Content View Research Articles

Perception, Content, Generality

AbstractHow does perceptual experience disclose the world to us? According to the content view (CV), visual perceptual consciousness entails representational content. According to pure relationalism, perception is a non‐representational relation between a subject and an object. In this article, I argue that CV‐theorists are implicitly committed to the claim that there is an element of generality in perception, and I show how pure relationalists would emphasize the particularity of perception, instead of its generality. But I also argue that there are good epistemological and phenomenological reasons for thinking that there is generality in perception. In particular, I focus on Brewer's purely relationalist account and I argue that it either fails to satisfy important phenomenological and epistemological requirements, or it introduces generality in a way that makes it collapse into CV. I contend that construing the debate between CV and pure relationalism in light of particularity and generality advances our understanding of how perceptual experience discloses the world to us, as well as strengthening the standing of CV.

How to Index Visual Contents

According to the Content View (CV), visual perceptual experiences represent the subject’s surroundings or have representational content. A critical question posed by Charles Travis against CV is how the subject of experiences could index or introspectively ascribe a specific representational content of a given (occurring) visual experience: if her visual experiences incorporate representational contents, how could she ascribe a particular content to any given visual experience of hers? According to Travis, while visual representation is supposed to be “a familiar phenomenon; something we can tell is happening” (Travis 2004: 86), there is no good available evidence that our visual experiences represent our surroundings; and he thinks so because there seems to be no method of visual contents’ indexation or self-ascription. The aim of this paper is to show how CV could meet what I shall call the Indexing Problem for perceptual — more specifically, visual — content. My main positive suggestion turns on the thought that the contents of visual experiences could be indexed by the way things demonstrably look to the subject of experiences.