Transparency, Intentionalism, and the Nature of Perceptual Content

Abstract

Moore's idea here is often summarized by saying that experience is transparent: when we try to examine the features of an experience, we end up 'looking through' the experience and examining features of what the experience is an experience of.2 Though there is widespread agreement that the transparency of experience shows something important about perception, there is little agreement about what it shows. Many have argued that we can use it to decide questions about the objects of experience whether they are sense data, propositions of some sort, or external particulars and their properties. I agree that there is something important to be learned from Moore's observation: but I think that it concerns the contents, not the objects, of perception. These two topics are not the same. To ask whether perceptual experiences have objects is to ask whether the having of a perceptual experience is a matter of instantiating a certain monadic property or of