Representationalism and the perspectival character of perceptual experience

Abstract

Perceptual experiences inform us about objective properties of things in our environment. But they also have perspectival character in the sense that they differ phenomenally when objects are viewed from different points of view. Contemporary representationalists hold, at a minimum, that phenomenal character supervenes on representational content. Thus, in order to account for perspectival character, they need to indentify a type of representational content that changes in appropriate ways with the perceiver's point of view. Many representationlists, including Shoemaker and Lycan, argue that such contents are best construed in terms of mind-dependent properties. Other representationalists, including Tye and Dretske, hold that these contents involve only mind-independent properties. Susanna Schellenberg has recently developed an account of perceptual experience that would serve these latter representationalists extremely well. She suggests that we can do justice to the perspectival character of perceptual experience by appeal to representations of a certain type of relational properties, so-called 'situationdependent properties.' In this paper, I critically engage with Schellenberg's proposal in order to show how mind-independent representationalists can explain perspectival character. I argue that appeal to situation-dependent properties is problematic. I then show that mind-independent representationalists can account for perspectical character by means of scenario contents in Christopher Peacocke's sense.

The puzzle of cross‐modal shape experience

“…Perhaps visual experience represents the solid angle an object subtends, which is formed by the set of rays emanating from an apex at the perceiver's viewpoint and just grazing the object's visible boundary (Huemer, 2001, 121; cp. Jagnow, 2012). The slanted circle and head‐on ellipse subtend the same solid angle, while the slanted circle and head‐on circle do not 8…”

Twin Earth and perceptual content

“…8 We could describe it as simply a case in which the sticks are located at different distances from us, and that the vehicles for representing the sticks consequently are located at different distances from the position representing our viewpoint in phenomenal space. If this is the case, there is no need to assume that there is any phenomenal entity that is bigger than another entity (cf Smith 2002: p. 172;Hopp 2013;Jagnow 2008Jagnow , 2012. There are however other alternatives.…”

Spatial perception: The perspectival aspect of perception

“…A view similar to the P‐shape proposal has it that spatial appearance properties should be understood in terms of awareness of the solid visual angles that perceived objects subtend (Jagnow, ; Tye, ). The solid visual angle an object subtends relative to a viewpoint is fixed by the union of rays leading from that viewpoint to the boundary of the object.…”