Perception and its objects

TY - JOUR

T1 - Perception and its objects

AU - Brewer, Bill

PY - 2007/1

Y1 - 2007/1

N2 - Early modern empiricists thought that the nature of perceptual experience is given by citing the object presented to the mind in that experience. Hallucination and illusion suggest that this requires untenable mind-dependent objects. Current orthodoxy replaces the appeal to direct objects with the claim that perceptual experience is characterized instead by its representational content. This paper argues that the move to content is problematic, and reclaims the early modern empiricist insight as perfectly consistent, even in cases of illusion, with the realist contention that these direct objects of perception are the persisting mind-independent physical objects we all know and love.

AB - Early modern empiricists thought that the nature of perceptual experience is given by citing the object presented to the mind in that experience. Hallucination and illusion suggest that this requires untenable mind-dependent objects. Current orthodoxy replaces the appeal to direct objects with the claim that perceptual experience is characterized instead by its representational content. This paper argues that the move to content is problematic, and reclaims the early modern empiricist insight as perfectly consistent, even in cases of illusion, with the realist contention that these direct objects of perception are the persisting mind-independent physical objects we all know and love.

U2 - 10.1007/s11098-006-9051-2

DO - 10.1007/s11098-006-9051-2

M3 - Article

SN - 0031-8116

VL - 132

SP - 87

EP - 97

JO - PHILOSOPHICAL STUDIES

JF - PHILOSOPHICAL STUDIES

IS - 1

ER -