The philosophy of perception is dominated by trichotomies: traditional discussions focused on the relative merits of direct realism, indirect realism, and phenomenalism (see e.g. Moore 1959, pp. 32–59). But these discussions confused issues in metaphysics and epistemology with those that concern perception alone. More recent discussions have moved on to a new trichotomy concerning the nature of perceptual representation: representative theories of perception, adverbial theories, and informational theories. Yet it cannot, I think, be said that this trichotomy forms a Hegelian triad; the search for a synthesis is still on. In this paper I shall present one possible solution – what I shall call the projective theory.

Since the merits of the projective theory are best appreciated in the context of a critical survey of the members of the current trichotomy, I shall briefly discuss these, starting out from the approach characteristic of informational theories. These theories are the result of the application of a broadly functionalist treatment of mental representation to perception; so the content of perceptual representations is taken to be exhaustively determined by the causal role of such representations in bringing information about the environment to bear upon the control of behaviour.