Abstract
The dissertation collects six essays in the philosophy of perception and perception of mind. The first essay defends the basic claim that perceptual experiences have representational content against Charles Travis’s recent, fundamental criticism. The second argues against John McDowell’s suggestion that subjects have recognitional capacities for the fine-grained features they experience things as having; the argument trades on the non-transitivity of phenomenal indiscriminability. In the third essay, the fundamental question is raised of what the principled distinction may be between conceptual and nonconceptual representational capacities. I argue that two prima facie plausible and popular suggestions towards answering that question are unavailable to the conceptualist (specifically, to the ‘state’ conceptualist): the suggestions, namely, that conceptual capacities characteristically (i) are exercisable in self-conscious thought, and (ii) exhibit a certain systematicity or re-combinability. The fourth and the fifth essays discuss issues connected with Moore’s popular idea that perceptual experience is ‘diaphanous’. The fourth argues that there is a problem about the compatibility of content conceptualism with a certain specific much-discussed and often-endorsed claim of diaphanousness. In the fifth essay, I develop an ‘object-directed’ analogue of Jackson’s ‘experience-directed’ knowledge argument, and reach the conclusion that adherents of the so-called ‘perspectivalist’ or ‘phenomenal concepts’ account of Jackson’s argument ought to posit phenomenal concepts not only in introspective judgment but also in basic perceptual judgement. The sixth and final paper widens the focus to consider a basic question in general philosophy of mind, viz. whether, as Brentano argued, intentionality the unifying mark of the mental. I show that, on many standard account of intentionality, it isn’t sufficient to mentality.