Perception and Content

Abstract

It is close to current orthodoxy that perceptual experience is to be characterized, at least in part, by its representational content, roughly, by the way it represents things as being in the world around the perceiver. Call this basic idea the content view (CV). There is debate within (CV) concerning the extent to which such content captures the subjective nature of experience; and, indeed, this issue poses something of a dilemma for (CV). For, consider the content of any particular perceptual experience. Is this very content also the content of a possible non-experiential thought or belief by the subject? If so, then what is added to it, in perception, to produce the characteristically conscious, subjective nature of the experience? If not, then how are we to explain its status as an essentially experiential representational content-a genuine content, which nevertheless cannot be the content of anything other than perceptual experience? This dilemma is in my view ultimately fatal, although I do not pursue it directly here. My aim is rather to bring out as clearly as I can what I regard as the core errors of (CV) which lie behind the dilemma.The obvious model of representational content, for expounding (CV), is that of a person's thought about the world around him, as this is expressed in his linguistic communication with others, and registered by their everyday attitude ascriptions to him. Let us begin, then, with S's thought that a is F: a thought about a particular object in his environment, a, to the effect that it is F. Call this the initial model for content, (IM).Motivated in part by the need to achieve a satisfactory relation between the content and the consciousness of perception, in the context of (CV), McDowell insists at this point upon a crucially qualified application of (IM) to the case of perceptual experience, by stressing that the singular components of genuinely perceptual contents are object-dependent demonstrative senses (see esp. McDowell 1998a, 1998b, Lect. III, and 1998c. We therefore move from S's thought that a is F to his thought that that (man, say) is F. He adds a further qualification, that a person has no real control over which such contents come to him in perception: given the way things are in the world around him, and the various interests and concerns which he has in attending to it as he does, he is simply 'saddled' with determinate such contents (see esp. McDowell 1994). Thought, on the other hand, is an operation of his spontaneity: he is in a certain sense free in his active formulation of the content 'a is F' in thought. 1 I endorse both of these qualifications in Perception and Reason (1999). Not wishing to do any injustice to the properties which we perceive the things around us to have, though, in comparison with the objects themselves which we perceive

The abolition of the “contracts in writing” rule in the 2009 Construction Act

“…However, it is common in the construction industry that a large number of constructions work to be undertaken on the strength of an oral agreement (BIS, 2010;Brewer, 2006). Therefore, one of the most important changes made in the new Act is the repeal of s. 107 of the 1996 Act.…”

A role for abstractionism in a direct realist foundationalism

“…Brewer himself later recognizes this difficulty, and revises his position to show how perceptual experience might count as both non-propositional and non-conceptual (Brewer 2006)-the type of revision we will have occasion to revisit. For the time being, it is useful to examine BonJour's third direct realist candidate, Reynolds (1991), who initially opts for a non-propositional view of perceptual content.…”

Subjective Consciousness: A Self-Representational Theory

“…The basic idea is that the brain constructs representations, whatever these are (Kriegel expresses sympathy for Dretske's (e.g., 1995) beleaguered teleo-informational semantics, according to which a representation of a fact, F, is a brain state whose function it is to carry information about F), corresponding to what perceive; and we perceive worldly items via these representations. Apparently he's unaware, unimpressed, or simply undaunted by the various objections that have been leveled against this view of perception (e.g., Alston, 2005;Brewer, 2006;Dewey, 1929;Travis, 2004).…”