledge. (shrink)

It is often assumed that perceptual experience provides evidence about the external world. But much perception can occur unconsciously, as in cases of masked priming or blindsight. Does unconscious perception provide evidence as well? Many theorists maintain that it cannot, holding that perceptual experience provides evidence in virtue of its conscious character. Against such views, I challenge here both the necessity and, perhaps more controversially, the sufficiency of consciousness for perception to provide evidence about the external world. In (...) addition to motivating and defending the idea that unconscious perception can and does often provide evidence, I observe that whether or not perceptual phenomenology is relevant to the evidentiary status of perception depends on the nature of consciousness. And I argue that a well-supported theory of consciousness—higher-order thought theory—invites a striking conclusion: that perceptual phenomenology is not on its own sufficient to provide for evidence of the external world. (shrink)

The “looks” of things are frequently invoked (a) to account for the epistemic status of perceptual beliefs and (b) to distinguish perceptual from inferential beliefs. ‘Looks’ for these purposes is normally understood in terms of a perceptual experience and its phenomenal character. Here I argue that there is also a nonexperiential sense of ‘looks’—one that relates to cognitive architecture, rather than phenomenology—and that this nonexperiential sense can do the work of (a) and (b).

This paper seeks to integrate analytic philosophy and phenomenology. It does so through an approach generated, specifically, in relation to imagination and its cognitive significance. As an Introduction, some reservations about existing phenomenological approaches to imagination—in the work of Sartre and Edward S. Casey—are considered. It is argued that their introspective psychological approach needs to be qualified through a more analytic orientation that determines essence, initially, on the basis of public discourse concerning the term ‘imagination.’ Part One then articulates (...) this orientation through an ‘analytic reduction’ that identifies imagination’s essence in public discourse as thought in its quasi-sensory mode. Part Two offers a sustained phenomenological investigation of this essence, and identifies four major intrinsic features. On the basis of this, Part Three shows how imagination is implicated, centrally, in the capacity to acquire language. In Conclusion the proceeding arguments are defended against possible objections, and a final key summarizing argument is formulated to show that imagination must be regarded, also, as necessary to perception and its capacity to articulate a world. The paper ends with a few thoughts on the further potential of post-analytic phenomenology. (shrink)

This book offers an updated and comprehensive phenomenology of norms and normativity. It is the first volume that systematically tackles both the normativity of experiencing and various experiences of norms. Part I begins with a discussion of the methodological resources that phenomenology offers for the critique of epistemological, social and cultural norms. It argues that these resources are powerful and have largely been neglected in contemporary philosophy as well as social and human sciences. The second part deepens the (...) discussion by studying the existential and moral-philosophical foundations of practical normativity. It takes on the task of illuminating the origins of normativity and offers phenomenological alternatives to the neo-Kantian and neo-Hegelian approaches that dominate contemporary debates on the sources of normativity. The final part proceeds from practical normativity to the analysis of the guiding powers of values, perceptual norms, instincts and drives. These are different forms of intentionality that in various manners contribute to the constitution of human practices. By clarifying their divergences and their interrelations, the volume demonstrates that normativity is not one phenomenon but a complex set of various phenomena, with multiple origins and sources. Contemporary Phenomenologies of Normativity will be of interest to researchers and advanced students working on issues of normativity in phenomenology, epistemology, ethics, and social philosophy. (shrink)

According to the recent Perceptual 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 between perceptual experiences and degrees of belief. We conclude that, in their present state of development, orthodox accounts of perceptual experience are still to (...) be favoured over the perceptual confidence view. (shrink)

It seems intuitive that in situations of perceptual recognition additional properties are represented. While much has been written about the significance of such properties for perceptual phenomenology, it is still unclear (a) what is the relation between recognition-based properties and lower-level perceptual properties, and (b) whether it is justified to classify them as kind-properties. Relying on results in cognitive psychology, I argue that recognition-based properties (I) are irreducible, high-level properties, (II) are kind properties by virtue of (...) being sortal properties, but (III) they supervene on lower-level properties and so are unlikely to be natural kind properties. (shrink)

A perceptual experience of a given object seems to make the object itself present to the perceiver’s mind. Many philosophers have claimed that naïve realism (the view that to perceive is to stand in a primitive relation of acquaintance to the world) provides a better account of this phenomenological directness of perceptual experience than does the content view (the view that to perceive is to represent the world to be a certain way). But the naïve realist account of (...) this phenomenology has a conspicuous shortcoming: it explains the phenomenological directness of veridical perceptual experiences but not of hallucinations. Conversely, I maintain that a particular variety of the content view provides a unified account of the phenomenological directness of both veridical and hallucinatory experiences. If so, then contrary to what is often assumed, the phenomenological facts concerning perceptual experience are explained better by the content view than by naïve realism, and consequently, we have a compelling reason to prefer the content view to naïve realism. (shrink)

Steven Crowell has been for many years a leading voice in debates on twentieth-century European philosophy. This volume presents thirteen recent essays that together provide a systematic account of the relation between meaningful experience and responsiveness to norms. They argue for a new understanding of the philosophical importance of phenomenology, taking the work of Husserl and Heidegger as exemplary, and introducing a conception of phenomenology broad enough to encompass the practices of both philosophers. Crowell discusses Husserl's analyses of (...) first-person authority, the semantics of conscious experience, the structure of perceptual content, and the embodied subject, and shows how Heidegger's interpretation of the self addresses problems in Husserl's approach to the normative structure of meaning. His volume will be valuable for upper-level students and scholars interested in phenomenological approaches to philosophical questions in both the European and the analytic traditions. (shrink)

This chapter argues that smell and flavour perception present distinctive challenges for phenomenological reflection, but that these difficulties can be addressed through a ‘gestaltist’ approach to perceptual organisation. I argue that the ‘chemical’ senses do not generally allow immediate access to ordinary objects like roses and apples, but rather to odours and flavours, the diffuse nature of which make it hard to get a grip on the associated perceptual phenomenology. Drawing on the work of gestalt psychologists and (...) phenomenologists, I outline a modality-neutral approach that emphasises the irreducibly structured nature of perceptual experience and is especially useful for thinking about experiences that are not targeted at ordinary physical objects. Such an approach can clarify and explain nebulous aspects of perceptual experience, illuminating elements of our smell and flavour experiences that may be indeterminate. (shrink)

This article is the promised sequel to a recently published article in this journal , in which I sought to make more available to psychologists Edmund Husserl’s attempted explanation of how perceptual mental acts succeed in presenting to consciousness their external, environmental objects themselves, as opposed to some kind of representation of them. Here, I continue my exposition of Husserl’s effort and, as well, I begin a project of seeking to bridge the gap between his phenomenological account of (...) class='Hi'>perceptual presence to consciousness and James J. Gibson’s ecological conception of direct perception. I am concerned, with what happens at the juncture of the perceptual system’s resonance to the stimulus energy flux and the perceiver’s awareness of those environmental objects, events, properties, and relations which are specified by the informational variables that the picked-up stimulus flux instantiates. I believe that simultaneously considering the environment’s phenomenological perceptual presence from both sides of the great epistemic divide – from the ecological outside and from the phenomenological inside – is worth a serious try. In the case of both these perspectives, we fortunately can draw upon a lifetime of intensive work by a major theorist operating at the highest level, work directly relevant to the general phenomenon of special interest here. (shrink)

Perception grounds demonstrative reference, yields singular thoughts, and fixes the reference of singular terms. Moreover, perception provides us with knowledge of particulars in our environment and justifies singular thoughts about particulars. How does perception play these cognitive and epistemic roles in our lives? I address this question by exploring the fundamental nature of perceptual experience. I argue that perceptual states are constituted by particulars and discuss epistemic, ontological, psychologistic, and semantic approaches to account for perceptual particularity.

The paper develops a conception of epistemic warrant as applied to perceptual belief, called "entitlement", that does not require the warranted individual to be capable of understanding the warrant. The conception is situated within an account of animal perception and unsophisticated perceptual belief. It characterizes entitlement as fulfillment of an epistemic norm that is apriori associated with a certain representational function that can be known apriori to be a function of perception. The paper connects anti-individualism, a thesis about (...) the nature of mental states, and perceptual entitlement. It presents an argument that explains the objectivity and validity of perceptual entitlement partly in terms of the nature of perceptual states–hence the nature of perceptual beliefs, which are constitutively associated with perceptual states. The paper discusses ways that an individual can be entitled to perceptual belief through its connection to perception, and ways that entitlement to perceptual belief can be undermined. (shrink)

Perception is riddled with cases of reliable misperception. These are cases in which a perceptual state is tokened inaccurately any time it is tokened under normal conditions. On the face of it, this fact causes trouble for theories that provide an analysis of perceptual content in non-semantic, non-intentional, and non-phenomenal terms, such as those found in Millikan (1984), Fodor (1990), Neander (2017), and Schellenberg (2018). I show how such theories can be extended so that they cover such cases (...) without giving up their core commitments. (shrink)

In the perceptual model of mystical experience, the mystics are said to “perceive” God much like ordinary people perceive physical objects. The model has been used to defend the epistemic value of mysticism, and it has been championed most vigorously by William Alston in his work Perceiving God. This paper is a critique of the model from a phenomenological perspective. Utilizing insights from Husserl and Merleau-Ponty, I show that models like Alston’s are based on an inadequate notion of perception, (...) which fails to distinguish perception from other modes of intentionality; the result is that even if we assume the mystics have directly experienced God, it is not clear why we should say they have “perceived” God. Then, using a better and richer concept of perception, I show that the mystical experiences under discussion cannot be truly perceptual, because they lack some salient features of perception. The conclusion is that talks of “perceiving God” can only be analogical or metaphorical, but not literal. (shrink)

Perceptual representations pick out individuals and attribute properties to them. This paper considers the role of perceptual attribution in determining or guiding perceptual reference to objects. We consider three extant models of the relation between perceptual attribution and perceptual reference–all attribution guides reference, no attribution guides reference, or a privileged subset of attributions guides reference–and argue that empirical evidence undermines all three. We then defend a flexible-attributives model, on which the range of perceptual attributives (...) used to guide reference shifts adaptively with context. This model underscores the remarkable and dynamic intelligence of our perceptual capacities. We elucidate implications of the model for the boundary between perception and propositional thought. (shrink)

In the succession of states of consciousness that constitute James’s stream of consciousness, there occur, among others, states of consciousness that are themselves, or that include, perceptual mental acts. It is assumed some of the latter states of consciousness are purely perceptual, lacking both imaginal and signitive contents. According to Husserl, purely perceptual acts present to consciousness, uniquely, their environmental objects in themselves, in person. They do not present, as imaginal mental acts do, an image or other (...) representation of their object. Husserl’s theory resembles Gibson’s with respect to perception’s being direct. Both theorists hold perceptual awareness of the environment is not a "founded" act; its proximate causation does not involve any other mental act. Both theorists contend that perceptual acts keep the perceiver directly in touch with the surrounding environment. The present article considers Husserl’s account of this directness. Although this account has problems, and is largely phenomenological description, it may help psychologists to find their way to an adequate account of the objects of perceptual consciousness — perhaps if it is integrated with Gibson’s perception theory, as I will attempt in a sequel to which this article is introductory. Husserl seeks to provide the phenomenological side of the story, Gibson the stimulus-informational side. (shrink)

The idea that perceptual experience is transparent is generally used by naïve realists and externalist representationalists to promote an externalist account of the metaphysics of perceptual experience. It is claimed that the phenomenal character of our perceptual experience 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 our experience. Internalist qualia theorists deny this, and claim that the phenomenal character (...) of our perceptual experience is internally constituted. However, my concern in this paper is not with the metaphysical debate, but with transparency as a phenomenological feature of perceptual experience. Qualia theorists have presented a number of examples of perceptual 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 of perceptual experience can in fact be characterized solely with reference to externally located objects and properties, and the sense in which some features of our perceptual experiences do not seem external is due to cognitive, not perceptual, phenomenology. (shrink)