Intentionalism and the problem of the object of perception

2010

The aim of this dissertation is to clarify a general question: 'What does it mean to say that perceptual experience is intentional?' and to check whether a certain suspicion is correct: that a major shift has occurred in the views about the intentionality of experience and the strategies of arguing for it.

The Incarnate Word, 2019

The following is a paper presented for the Course Rahner and Lonergan at the University of Toronto (Winter, 2014), revised and edited Winter, 2018. Our purpose is to defend the possibility of “perceptualism,” that is to say, the position maintaining that the intelligible content of consciousness is given in perception and not posited by the activity of the subject. Assisted by the insights of Cornelio Fabro, this defense contrasts perceptualism with Bernard Lonergan’s “critical realism”. This paper focuses on the notion of experience, seemingly the basis of the opposition between perceptualism and critical realism.

Published in The Oxford Handbook of Philosophy of Mind edited by A. Beckermann and B.

Philosophical perspectives, 2007

Erkenntnis, 2018

I argue that intentionalist theories of perceptual experience are unable to explain the phenomenal character of perceptual experience. I begin by describing what is involved in explaining phenomenal character, and why it is a task of philosophical theories of perceptual experience to explain it. I argue that reductionist versions of intentionalism are unable to explain the phenomenal character of perceptual experience because they mischaracterize its nature; in particular, they fail to recognize the sensory nature of experience's phenomenal character. I argue that nonreductionist versions of intentionalism are unable to explain the phenomenal character of perceptual experience because, although they recognize its sensory nature, they mislocate it.

2013

The central problem of the dissertation is the question whether our perceptual states have content. While debates about the nature of perceptual content have been common in the philosophy of perception, a recent discussion questioned whether perception has intentional content at all. Relationalism defends the view that perception is not a form of representation, that it cannot be accurate or inaccurate, that it does not have a content which would give to perception the ability to represent or misrepresent the world. Relationalism is a serious challenge for intentionalism, the view that perceptual states have intentional content and can be accurate or inaccurate. The present dissertation analyses the different aspects of this conflict between relationalism and intentionalism. The central claim of the book is that the relationalist explanation of perception is insufficient and that a theory of intentional content for perception is needed in order to explain the different aspects of perceptual experience, especially perceptual illusions. Relationalism must reduce cases where we fail to see to cases of blindness, i.e. cases where we do not stand in an appropriate relation to a certain object or property, cases where we are blind to that object or property. It will be claimed that certain cases of illusions can be explained as such cases of a failure to see due to blindness. But other types of illusions cannot be treated in the same way. It will be claimed that we need the notion of inaccurate (or false) content to explain at least a certain type of common perceptual illusions. It will also be claimed that only intentionalism can give a coherent explanation of such illusions. The critical part of the book against relationalism will be complemented by a positive defense of intentionalism and perceptual content. This second part of the book offers first a teleo-semantic account of the intentional content of perception. The view is defended here that the content of perceptual states depends on their causal relations and on the functions these states have for systems which use them. Finally, the nature of perceptual content is specified as a Russellian propositional content. The dissertation finishes with the claim that such a view of content counters the relationalist objections against intentional content. Perceptions can have content and can involve a direct relation to external objects and their properties.

Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, 2019

This paper develops a form of transcendental na€ ıve realism. According to na€ ıve realism, veridical perceptual experiences are essentially relational. According to transcendental na€ ıve realism, the na€ ıve realist theory of perception is not just one theory of perception amongst others, to be established as an inference to the best explanation and assessed on the basis of a cost-benefit analysis that weighs performance along a number of different dimensions: for instance, fidelity to appearances, simplicity, systematicity, fit with scientific theories, and so on. Rather, na€ ıve realism enjoys a special status in debates in the philosophy of perception because it represents part of the transcendental project of explaining how it is possible that perceptual experience has the distinctive characteristics it does. One of the potentially most interesting prospects of adopting a transcendental attitude towards na€ ıve realism is that it promises to make the na€ ıve realist theory of perception, in some sense, immune to falsification. This paper develops a modest form of transcendental na€ ıve realism modelled loosely on the account of the reactive attitudes provided by Strawson in 'Freedom and Resentment', and suggests one way of understanding the claim that na€ ıve realism is immune to falsification. 1. Transcendental Na€ ıve Realism According to the version of the na€ ıve realist theory of perception that I will take as representative, veridical perceptual experiences are essentially relational: veridical perceptual experiences are constituted at least in part by the mind-independent objects and properties in our environment that they are experiences of. Because on this view veridical perceptual experiences are essentially relational, a particular perceptual experience could not have occurred if the subject had not been perceptually related to precisely those elements of their environment. 1 In this respect, na€ ıve realist theories of perception differ from common kind theories of perception, like sense-datum or representationalist theories, which allow that how things are with the subject is constitutively independent, at least on a particular occasion, of how things are in their environment. According to common kind theories, it is possible for the subject to have fundamentally the same kind of experience whether or not the environment This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

Phenomenology and philosophy of mind, 2005

2015

This thesis is a defense of the Content View on perceptual experience, of the idea that our perceptual experiences represent the world as being a certain way and so have representational content. Three main issues are addressed in this work. Firstly, I try to show that the Content View fits very well both with the logical behaviour of ordinary ascriptions of seeing-episodes and related experiential episodes, and with our pretheoretical intuitions about what perceiving and experiencing ultimately are: that preliminary analysis speaks for the prima facie plausibility of such a view. Secondly, I put forward a detailed account of perceptual episodes in semantic terms, by articulating and arguing for a specific version of the Content View. I provide arguments for the following theses: Perceptual content is two-layered so it involves an iconic level and a discrete or proto-propositional level (which roughly maps the seeing-as ascriptions in ordinary practices). Perceptual content is singular and object-dependent or de re, so it includes environmental objects as its semantic constituents. The phenomenal character of perceptual experience is co-determined by the represented properties together with the Mode (ex. Visual Mode), but not by the perceived objects: that is what I call an impure representationalism. Perceptual content is 'Russellian': it consists of worldly objects, properties and relations. Both perceptual content and phenomenal character are 'wide' or determined by environmental factors, thus there is no Fregean, narrow perceptual content. Thirdly, I show that such a version of the Content View can cope with the objections which are typically moved against the Content View as such by the advocates of (anti-intentionalist versions of) disjunctivism. I myself put forward a moderately disjunctivist version of the Content View, according to which perceptual relations (illusory or veridical) must be told apart from hallucinations as mental states of a different kind. Such a disjunctivism is 'moderate' insofar as it allows genuinely relational perceptual experiences and hallucinations to share a positive phenomenal character, contrary to what Radical Disjunctivism cum Naïve Realism holds. Showing that the Content View vindicates our pre-theoretical intuitions and does justice of our ordinary ascriptive practices, articulating a detailed and argued version of the Content View, and showing that such a version is not vulnerable to the standard objections recently moved to the Content View by the disjunctive part, all that can be considered as a big, multifaceted Argument for the Content View.

Philosophical Studies

I argue that any account of perceptual experience should satisfy the following two desiderata. First, it should account for the particularity of perceptual experience, that is, it should account for the mind-independent object of an experience making a difference to individuating the experience. Second, it should explain the possibility that perceptual relations to distinct environments could yield subjectively indistinguishable experiences. Relational views of perceptual experience can easily satisfy the first but not the second desideratum. Representational views can easily satisfy the second but not the first desideratum. I argue that to satisfy both desiderata perceptual experience is best conceived of as fundamentally both relational and representational. I develop a view of perceptual experience that synthesizes the virtues of relationalism and representationalism, by arguing that perceptual content is constituted by potentially gappy de re modes of presentation.