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Experience as Perception as ...?

 


Adam Pautz, a philosopher at Brown University, has written PERCEPTION, a new book from Routledge.

I gather from the review in NOTRE DAME PHILOSOPHICAL REVIEWS that Routledge takes it there are four distinct schools about perception, which he regards as roughly synonymous with human experience. He categorizes these schools as different answers to the following fill-in-the-blank question:

"To have an experience with a certain character (that is, to have an experience of a certain type) just is to ____________________." 

 First there is "naive realism." This holds that to have an experience of a certain character just is to experience the actual character of material things, e.g., the redness and roundness of the tomato. 

Then there is "sense datum theory." To have an experience of a certain character just is to be aware of non-material objects, viz., sense data, generated by neural processes in the brain.

Thirdly, there is "internal physical state theory." To have an experience of a certain character just is to be in a certain neural activation state. This erases the distinction between seeing a tomato and having a hallucination of a tomato, which seems to be what Descartes was worrying about at the dawn of modern philosophy. 

Finally, there is representationalism. To have an experience of a certain character just is to experientially represent a complex array of actual or possible perceptible properties.  Pautz' own sympathies are surely here, and he spends much of the book distinguishing the different forms that representationalism can take.

SPOILER ALERT! His own view is what he calls internalist-nonreductive representationalism.

This contrasts with both response-dependent and response-independent representationalists. 

Unless I misunderstand (and it is reasonably likely that I do) the response-independent representationalists are classical empiricists, in the manner of John Locke or Thomas Reid. The response-dependent representationalists are pragmatists, in the manner of Peirce or James. So the reader will know which side of THAT divide I am on. Look again to the title of this blog. 

Internal-nonreductive representationalism is some sort of have-it-all-ways synthesis.   


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