Book contents
6 - Perception
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 June 2012
Summary
At the beginning of the previous chapter, I remarked that perceptual states, such as an experience of seeing a tree to be in front of a house, are partly like sensational states and partly like propositional attitude states. They are like the former in that they have qualitative or phenomenal features and they are like the latter in that they have conceptual content. I had a good deal to say in that chapter about the qualitative aspects of perceptual experiences, but not much about their conceptual content. In the present chapter I shall try to redress the balance and say more about the latter. But one of the things that we shall need to discuss is how the conceptual content of a perceptual experience is related to its qualitative features – for it can scarcely be supposed that these two dimensions of perceptual experience are quite unconnected.
However, we should acknowledge that an account of the nature of perceptual experiences is only part of what is demanded of a philosophical analysis of the concept of perception, which is another chief concern of this chapter. According to most contemporary philosophers, perceiving certainly involves having perceptual experiences, but is more than just that. The question is: what more? One plausible suggestion is that perceiving additionally involves some sort of causal relationship between the perceiver's perceptual experiences and those objects which, in virtue of that relationship, the perceiver may be said to perceive.
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- An Introduction to the Philosophy of Mind , pp. 130 - 159Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2000