Does Perception Have Content?

Abstract

According to the phenomenal belief account of perceptual experience I have suggested elsewhere, experience is a kind of belief. These beliefs have contents of a special form or type: While their objects are ordinary material objects, the properties they ascribe to these objects are 'phenomenal' properties, properties such as looking red or looking round. In this paper, I shall further develop this account by defending it against two objections: a) the objection that ultimately, no plausible epistemology can be built upon experiences with phenomenal contents. And b) the objection that phenomenal ‘looks’ is a propositional attitude operator and therefore cannot be used in specifying the content of experience. First, however, I shall argue that the intuitive inferential integration of experience into our system of beliefs provides one of the strongest motivations for construing experiences as having propositional content in the first place. The phenomenal belief account provides one good way of accommodating this inferential integration. Defending it thus is one way of defending the claim that experience indeed has propositional content.