Susanna Siegel

What is the role of conscious experience in action and cognition? John Campbell’s answer in Reference and Consciousness begins from ideas he thinks are part of common sense: When our actions are directed toward particular things—as when we grab our keys, or lift forks from plates—these actions are guided by visual experience. We see where to reach for keys or fork, and only then are able to do it. Similarly for the case of cognition: in cases where experience is limited, such as blindsight, cognition suffers as well. Consider a blindsighter who can reliably point to the person a normally sighted speaker is talking about whenever she uses the expression ‘that woman’. Even if the blindsighter points correctly all the time, she does not understand the speaker’s use of ‘that woman’. Common sense thus finds a distinctive role for conscious experience in action and cognition, in opposition to the view that everything essential to action and cognition could proceed perfectly well without any conscious experience at all. In this way, common sense opposes epiphenomenalism about experience—the view that experience has no causal role to play with respect to cognition or action.

The thesis that we can visually perceive causal relations is distinct from the thesis that visual experiences can represent causal relations. I defend the latter thesis about visual experience, and argue that although they are suggestive, the data provided by Albert Michotte's experiments on perceptual causality do not establish this thesis. Turning to the perception of causality, I defend the claim that we can perceive causation against the objection that its arcane features are unlikely to be represented in experience.

Since disjunctivists when talking about perception deny that hallucinations and veridical perceptions have a common fundamental nature, they need some other way to account for the fact that these kinds of experiences can ‘seem the same’ from the inside. A natural response is to give a purely epistemic account of hallucination, according to which there is nothing more to hallucinations than their indiscriminability from veridical perceptions. This chapter argues that the epistemic conception of hallucination falters in its treatment of cognitively unsophisticated creatures, and that it cannot respect all the facts about what we can know on the basis of introspection.

Using certain bits of language, we seem to be able to refer to particular middle-sized dry goods. How is this possible? In this essay, I address this question with respect to uses of demonstrative expressions. I argue that perception makes demonstrative reference possible, and I try to explain how it does so. I argue that the reference of uses of demonstrative expressions, such as "these" in utterances of "these are my keys," is fixed by a demonstrative mental state: more exactly, by an intention to refer that is anchored by perception. When the intention is visually anchored, it, in turn, comes to be about its object thanks to a contribution from visual experience. A full explanation of how in the visual case perception makes demonstrative reference possible will include an account of what visual experience contributes. I argue that visual experience helps establish demonstrative reference because it represents which visible surfaces and edges belong to the same middle-sized dry-good