Course Descriptions

In the first half of the semester, we will be focusing on the relation between perceptual experience and consequent intentional states, with the ultimate aim of understanding how perceptual experience can justify empirical beliefs. We’ll begin by considering general methodological issues in the philosophy of perception, focusing on the interplay/tension between (what Bence Nanay calls) the “intuitive” approach to characterizing perception and the “naturalistic” or “perceptual processing” approach. With this distinction in mind, we’ll revisit Wilfred Sellars’s famous (or infamous) attack on “the given”. Sellars argues that perceptual experience cannot both provide a fully objective reflection of the external world and also serve as a justifier for beliefs: it either belongs to the “space of causes” or to the “space of reasons,” and these two “spaces” are incommensurable.

Contemporary philosophers disagree about whether Sellars has really identified a problem for naturalistic theories of perceptual justification, and if he has, what the solution is. But in any case, his challenge continues to reverberate throughout philosophy, informing many contemporary debates about perceptual content and its relation to empirical belief. Contrary to what one might have thought, philosophers’ positions on these debates do not line up neatly along the intuitive/naturalistic divide.

With all this in mind, we’ll look at as many of the following examples as interest dictates and as time permits:

1. Are perceptual states representational? Many philosophers say yes, based on both intuitive and empirical considerations. But others deny it, some for Sellarsian reasons, and others for empirical reasons.
2. If perceptual states are representational, what do they represent? What is their representational content? Do they represent only sensorily basic properties (like, for vision, shapes and spatial relations), or do they include objectproperties (like TREE and CUP), or even high-level, “theoretical” properties (like WHITE PINE or SPODE CHINA)? Can we perceive potentials of things – e.g., whether something can be pulled or folded? Can empirical investigate settle this question?
3. Does perception involve concepts? Sellars argued that if perceptual experience represents the world as being a certain way, then perceptual experience must involve conceptualizing the world. Some contemporary philosophers agree with this. Others argue that perceptual experience is non- or pre-conceptual. Among these philosophers, there is disagreement about what it is for experience to be non-conceptual. We’ll look at both intuitive and empirical aspects of this question.
4. What makes it the case that a perceptual state has this or that content? Sellars presumed that, for the perceptual “given” to play its presumed role in justifying empirical belief, whatever content it has would have to be completely determined by the external world. Is this true of perceptual experience, or is perceptual content influenced by subjective factors? Could those factors include a subject’s background beliefs and desires?
5. How important are consciousness and attention to the epistemology of perception? Does Sellars’s challenge depend on the assumption that we must be aware of the content of perceptual states for them to be justifiers? Do we get different answers to some of the questions above if we relax this assumption?

In the second half of the course, we’ll focus on the current naïve realism/representationalism debate about the nature of perceptual experience. We’ll examine whether naïve realists can accept the computational theory of perception, which posit representations. And we will examine problems that both naïve realism and representationalism face in trying to accommodate visual illusions. The philosophers whose views we’ll discuss include the naïve realists Martin, Brewer, French, Phillips, and Fish, and the representationalists Dretske, Tye, Bryne, Green, and Hill.