Perceptual Experience

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This book offers an account of perceptual experience: its intrinsic nature, its engagement with the world, its relations to mental states of other kinds, and its role in epistemic norms. Christopher S. Hill argues that perceptual experience constitutively involves representations of worldly items, and that the relevant form of representation can be explained in broadly biological terms. On this basis, appearances turn out to be relational, viewpoint dependent properties of external objects. A complementary account is offered of how the objects that possess these properties are represented. Hill maintains that perceptual phenomenology can be explained reductively in terms of the representational contents of experiences, and uses this doctrine to undercut the traditional arguments for dualism. This treatment of perceptual phenomenology is expanded to encompass cognitive phenomenology, the phenomenology of moods and emotions, and the phenomenology of pain, and to the various forms of consciousness that perceptual experience can possess. It is argued that phenomenology is metaphysically independent of these forms of consciousness, and another is to de-mystify the form known as phenomenal consciousness. The book concludes by discussing the relations of various kinds that perceptual experiences bear to higher level cognitive states, including relations of format, content, and justification or support.