Berkeley's Puzzle

Abstract

Sensory experience seems to be the foundation of our knowledge of mind-independent things. But how can that be? Sensory experience provides knowledge of nothing but sensory experience itself. What solves this puzzle, Chapters 1–4 show, is a view of sensory experience as a relation, more primitive than thought, between the perceiver and high-level objects and properties in the mind-independent world. Mind-independence is explained as the causal autonomy of physical objects, the fact that physical objects themselves are the mechanisms by which causal influence is transmitted from place to place. This response is worked out in the context of current work on visual attention, problems about illusion and hallucination, the view of perception as an intervention on belief, and the ideas of Locke, Berkeley, and Moore. An alternative response to the puzzle, developed in Chapters 5–8, draws on the idea that sensory experiences have non-conceptual representational content. This enables such experiences to ground our grasp of concepts of mind-independent objects in a way that does justice to the contribution of the subject. As long as representationalism regards the intentionality of sensory experience as a form of phenomenal intentionality it can satisfy the demands of experientialism, the view that our understanding of concepts of ordinary objects and their properties is grounded in sensory experience. Sensory experiences have their representational content by virtue of their conscious character, which means that consciousness does important work in grounding our grasp of concepts.