The nature of perception has long been a central question in philosophy. It is of crucial importance not just in the philosophy of mind, but also in epistemology, metaphysics, aesthetics, and the philosophy of science. The essays in this 1992 volume not only offer fresh answers to some of the traditional problems of perception, but also examine the subject in light of contemporary research on mental content. A substantial introduction locates the essays within the recent history of the subject, (...) and demonstrates the links between them. The Contents of Experience brings together some prominent philosophers in the field, and offers a major statement on a problem central to current philosophical thinking. Notable contributors include Christopher Peacocke, Brian O'Shaughnessy and Michael Tye. (shrink)

This paper examines the representationalist view of experiences in the light of the phenomena of perfect and relative pitch. Two main kinds of representationalism are identified - environment-based and cognitive role-based. It is argued that to explain the relationship between the two theories a distinction should be drawn between various types of implicit and explicit content. When investigated, this distinction sheds some light on the difference between the phenomenology of perfect and relative pitch experiences and may be usefully applied (...) to describe the nature of experiences in the other sense modalities. (shrink)

Diachronic perceptual atomism is the view that the contents of experience do not involve temporal relations between non-simultaneous events, such as motion, succession, or duration, but only 'snapshots' of the world. Traditionally, atomism has not been a very popular view. Indeed, many philosophers think that it is obviously false and that the main debate about time consciousness takes place between models which reject atomistic commitments. This antiatomistic sentiment can be traced back to William James's slogan that 'a succession of (...) feelings, in and of itself, is not a feeling of succession'. In this paper I argue, first, that the arguments typically launched against atomism in the spirit of James's slogan fail; and second, that the viability of atomism depends on what the conditions for a mental event's being an experience are. In particular, I argue that if a mental event is an experience only if it fulfils certain downstream conditions, which concern the role of the event in the subject's cognitive life, then atomism fails. Otherwise, it is in fact a viable and in many ways attractive view. It follows from my discussion that, contrary to popular belief, atomism is by no means obviously false. Rather, its viability depends on one's further views about the relationship between experience and cognition. (shrink)

Which objects and properties are represented in perceptual experience, and how are we able to determine this? The papers in this collection address these questions together with other fundamental questions about the nature of perceptual content. The book draws together papers by leading international philosophers of mind, including Alex Byrne (MIT), Alva Noë (University of California, Berkeley), Tim Bayne (St Catherine’s College, Oxford), Michael Tye (University of Texas, Austin), Richard Price (All Souls College, Oxford) and Susanna Siegel (Harvard (...) University) Essays address the central questions surrounding the content of perceptual experience Investigates how are we able to determine the admissible contents of experience Published in association with the journal Philosophical Quarterly . (shrink)

To what extent is the external world the way that it appears to us in perceptual experience? This perennial question in philosophy is no doubt ambiguous in many ways. For example, it might be taken as equivalent to the question of whether or not the external world is the way that it appears to be? This is a question about the epistemology of perception: Are our perceptual experiences by and large veridical representations of the external world? Alternatively, the question (...) might be taken as asking whether or not the external world is like its ways of appearing to us, where the expression “ways of appearing” is intended to pick out aspects of our perceptual experiences themselves. This is a metaphysical version of the question of the relationship between appearance and reality: What is the relationship between the phenomenal features that characterize perceptual experience, on the one hand, and the mind-independent features of the external objects of perception, on the other? There are some philosophers who might resist distinguishing between these two questions. For them, “ways of appearing” in the phenomenal sense just are the ways that things appear to be (let’s call the latter the “intentional sense” of “ways of appearing”).1 That is, the phenomenal character of an experience is nothing over and above its representational content. Phenomenal properties are represented properties—the properties that an experience attributes to the external objects of perception. The question of whether or not phenomenal properties can be identified with the represented properties of an experience mirrors traditional questions in the philosophy of perception. If they can be identified with each other, then in veridical perception we might be said to “directly grasp” features of the external world through perception. The properties that are present to the mind are the very same properties that belong to the external objects of perception. Such a view affords.... (shrink)

Forthcoming (2011) in K. Hawley and F. Macpherson (eds.) The Admissible Contents of Experience, Wiley‐Blackwell. The Admissible Contents of Experience Fiona Macpherson This essay provides an overview of the debate concerning the admissible contents of experience, together with an introduction to the papers in this volume. The debate is one that takes place among advocates of a certain way of thinking of perceptual experiences: that they are states that represent the world. For to say that a state (...) has content is to say that it represents; and its content is usually taken to be that which is represented. One should not be tempted to think that the debate is therefore marginal or esoteric, for this view of perceptual experience has been by far the dominant view of perceptual experience in recent years in philosophy (and in psychology and neuroscience). The debate is about what answer to give to a fundamental question about the nature of perceptual experience, namely: what objects and properties can it represent? (shrink)

Representationalism is the position that the phenomenal character of an experience is either identical with, or supervenes on, the content of that experience. Many representationalists hold that the relevant content of experience is nonconceptual. I propose a counterexample to this form of representationalism that arises from the phenomenon of Gestalt switching, which occurs when viewing ambiguous figures. First, I argue that one does not need to appeal to the conceptual content of experience or (...) to judgements to account for Gestalt switching. I then argue that experiences of certain ambiguous figures are problematic because they have different phenomenal characters but that no difference in the nonconceptual content of these experiences can be identified. I consider three solutions to this problem that have been proposed by both philosophers and psychologists and conclude that none can account for all the ambiguous figures that pose the problem. I conclude that the onus is on representationalists to specify the relevant difference in content or to abandon their position. (shrink)

I suppose that substantive philosophical theses are much like second marriages. The philo- sophical thesis I wish to discuss in this paper is the thesis that experiences have nonconceptual content. I shall not attempt to argue that _all_ experiences have nonconceptual content nor that the only contents experiences have are nonconceptual. Instead, I want to ? esh out the thesis of nonconceptual content for experience in more detail than has been offered hithertofore and to provide a (...) variety of motivations for the view. (shrink)

Some have claimed that people with very different beliefs literally see the world differently. Thus Thomas Kuhn: ‘what a man sees depends both upon what he looks at and also upon what his previous visual—conceptual experience has taught him to see’ (Kuhn 1970, p. ll3). This view — call it ‘Perceptual Relativism’ — entails that a scientist and a child may look at a cathode ray tube and, in a sense, the first will see it while the second won’t. (...) The claim is not, of course, that the child’s experience is ‘empty’; but that, unlike the scientist, it does not see the tube as a cathode ray tube. One way of supporting this claim is to say that one cannot see something as an F unless one has the concept F. Since the child plainly lacks the concept of a cathode ray tube, it cannot see it as a cathode ray tube. Although Perceptual Relativism is hard to believe, this supporting suggestion is not so implausible. After all, when we see (and more generally, perceive) the world, the world is presented to us in a particular way; so how can we see it as being that way unless we have some idea or conception of the way it is presented? We need not be committed to a representative theory of perception to think that perceptions in some sense represent the world. We can express this by saying that perceptions have content. Now it is a commonplace that the contents of beliefs and the other propositional attitudes involve concepts. The belief that this thing is a cathode ray tube involves, in some sense, the concept cathode ray tube. So the line of thought behind Perceptual Relativism may be expressed thus: seeing an F as an F is a state with content. (shrink)

I defend the thesis that at least some moral properties can be part of the contents of experience. I argue for this claim using a _contrast argument_, a type of argument commonly found in the literature on the philosophy of perception. I first appeal to psychological research on what I call emotionally empathetic dysfunctional individuals to establish a phenomenal contrast between EEDI s and normal individuals in some moral situations. I then argue that the best explanation for this contrast, (...) assuming non-skeptical moral realism, is that _badness_ is represented in the normal individual’s experience but not in the EEDI ’s experience. I consider and reject four alternative explanations of the contrast. (shrink)

We discuss at some length evidence from the cognitive science suggesting that the representations of objects based on spatiotemporal information and featural information retrieved bottomup from a visual scene precede representations of objects that include conceptual information. We argue that a distinction can be drawn between representations with conceptual and nonconceptual content. The distinction is based on perceptual mechanisms that retrieve information in conceptually unmediated ways. The representational contents of the states induced by these mechanisms that are available to (...) a type of awareness called phenomenal awareness constitute the phenomenal content of experience. The phenomenal content of perception contains the existence of objects as separate things that persist in time and time, spatiotemporal information, and information regarding relative spatial relations, motion, surface properties, shape, size, orientation, color, and their functional properties. (shrink)

This paper examines the contents of perceptual experience, and focuses in particular on the relation between the representational aspects of an experience and its phenomenal character. It is argued that the Critical Realist two-component analysis of experience, advocated by Wilfrid Sellars, is preferable to the Intentionalist view. Experiences have different kinds of representational contents: both informational and intentional. An understanding of the essential navigational role of perception provides a principled way of explaining the nature of such representational (...) contents. Experiences also have a distinct phenomenal content, or character, which is not determined by representational content. (shrink)

The intentionalist about consciousness holds that the qualitative character of experience, “what it’s like,” is determined by the contents of a select group of special intentional states of the subject. FredDretske (1995), MikeThau (2002), MichaelTye (1995)and many others have embraced intentionalism, but these philosophers have not generally appreciated that, since we are intimately familiar with the qualitative character of experience, we thereby have special access to the nature of these contents. In this paper, we take advantage of this (...) fact to show that intentionalism is incompatible with the idea that these contents are singular or general propositions, and thus that intentionalism is incompatible with one dominant trend in thinking about contents in general. In particular, there appear to be insoluble difficulties in explaining how the phenomenology of place and time can be explained by any intentionalist theory appealing to singular or general propositions. (shrink)

I address three interrelated issues concerning the contents of experiences. First, I address the preliminary issue of what it means to say that experiences have contents. Then I address the issue of why we should believe that experiences have contents. Finally, I address the issue of what the contents of experiences are.

The view that the content of experience is conceptual is often felt to conflict with the empiricist intuition that experience precedes thought, rather than vice versa. This concern is explicitly articulated by Ayers as an objection both to McDowell and Davidson, and to the conceptualist view more generally. The paper aims to defuse the objection in its general form by presenting a version of conceptualism which is compatible with empiricism. It proposes an account of observational concepts on (...) which possession of such a concept involves more than the ability for perceptual discrimination, but less than the capacity to employ the concept in inferences: it consists in the capacity to perceptually discriminate objects with the awareness that one is discriminating as one ought. This understanding of concept-possession allows us make sense of experiences' having conceptual content without supposing that the subject must grasp the relevant concepts prior to having those experiences. (shrink)

Crane's volume collects nine essays ranging over an impressive number of fundamental problems of perception. One unique feature of this volume is captured in Crane's hope that "some of the essays in this volume show that there is much that is worth recovering from the sense-data tradition".

What do we see? We are visually conscious of colors and shapes, but are we also visually conscious of complex properties such as being John Malkovich? In this book, Susanna Siegel develops a framework for understanding the contents of visual experience, and argues that these contents involve all sorts of complex properties. Siegel starts by analyzing the notion of the contents of experience, and by arguing that theorists of all stripes should accept that experiences have contents. She then (...) introduces a method for discovering the contents of experience: the method of phenomenal contrast. This method relies only minimally on introspection, and allows rigorous support for claims about experience. She then applies the method to make the case that we are conscious of many kinds of properties, of all sorts of causal properties, and of many other complex properties. She goes on to use the method to help analyze difficult questions about our consciousness of objects and their role in the contents of experience, and to reconceptualize the distinction between perception and sensation. Siegel's results are important for many areas of philosophy, including the philosophy of mind, epistemology, and the philosophy of science. They are also important for the psychology and cognitive neuroscience of vision. (shrink)

We discuss in some length evidence from the cognitive science suggesting that the representations of objects based on spatiotemporal information and featural information retrieved bottom‐up from a visual scene precede representations of objects that include conceptual information. We argue that a distinction can be drawn between representations with conceptual and nonconceptual content. The distinction is based on perceptual mechanisms that retrieve information in conceptually unmediated ways. The representational contents of the states induced by these mechanisms that are available to (...) a type of awareness called phenomenal awareness constitute the phenomenal content of experience. The phenomenal content of perception contains the existence of objects as separate things that persist in time and time, spatiotemporal information, and information regarding relative spatial relations, motion, surface properties, shape, size, orientation, color, and their functional properties. (shrink)

When you look at a circular plate at an angle, it looks circular. But there also is a certain sense in which its look can be described as oval. When you move, the plate’s look changes with your perspective on it—nevertheless, it continues to look circular. This chapter investigates whether these “constancy in variation” phenomena can be explained in terms of the representational content of visual experience, and whether constancy in variation provides special, phenomenological, reasons to construe (...) class='Hi'>experience as having centered contents. Concentrating on shape, it argues that due to warring phenomenological demands, all views construing constancy in variation as representation of both objective and perspectival properties or features have limited explanatory powers, and that centering does not provide any advantage. By contrast, adopting the non-standard intentionalism called phenomenal intentionalism, we get rather natural explanations of the phenomenology of constancy in variation. (shrink)

The major part of our beliefs and our knowledge of the world is based on, or grounded in, sensory experience. But, how is it that we can have perceptual beliefs that things are thus and so, and, moreover, be justified in having them? What conditions must experience satisfy to rationally warrant, and not merely to cause, our beliefs? Against the currently very popular contention that experience itself already has to be propositionally and conceptually structured, I will rehabilitate (...) the claim that there is given element in experience which is independent of thought and which is possessed of a distinctive nonpropositional and nonconceptual content. Further, I will argue that this given element is indeed fit to play a significant evidential role in the justification of our beliefs about the world. (shrink)

In ‘Avoiding the Myth of the Given’, McDowell revisits the main themes of Mind and World in order to make two important corrections: first, he does not longer believe that the content of perceptual...

I propose a counterexample to naturalistic representational theories of phenomenal character. The counterexample is generated by experiences of novel colours reported by Crane and Piantanida. I consider various replies that a representationalist might make, including whether novel colours could be possible colours of objects and whether one can account for novel colours as one would account for binary colours or colour mixtures. I argue that none of these strategies is successful and therefore that one cannot fully explain the nature of (...) the phenomenal character of perceptual experiences using a naturalistic conception of representation. (shrink)

The book addresses the debate on whether the representational content of perceptual experience is conceptual or non-conceptual, by bringing out the points of comparison between Kant s conception of intuition and contemporary accounts of non-conceptual content. It is argued that intuition provides the most basic form of intentionality pre-conceptual reference to objects, which underlies the acts of conceptualization and judgment.".

I begin by examining a recent debate between John McDowell and Christopher Peacocke over whether the content of perceptual experience is non-conceptual. Although I am sympathetic to Peacocke’s claim that perceptual content is non-conceptual, I suggest a number of ways in which his arguments fail to make that case. This failure stems from an over-emphasis on the "fine-grainedness" of perceptual content - a feature that is relatively unimportant to its non-conceptual structure. I go on to describe (...) two other features of perceptual experience that are more likely to be relevant to the claim that perceptual content is non-conceptual. These features are 1) the dependence of a perceived object on the perceptual context in which it is perceived and 2) the dependence of a perceived property on the object it is perceived to be a property of. (shrink)

The on-going debate over the ‘admissible contents of perceptual experience’ concerns the range of properties that human beings are directly acquainted with in perceptual experience. Regarding vision, it is relatively uncontroversial that the following properties can figure in the contents of visual experience: colour, shape, illumination, spatial relations, motion, and texture. The controversy begins when we ask whether any properties besides these figure in visual experience. We argue that ‘ensemble properties’ should be added to the list (...) of visually admissible properties. Ensemble properties are features that belong to a set of perceptible objects as a whole as opposed to the individuals that constitute that set. They include such features as the mean size of an array of shapes or the average emotional expression of an array of faces. Recent work in vision science has yielded compelling evidence that the visual system routinely encodes such properties. We argue that epistemological considerations provide strong reasons to think that these properties figure in visual experience. Judgements about ensemble properties are immediately warranted by our perceptual experience, and the only plausible way that a perceptual experience could confer this warrant is if it confers awareness of ensemble properties. (shrink)

Integrated information theory attempts to account for both the quantitative and the phenomenal aspects of consciousness, and in taking consciousness as fundamental and widespread it bears similarities to panpsychist Russellian monism. In this paper I compare IIT's and RM's response to the conceivability argument, and their metaphysical account of conscious experience. I start by claiming that RM neutralizes the conceivability argument, but that by virtue of its commitment to categoricalism it doesn't exclude fickle qualia scenarios. I argue that IIT's (...) core notion of intrinsic cause-effect power makes it incompatible with categoricalist versions of RM and, to the contrary, is best understood as entailing pandispositionalism, the view for which all properties are powers. I show that, thus construed, IIT can cope with both the conceivability and with the fickle qualia arguments, offers a promising way to account for the content of experience, and hence is preferable to categoricalist RM. (shrink)

Clare Batty has recently argued that the content of human olfactory experience is 'a very weak kind of abstract, or existentially quantified content', and so that 'there is no way things smell'. Her arguments are based on two claims. Firstly, that there is no intuitive distinction between olfactory hallucination and olfactory illusion. Secondly, that olfaction 'does not present smell at particular locations', and 'seems disengaged from any particular object'. The present article shows both of these claims to (...) be false. It shows that naïve subjects find it quite natural to draw a distinction between olfactory hallucination and olfactory illusion. And it argues that the phenomenology of normal olfactory experience is of particular objects as having smells. Two confusions are responsible for Batty thinking otherwise: (1) Batty's examples are cases of extreme pungency, and she mistakes a peculiarity of intense perceptions for a property of olfaction more generally; (2) Batty focuses on very short time slices and so confuses limitations on the information carried by a single sniff for a limitation on the logical form of all olfactory content. (shrink)

The usual visual experiences possess a perspectival phenomenology as they seem to present objects from a certain perspective. Nevertheless, it is not obvious how to characterise experiential content determining such phenomenology. In particular, while there are many works investigating perspectival properties of experienced objects, a question regarding how subject is represented in visual perspectival experiences attracted less attention. In order to address this problem, I consider four popular phenomenal intuitions regarding perspectival experiences and argue that the major theories of (...) perspectival experiences do not account for all of them. Relying on these observations, I show how a theory which accommodates all these intuitions can be developed by (a) recognising that visual perspectival experiences are, in fact, multimodal visuo-bodily experiences and (b) distinguishing between egocentric and structural contents. (shrink)

In this paper I will claim that the different phenomenology of seeing-as experiences of ambiguous figures matches a difference in their intentional content. Such a content is non-conceptual when the relevant seeing-as experience is just an experience of organizational seeing-as. It is partially conceptual when the relevant seeing-as experience is an overall experience of seeing something as a picture that is identical with Wollheim’s seeing-in experience and is constituted by an experience of (...) organizational seeing-as (its configurational fold) and by an experience of knowingly illusory seeing-as (its recognitional fold). To my mind, Wittgenstein’s reflections on seeing-as have anticipated these claims. (shrink)

In this paper I discuss several proposals for how to find out which contents visual experiences have, and I defend the method I.

To account for a perceived distinction it is necessary to postulate a real distinction. Our process of experiencing the world is one of, mostly unconscious, interpretation of observed distinctions to provide us with a partial world-picture that is sufficient to guide action. The distinctions, themselves, are acorrigible (they do not have a truth value), directly perceived, structured, and capable of being interpreted. Interpreted experience is corrigible, representational and capable of guiding action. Since interpretation is carried out mostly unconsciously and (...) in real time, the two aspects are present in experience together so that it is difficult to separate them out. (shrink)

We present a content markup language for physics realized by extending the OMDoc format by an infrastructure for the principal concepts of physics: observables, physical systems, and experiments.