Perception naturalised: relocation and the sensible qualities
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Perception naturalised: relocation and the sensible qualities Paul Coates1
Received: 21 February 2017 / Accepted: 2 September 2017 © Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2017
Abstract This paper offers a partial defence of a Sellarsian-inspired form of scientific realism. It defends the relocation strategy that Sellars adopts in his project of reconciling the manifest and scientific images. It concentrates on defending the causal analysis of perception that is essential to his treatment of sensible qualities. One fundamental metaphysical issue in perception theory concerns the nature of the perceptual relation; it is argued that a philosophical exploration of this issue is continuous with the scientific investigation of perceptual processes. Perception, it is argued, can, and should, be naturalised. A challenge for any account of perception arises from the fact that a subject’s experiences are connected with particular objects. We need to supply principled grounds for identifying which external physical object the subject stands in a perceptual relation to when they have an experience. According to the particularity objection presented in the paper, naive realism (or disjunctivism) does not constitute an independently viable theory since, taken on its own, it is unable to answer the objection. In appealing to a ‘direct experiential relation’, it posits a relation that cannot be identified independently of the underlying causal facts. A proper understanding of one central function of perception, as guiding extended patterns of actions, supports a causal analysis of perception. It allows us to draw up a set of necessary and sufficient conditions for perceiving that avoids well-known counterexamples. An analysis of this kind is congruent with the scientific account, according to which experiences are interpreted as inner states: sensible qualities, such as colours, are in the mind (but not as objects of perception). A Sellarsian version of the relocation story is thus vindicated.
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Paul Coates [email protected] Department of Philosophy, University of Hertfordshire, Hatfield AL10 9AB, UK
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Synthese
Keywords Causal theory of perception · Manifest image · Naive realism · Navigational account · Perceptual content · Relocation · Scientific realism · Sensible qualities · Wilfrid Sellars
1 Introduction Science, according to a longstanding realist tradition, is continuous with philosophy. Philosophical analysis can help to clarify the basic categories that we need to employ in any conceptual scheme, such as substance and property; while science, and in particular physics, can reveal the detailed nature of the fundamental substances that ground the truths about the actual world. Scientific realism claims that the scientific and metaphysical pictures of the world can be unified along these lines. In this paper I shall defend this tradition indirectly, by focusing on one particular problem area in philosophy that has attracted much recent attention, the nature of the perception. The question, ‘what is it for a pe
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