The limits of perceptual phenomenal content
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The limits of perceptual phenomenal content Peter V. Forrest1
Springer Nature B.V. 2020
Abstract There is an ongoing debate in philosophy of mind and epistemology about whether perceptual experience only represents those ‘‘thin’’ features of our environment that are apprehended by our senses, or whether, in addition to these, at least some perceptual experiences represent more complex, ‘‘thick’’ properties. My aim in this paper is to articulate an important difference between thin and thick properties, and thus to diagnose a key intuitive resistance many proponents of the thin view feel towards the thick view. My diagnosis then provides us with a novel and compelling argument against the thick view. In what follows, first I consider two unsuccessful versions of an alternative strategy against the thick view found in the literature. Next, I present my own argument. The argument involves proposing two constraints on the phenomenal contents of perceptual experience, which I call the Presentation Principle and the Containment Principle, and then reasoning from these principles to a conclusion that is fatal to (most forms of) the thick view—an outcome that I call the problem of Phenomenal Explosion. I conclude by responding to several objections. Keywords The admissible contents of perceptual experience Phenomenal content Kind properties Perceptual presentation
1 Introduction There is an ongoing debate in philosophy of mind about whether perceptual experience only represents those low-level or ‘‘thin’’ features of our environment that are apprehended by our senses, or whether, in addition to these, at least some & Peter V. Forrest [email protected] 1
Auburn University, Auburn, AL, USA
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P. V. Forrest
perceptual experiences represent higher-level, categorical or ‘‘thick’’ properties. Those philosophers that endorse the latter view represent a form of what is sometimes called Phenomenal Liberalism, since they are generous about what contents they allow may be represented in phenomenal consciousness, while those that reject this view correspondingly exhibit a type of Phenomenal Conservatism about perceptual experience.1 Widely agreed upon examples of thin properties are colors, shapes, and motion in vision.2 Thick properties include causation; action affordances; emotions and other mental state properties; and social, natural, and artifactual kind properties, such as being-upper-class, being-a-wallaby, and being-aSubaru-Forester. The debate that interests me is sometimes construed as addressing the question of what properties are admissible into the contents of perceptual experience (Hawley and Macpherson 2011).3 But there are several ways of understanding this question that are inadequate for capturing what is really at issue. Susanna Siegel helpfully suggests that ‘‘when a property is represented in experience, its being so represented has an associated phenomenology’’ (2006, 485), and ‘‘nothing counts as a content of experience if it does not reflect the phenomenal character of experience’’ (20
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