Adam Pautz

Perception is one of the most pervasive and puzzling problems in philosophy, generating a great deal of attention and controversy in philosophy of mind, psychology and metaphysics. If perceptual illusion and hallucination are possible, how can perception be what it intuitively seems to be, a direct and immediate access to reality? _Perception _is an outstanding introduction to this fundamental topic, covering both the perennial problems and recent work on the problem. Adam Pautz examines four of the most important theories of perception: the sense datum view; the Qualia view; the intentional view; and the disjunctive view, assessing each in turn. He also discusses the relationship between perception and the physical world, in particular arguments for physical reductivism in perception, and the problem of sensory qualities such as color. Useful examples are included throughout the book to illustrate the problematic nature of perception, including consciousness, hallucination, illusion, blindsight, the reliability of introspection, and whether perception is conceptual or non-conceptual. The addition of chapter summaries, annotated further reading and a glossary make _Perception_ essential reading for anyone studying the topic and students of philosophy of mind, philosophy of psychology and metaphysics.

In “Radical Interpretation” (1974), David Lewis asked: by what constraints, and to what extent, do the non-intentional, physical facts about Karl determine the intentional facts about him? There are two popular approaches: the reductive externalist program and the phenomenal intentionality program. I argue against both approaches. I will agree with friends of phenomenal intentionality that reductive externalists neglect the role of our internally determined conscious experiences in grounding intentionality, but I will fault them for not adequately explaining intentionality. They cannot just say “conscious experience explains it” and leave it at that. However, I will sketch an alternative multistage account incorporating ideas from both camps. In particular, by appealing to Lewisian ideas, we can explain how Karl’s conscious experiences help to ground the contents of his other mental states.

The chapter criticizes the thesis that “cognitive phenomenology” might help ground mental content. Criticisms concern what the chapter calls “altered cognitive qualia cases”, “absent cognitive qualia cases”, and “disembodied cognitive qualia cases”. But the chapter defends a thesis in the same vicinity. In the chapter's view, it is sensory phenomenology, not “cognitive phenomenology”, that is the source of all determinate intentionality. To explain how, a modified version of David Lewis’s theory of mental content is developed.

What is the role of conscious experience in the epistemology of perceptual knowledge: how should we characterise what is going on in seeing that o is F in order to illuminate the contribution of seeing o to their status as cases of knowing that o is F? My proposal is that seeing o involves conscious acquaintance with o itself, the concrete worldly source of the truth that o is F, in a way that may make it evident to the subject that o is an instance of ‘x is F’ as she understands this, and hence evident that o is F. Seeing that o is F is thus a way of its being evident that o is F and is therefore a way of knowing that o is F.

I reply to comments on my book Perception (Routledge 2021) by Umrao Sethi, Jeff Speaks and Brian Cutter. Sethi objects to my representational view of perception on the ground that that having an experience of a color or shape can enable you to know what that color or shape is like only if it is actually present in the experience. Speaks has a very interesting discussion of my puzzle of the laws of appearance for the representational view. And Cutter asks what I have against 'neural sense datum theory'. In my responses, I try to take the discussion forward. At the end, I develop a new argument against reductive physicalist theories of sensible qualities based on a principle I call "qualitative closure".

In this chapter, Pautz raises a puzzle about spatial experience for phenomenal internalists like Ned Block. If an accidental, lifelong brain-in-the-void (BIV) should have all the same experiences as you, it would have an experience as of items having various shapes, and be able to acquire concepts of those shapes, despite being cut off from real things with the shapes. Internalists cannot explain this by saying that BIV is presented with Peacocke-style visual field regions having various shapes, because these would have to be non-physical sense data. They might instead explain this by saying that BIV “phenomenally represents” various shape properties. But since BIV lacks any interesting physical relations to shapes, this would imply that phenomenally representation is an irreducible relation.