Get Free Shipping on orders over $79
Existence and Illusion : A Semantic Account of Perception - D. E. Buckner

Existence and Illusion

A Semantic Account of Perception

By: D. E. Buckner

eText | 19 February 2026 | Edition Number 1

At a Glance

eText


$153.01

or 4 interest-free payments of $38.25 with

 or 

Instant online reading in your Booktopia eTextbook Library *

Why choose an eTextbook?

Instant Access *

Purchase and read your book immediately

Read Aloud

Listen and follow along as Bookshelf reads to you

Study Tools

Built-in study tools like highlights and more

* eTextbooks are not downloadable to your eReader or an app and can be accessed via web browsers only. You must be connected to the internet and have no technical issues with your device or browser that could prevent the eTextbook from operating.
Illusion is a longstanding problem in the philosophy of perception: how can it perceptibly appear that something is the case, though nothing corresponds in reality?

A strong intuition - the Common Kind Assumption that the same account must apply to veridical perception as to illusion - seems to commit us to "weird" mental items like sense data, but an equally strong intuition is that weird items have no place in a parsimonious account of reality.

D.E. Buckner takes a novel approach to this problem, arguing that perceptual states are propositional. Just as the same proposition can be true or false, so the same perceptual state can be veridical or not. Sight tells us that the stick in water is bent, even when our understanding says it is not. This semantic account of perception satisfies the Common Kind Assumption without committing us to weird items.

The book is a fresh approach to the classic problem of illusion, informed by the core topics of philosophical logic: identity, existence, reference and predication. It brings together a number of disparate traditions, including twentieth-century sense datum theory and the subsequent reaction to it; Chastain's anaphoric theory of reference; the Aristotelian notion of a substance (the this of demonstrative reference) and its accidents.
on
Desktop
Tablet
Mobile

More in Epistemology & The Theory of Knowledge

Is God a Mathematician? - Mario Livio

eBOOK

The Book of Memory : Or, How to Live Forever - Mark Rowlands

eBOOK

Feminism Enchanted - Yanbing Er

eBOOK

RRP $59.29

$53.99