Reply to Keith A. Wilson

2018 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Perceptual Experience ◽  
Representational Content ◽  
The Senses

In my essay, ‘The Silence of the Senses’ (2004, revised 2013) I argued that perceptual experience has no representational content, or at least none if you exclude the content of a perceiver’s, or experiencer’s responses to his experience, e.g., in a case of perceiving, recognizing...

In Defense of Perceptual Content

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Susanna Schellenberg
Keyword(s):  
Perceptual Experience ◽  
Representational Content ◽  
Perceptual Content ◽  
Explanatory Role ◽  
Relational Understanding ◽  
The Way

Chapter 5 takes a step back and traces the way in which excessive demands on the notion of perceptual content invite an austere relationalist account of perception. It argues that any account that acknowledges the role of discriminatory, selective capacities in perception must acknowledge that perceptual states have representational content. The chapter shows that on a relational understanding of perceptual content, the fundamental insights of austere relationalism do not compete with representationalism. Most objections to the thesis that perceptual experience has representational content apply only to austere representationalist accounts, that is, accounts on which perceptual relations to the environment play no explanatory role. By arguing that perceptual relations and perceptual content are mutually dependent the chapter shows how Fregean particularism can avoid the pitfalls of both austere representationalism and austere relationalism. With relationalists, Fregean particularism argues that perception is constitutively relational, but with representationalists it argues that it is constitutively representational.

Perceptual knowledge

2019 ◽  
pp. 279-308
Author(s):  
Georges Dicker
Keyword(s):  
Perceptual Experience ◽  
Perceptual Knowledge ◽  
The Senses ◽  
Carry Over ◽  
Sensitive Knowledge ◽  
Rule Out

This chapter critically analyzes Locke’s views on “sensitive knowledge.” Its main theses are: (1) Locke sometimes confuses the legitimate question (Q1), “When we perceive a body, how can we know that we aren’t hallucinating instead?” with the faulty “veil-of-perception” question, (Q2) “How do we know bodies exist, since we can’t perceive them?” (2) When Locke does mention (Q1), he sometimes just dismisses it, because he holds that simple ideas of sensation are by definition produced by bodies. (3) At other times, Locke humors the skeptic, and offers a defense of the senses, in the form of an inference to the best explanation. (4) It’s doubtful that he could successfully rule out other possible explanations of our perceptual experience, like Descartes’s deceiver scenario and its contemporary variants. (5) There are reasons for this weakness, and they carry over to any attempt to defeat skepticism by an inference to the best explanation.

Perceptual Experience, Conscious Content, and Non-Conceptual Content

2004 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
pp. 78-90 ◽  
Author(s):  
Uriah Kriegel ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Perceptual Experience ◽  
Phenomenal Character ◽  
Representational Content ◽  
Conceptual Content ◽  
Perceptual Consciousness ◽  
The Face ◽  
Content Of Experience ◽  
Representational Approach

One of the promising approaches to the problem of perceptual consciousness has been the representational theory, or representationalism. The idea is to reduce the phenomenal character of conscious perceptual experiences to the representational content of those experiences. Most representationalists appeal specifically to non-conceptual content in reducing phenomenal character to representational content. In this paper, I discuss a series of issues involved in this representationalist appeal to non-conceptual content. The overall argument is the following. On the face of it, conscious perceptual experience appears to be experience of a structured world, hence to be at least partly conceptual. To validate the appeal to non-conceptual content, the representationalist must therefore hold that the content of experience is partly conceptual and partly non-conceptual. But how can the conceptual and the non-conceptual combine to form a single content? The only way to make sense of this notion, I argue, leads to a surprising consequence, namely, that the representational approach to perceptual consciousness is a disguised form of functionalism.

scholarly journals Nonconceptualism and content independence

2021 ◽  
Vol 44 (2) ◽  
pp. 325-340
Author(s):  
Sebastián Sanhueza Rodríguez
Keyword(s):  
Stress State ◽  
Perceptual Experience ◽  
Representational Content ◽  
The State ◽  
Perceptual Content ◽  
Cognitive Content ◽  
Cognitive States

Abstract: State Nonconceptualism is the view that perceptual states (not perceptual content) are different in kind from cognitive states (not cognitive content), insofar as a subject could be in perceptual states even if she lacked the concepts necessary to describe those states. Although this position has recently met serious criticism, this piece aims to argue on its behalf. A point I specifically want to highlight is that, thanks to State Nonconceptualism, it is possible to characterize perceptual experiences as nonconceptual or concept-independent without relying on the notion of perceptual content - a feature I term here the content independence of State Nonconceptualism. I think one should welcome this result: for, although a nonconceptualist characterization of perceptual experience is quite plausible, nonrepresentationalist approaches to perception have persuasively challenged the thought that perceptual experiences have representational content. This brief piece is divided into three parts: (i) I introduce two versions of Perceptual Nonconceptualism, namely, Content and State Nonconceptualism; (ii) I go on to stress State Nonconceptualism’s content independence; and (iii), I briefly address three prominent objections against the state nonconceptualist.

scholarly journals Perceptual Experience and Degrees of Belief

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Thomas Raleigh ◽  
Filippo Vindrola
Keyword(s):  
Present State ◽  
Perceptual Experience ◽  
Representational Content ◽  
Degrees Of Belief ◽  
Degree Of Confidence ◽  
Perceptual Confidence

Abstract According to the recent Perceptual Confidence view, perceptual experiences possess not only a representational content, but also a degree of confidence in that content. The motivations for this view are partly phenomenological and partly epistemic. We discuss both the phenomenological and epistemic motivations for the view, and the resulting account of the interface between perceptual experiences and degrees of belief. We conclude that, in their present state of development, orthodox accounts of perceptual experience are still to be favoured over the perceptual confidence view.

Perception, Especially Perception through Language

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ruth Garrett Millikan
Keyword(s):  
Perceptual Experience ◽  
Perceptual Processing ◽  
Perceptual Illusions ◽  
The Senses ◽  
Psychological Processing ◽  
Cognitive Understanding

Perceptual processing is translation of patterns in the data of sense into cognitive understanding without uniceptual inference. Understanding language differs from ordinary perceptual processing in that the signs it translates are detached rather than attached. This similarity is obscured because ordinary uses of the verbs of perception do not track a kind of psychological processing. Their use is mostly factive, which encourages overlooking the fallibility of perception. One result is the mistaken view that perceptual illusions are an anomaly and that perception is cognitively impenetrable. The assumption that each of the senses has its own proprietary level of perception and the assumption that differences in the result of perceptual processing are always accompanied by differences in perceptual experience are questioned. Finally, a number of intuitive objections to the idea that understanding language is a form of perceptual processing are discussed.

Ayurvedic perspective of Cosmetology

2016 ◽  
Vol 1 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Dr.Sumedh Wasnik ◽  
Tanuja Naik ◽  
Anita Ghodke ◽  
Vaibhav Sulakhe
Keyword(s):  
Perceptual Experience ◽  
Life Science ◽  
Toxic Materials ◽  
The Senses ◽  
Four Levels ◽  
The Aesthetic ◽  
The Mind ◽  
Concept Of Beauty ◽  
Physically Attractive

Cosmetology deals with various aspect of beauty. Beauty is the quality of being physically attractive, the qualities in a person or a thing that give pleasure to the senses or the mind. It is the quality or aggregate of qualities in a person or thing that gives pleasure to the senses or pleasurably exalts the mind or spirit. Beauty is the quality present in a thing or person that gives intense pleasure or deep satisfaction to the mind, whether arising from sensory manifestations (as shape, colour, sound, etc.), a meaningful design or pattern, or something else. It pleases the aesthetic senses, especially the sight. Beauty of person gives perceptual experience of pleasure or satisfaction. According to Ayurveda, the concept of beauty includes physical, mental, social and spiritual elements. Ayurveda is the science of health care and healing, works on four levels body, Breath, mind and spirit. When these are in perfect harmony, a person radiates with inner and outer beauty. In fact, the concept of beauty and cosmetics is as old as mankind and civilization. Ama (toxic materials) inside our body make a person ugly and diseased and Sodhana i.e. Panchakarma (purification) is the best therapeutic intervention to eliminate body toxins. Being Ayurveda as a life science and tradition of India, soon India will be the global cosmetic industry’s capital because of advantages of Ayurveda and Ayurvedic medicines.

scholarly journals Are the Senses Silent?

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Keith A. Wilson
Keyword(s):  
Perceptual Experience ◽  
Category Mistake ◽  
Important Challenge ◽  
The Senses

Many philosophers and scientists take perceptual experience, whatever else it involves, to be representational. In ‘The Silence of the Senses’, Charles Travis argues that this view involves a kind of category mistake, and consequently, that perceptual experience is not a representational or intentional phenomenon. The details of Travis’s argument, however, have been widely misinterpreted by his representationalist opponents, many of whom dismiss it out of hand. This chapter offers an interpretation of Travis’s argument from looks that it is argued presents a genuine and important challenge to orthodox representational views of experience. Whilst this challenge may not (pace Travis) be insurmountable, it places a substantial burden upon the representationalist to explain not only how experiences come to have the contents that they do (the individuation question), but how those contents come to feature in our conscious mental lives (the availability question).

scholarly journals Perception verbs and the conceptualization of the senses: The case of Avatime

Linguistics ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 58 (2) ◽  
pp. 1-38
Author(s):  
Saskia van Putten
Keyword(s):  
Visual Perception ◽  
Perceptual Experience ◽  
Sensory Perception ◽  
Perception Verbs ◽  
The Senses ◽  
Detailed Picture ◽  
Shed Light

AbstractLanguages differ in their number of basic verbs that describe perceptual experience. Some languages have only two such verbs: one for visual perception and another for non-visual perception. How do speakers of these languages conceptualize sensory perception? To shed light on this question, this paper investigates the perception verbs mɔ̀ ‘see’ and nu ‘hear/feel/taste/smell’ in Avatime (Kwa, Niger-Congo). These verbs are studied together with the constructions in which they occur, using both translated data and spontaneous discourse. Both perception meanings and meanings outside the domain of perception are taken into account. The detailed picture that emerges shows some previously undocumented patterns of perception encoding and enriches our understanding of the conceptualization of the senses more generally.

Senses

2019 ◽  
pp. 154-179
Author(s):  
Casey O'Callaghan
Keyword(s):  
Perceptual Experience ◽  
Information Gathering ◽  
Multisensory Perception ◽  
Activity Type ◽  
The Senses ◽  
The Way

Multisensory phenomena have been used to challenge the distinctness of our senses. Perceptual processes interact extensively and perform joint functions, while perceptual experience is constitutively and irreducibly multisensory. This chapter presents an account of the senses and what differentiates them. According to this proposal, each sense is a family of perceptual capacities unified and distinguished by the way in which those capacities are exercised. The relevant manner is an information-gathering activity type individuated by the information it functions to extract and the medium from which it does so. Perceiving involves exercising perceptual capacities in one or more sensory manners. Thus, perceptual episodes and experiences may be typed accordingly, without appealing to their phenomenology. The key to this approach is distinguishing the task of individuating senses from that of ascribing modalities to experiences. This account rejects the independence of the senses while preserving their distinctness. It illuminates richly multisensory perception and captures why it matters.

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