The Multiple Contents of Experience (original) (raw)

The Multiple Contents of Experience: Representation and the Awareness of Phenomenal Qualities (2009)

'The Multiple Contents of Experience: Representation and the Awareness of Phenomenal Qualities' [Forthcoming in Philosophical Topics: Perception and Intentionality, Vol 37:1, (2009), 25-48.] ABSTRACT This paper examines the contents of perceptual experience, and focuses in particular on the relation between the representational aspects of an experience and its phenomenal character. It is argued that the Critical Realist two-component analysis of experience, advocated by Wilfrid Sellars, is preferable to the Intentionalist view. Experiences have different kinds of representational contents: both informational and intentional. An understanding of the essential navigational role of perception provides a principled way of explaining the nature of such representational contents. Experiences also have a distinct phenomenal content, or character, which is not determined by representational content. KEY WORDS: Perceptual experience; perceptual content; critical realism; phenomenal qualities; representation; intentionalism; causal theory of perception; navigational account; Wilfrid Sellars;

The Content and Phenomenology of Perceptual Experience

2013

The paper’s main target is strong and reductive “representationalism”. What we claim is that even though this position looks very appealing in so far as it does not postulate intrinsic and irreducible experiential properties, the attempt it pursues of accounting for the phenomenology of experience in terms of representational content runs the risk of providing either an inadequate phenomenological account or an inadequate account of the content of the experience.

The phenomenal content of experience

Mind and Language, 2006

We discuss in some length evidence from the cognitive science suggesting that the representations of objects based on spatiotemporal information and featural information retrieved bottom-up from a visual scene precede representations of objects that include conceptual information. We argue that a distinction can be drawn between representations with conceptual and nonconceptual content. The distinction is based on perceptual mechanisms that retrieve information in conceptually unmediated ways. The representational contents of the states induced by these mechanisms that are available to a type of awareness called phenomenal awareness constitute the phenomenal content of experience. The phenomenal content of perception contains the existence of objects as separate things that persist in time and time, spatiotemporal information, and information regarding relative spatial relations,

Perceptual experience and its contents

The Journal of Mind and Behavior, 2002

The contents of perceptual experience, it has been argued, often include a characteristic "non-conceptual" component (Evans, 1982). Rejecting such views, McDowell (1994) claims that such contents are conceptual in every respect. It will be shown that this debate is compromised by the failure of both sides to mark a further, and crucial, distinction in cognitive space. This is the distinction between what is doubted here as mindful and mindless modes of perceiving: a distinction which cross-classifies the conceptual / non-conceptual divide. The goal of the paper is to show that there can be both mindful personal level perceptual experiences whose content cannot be considered conceptualpace McDowell (1994)-and that there are mindless personal level perceptual experiences whose content cannot be considered-pace Evans (1982)-nonconceptual. The resulting picture yields a richer four dimensional carving of the space of perceptual experience, and provides a better framework in which to accommodate the many subtleties involved in our sensory confrontations with the world.

Two Versions of the Conceptual Content of Experience

International Journal of Philosophical Studies, 2019

In ‘Avoiding the Myth of the Given’, McDowell revisits the main themes of Mind and World in order to make two important corrections: first, he does not longer believe that the content of perceptual experience is propositional in character; second, he does not believe now that the content of an experience needs to include everything the experience enables us to know non-inferentially. In this article, I take issue with both retractions. My thesis is that McDowell’s first version of perceptual content is preferable to the latest one.

The double structure of experience

In this essay I would like to explore a theme which is eminently phenomenological in that it deals with the relationship between experience and thinking. I am interested in the structure of experience as such and in the possibilities of thinking which can be developed from experience. My particular inquiry will deal with the moment when experience exceeds thinking and is exceeded by it at the same time. Although the care concerning this experience of exceeding can be understood as an enterprise in the phenomenological tradition, it is obvious, however, that it requires a reinterpretation of the classical phenomenological method. It concerns rather the moment of experience which is concealed and overlooked by classical phenomenology and which emerges only when thinking subordinates itself again to the authority of experience. The method of this work might seem to be philosophically suspect at first: it does not try to assert itself, including its presuppositions, by means of its performance, but it risks a somewhat centrifugal tendency within which it can leave itself.

The Particularity and Phenomenology of Perceptual Experience

Philosophical Studies

I argue that any account of perceptual experience should satisfy the following two desiderata. First, it should account for the particularity of perceptual experience, that is, it should account for the mind-independent object of an experience making a difference to individuating the experience. Second, it should explain the possibility that perceptual relations to distinct environments could yield subjectively indistinguishable experiences. Relational views of perceptual experience can easily satisfy the first but not the second desideratum. Representational views can easily satisfy the second but not the first desideratum. I argue that to satisfy both desiderata perceptual experience is best conceived of as fundamentally both relational and representational. I develop a view of perceptual experience that synthesizes the virtues of relationalism and representationalism, by arguing that perceptual content is constituted by potentially gappy de re modes of presentation.

INTENTIONALITY AND CONTINUITY OF EXPERIENCE

My aim is to provide an analysis of cognitive experience from the point of view of philosophy of mind, by identifying and describing different components or features present in it. But different things are called 'experience' and some are more complex than other. I will first examine different uses of the word 'experience' to clear the way and to avoid cases of circularity. Then I try to restrict the investigation and introduce the mode (character) and content of experience, and take BonJour's suggestion of what cognitive experience is as a starting point. In my view, the two main features of experience are Horizontal Intentionality (which produces Phenomenal Continuity) and Vertical Intentionality. The first is the most striking and fundamental; it constitutes the continuity of experience. Vertical Intentionality selects objects of experience, so that our experience is always experience of something. In Perception, something is identified and recognized by the application of concepts. Attention is required, especially when we get involved in complicated operations or manipulations. Finally, the last feature is constituted by a huge set of dispositions, particularly abilities to keep track our thoughts and former experiences. Cognitive Experience in the full sense is the result of the interaction and mutual support of these features.