Part V: Philosophy of Mind

Chapter 15

Study questions for What is Perception?

  1. Give examples of your own of the visual, auditory, tactile, olfactory and gustatory experience.
  2. Formulate the problems of illusion and hallucination in your own words, and explain how disjunctivism avoids these problems.
  3. Provide some examples of uses of ‘look’ that clearly do not reflect how what we are directly aware of in visual experience.
  4. How might the direct realist reply to Jackson’s argument?
  5. Give some examples of your own of perceptual experience that may not be transparent.
  6. Does the transparency of normal visual experience support direct realism?
  7. Can you think of any other potential forms of unconscious perception besides vision for action?

Multiple Choice Questions

Weblinks for What is perception?

Crane, Tim (2011). ‘The Problem of Perception’. Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Spring), ed. Edward N. Zalta, http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/spr2011/entries/perception-problem/. [An excellent evaluative overview of the arguments from illusion and hallucination.]

Huemer, Michael (2011). ‘Sense-Data’. Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Spring), ed., Edward N. Zalta, http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/spr2011/entries/sense-data/. [An excellent overview of the sense-datum theory and the various arguments for and against it.] 

Siegel, Susanna (2013). ‘The Contents of Perception’. Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Fall), ed. Edward N. Zalta, http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/fall2013/entries/perception-contents/. [An excellent overview of the nature of perceptual content and what it means to say that perception has content in the first place.]

Soteriou, Matthew (2010). ‘The Disjunctive Theory of Perception’. Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Winter), ed.Edward N. Zalta, http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/win2010/entries/perception-disjunctive/. [An excellent overview of disjunctivism and the arguments for and against the position.]

Introductory further reading for What is perception?

Brogaard, Berit (2013). ‘The Phenomenal Use of “Look” and Perceptual Representation’. Philosophy Compass 9(7): 455–68ed. [An evaluation of the success of Jackson’s argument from phenomenal looks and similar arguments.]

Fish, William (2010). Philosophy of Perception: A Contemporary Introduction. Routledge. [A very thorough overview of some of the main debates in philosophy of perception.]

Tye, Michael (1997). Ten Problems of Consciousness. MIT Press. [A fairly accessible defence of strong representationalism, a view that has triggered a lot of heated debate.]

Advanced further reading for What is perception?

Block, N. (2010). ‘Attention and Mental Paint’. Philosophical Issues 20(1): 23–63. [Block here lays out and defends the mental paint view.]

Brogaard, Berit (2012). ‘Vision for Action and the Contents of Perception’. Journal of Philosophy 109(10): 569–87. [A philosophical account of vision for action.]

Brogaard, Berit (ed.) (2014). Does Perception Have Content? Oxford University Press. [An edited collection devoted to the question of whether perception has content and related questions. This is a question that is typically answered in the negative by naive realists.]

Chalmers, David (2004). ‘The Representational Character of Experience’. In Future for Philosophy, ed. B. Leiter. Oxford University Press, pp. 153–81. [An advanced evaluative account of the various possible forms of representationalism.]

Jackson, Frank (1977). Perception: A Representative Theory. Cambridge University Press. [A fairly accessible book-length defence of the sense-datum theory that covers the argument from phenomenal looks.]

Siegel, Susanna (2010). The Contents of Visual Experience. Oxford University Press. [An advanced book-length defence of the view that visual experience has content of a particular kind.]