The Phenomenological Problem of Perception

Abstract

A perceptual experience of a given object seems to make the object itself present to the perceiver’s mind. As P. F. Strawson says, ‘‘mature sensible experience (in general) presents itself as, in Kantian phrase, an immediate consciousness of the existence of things outside us’’ (1979, 47). This phenomenological directness of perceptual experience is the distinctive feature of perceptual phenomenology—it distinguishes our perceptual experiences from every other kind of experience that we enjoy. For example, when you see a book in front of you or hold it in your hands, the book itself seems to be present to you in a way it never does when you merely consciously think or imagine that the book is in front of you. The question of how to best capture or explain this distinctive phenomenology of perceptual experience has played a crucial role in the debate between the two presently dominant theories of perception: the relational view or naive realism (the view that to perceive is to stand in a primitive relation of awareness or acquaintance to the world) and the representational or content view (the view that to perceive is to represent the world to be a certain way). Specifically, philosophers such as Crane (2006, 139–41), Hellie (2007, 266–69), Fish (2009, 19–23), and Kennedy (2009, 578–80), maintain that we should accept naive realism because it provides a satisfying account of the phenomenological directness of perceptual experience while the content view cannot. Very roughly, the naive realist complains that since states like thinking and imagining are representational mental states, the content view’s proposal that perceptual experiences are representational mental states