Experience, Seemings, and Evidence

Abstract

Many people have recently argued that we need to distinguish between experiences and seemings and that this has consequences for views about how perception provides evidence. In this article I spell out my take on these issues by doing three things. First, I distinguish between mere sensations like seeing pitch black all around you and perceptual experiences like seeing a red apple. Both have sensory phenomenology in presenting us with sensory qualities like colors, being analog in Dretske's sense, and being fine‐grained. However, only the latter have furthermore a perceptual phenomenology characterized by objectification and related dualities of perspectivality/completion and variation/constancy. Second, I elaborate on the reasons for thinking that both mere sensations and perceptual experiences (= experiences) need to be distinguished from accompanying seemings that passively assign things into conceptual categories and thereby tell you something about them. For example, when you look at a red apple and have the relevant recognitional abilities it will also normally seem to you that this is an apple. Finally, I argue that the best version of the popular dogmatist view about evidence is one which claims that it's neither experiences nor seemings by themselves, but rather the right sorts of composites of experiences and seemings that provide evidence.

Believing in Perceiving: Known Illusions and the Classical Dual‐Component Theory

“…One important terminological caveat, however, is that I use the term ‘perceptual experience’ to refer to the complex of nonconceptual and conceptual elements that the dual‐component theorist posits. I do not mean to imply that no dual‐component theorist can allow for seeing a as F to occur nonconceptually (see, e.g., Reiland, ). However, all dual‐component theorists have in common the claim that, at least for some Fs, nonconceptual and conceptual elements are required for some form of perceptual awareness of a as F, and it is that form of awareness that I refer to as ‘perceptual experience’ or simply ‘experience.’…”

“…Modern dual‐component views appear especially committed to the claim that seemings require the construction of an additional representation when one considers the putative epistemological function of seemings on (at least some of) these views. The perceptual seeming that p is the source of prima facie justification for the perceptual belief that p (Tucker, ; Reiland, ), in line with epistemological dogmatism (Pryor, ) or phenomenal conservatism (Huemer, ). In that case, it would appear that one won't be in a position to draw doxastic inferences from a perceptual seeming that p (e.g.…”

Ensemble representation and the contents of visual experience

“…Recent discussion of 'seemings' might be taken to suggest a positive answer to this question (Bergmann 2013;Brogaard 2013b;Cullison 2011;Pace 2017;Reiland 2014Reiland , 2015Tucker 2010). 9 Advocates of seemings hold that how the world appears to us in experience is constituted by two kinds of states: a layer of perceptual 'experience' that represents exclusively low-level properties and a layer of perceptual 'seeming' that is grounded in the contents of perceptual experience and can represent high-level properties.…”

Cognitive Penetrability and High‐Level Properties in Perception: Unrelated Phenomena?

“…There has been a lot of debate about whether visual seemings just are visual experiences (Ghijsen, ; Chudnoff and DiDomenico, ) or whether they are distinct from such experiences (Tucker, ; Lyons, ; Conee, ; Brogaard, ; Bergmann, ; Reiland, ). We are not taking a stance on this issue in this article but if it turns out that visual seemings come apart from visual experiences, then ‘visual experiences’ should be read so as not to include visual seemings.…”