Abstract
This paper tries to meet the three basic constraints in the metaphysics of perception—that, following Schellenberg (Philos Stud 149:19–48, 2010), I call here the particularity constraint, the indistinguishable constraint, and the phenomenological constraint—by putting forward a new combination of the two well-known contradictory views in this field: the relational view and the content view. Following other compatibilists (such as Schellenberg in Philos Stud 149:19–48, 2010), I do think that it is possible to reconcile the two views, recognizing that experience has both a relational and a representational dimension. However, in opposition to the current ways of combining these two views, I reject the idea of gappy contents. Instead, my proposal is builds on Lewis’s famous semantic (Philosophy and grammar, Riedel, Dordrecht, 1980b), according to which the content of sentences is best modeled as complex functions from context-index pairs to truth-values. In conformity with the content view, I want to suggest that perceptual experiences do represent complex properties or complex functions (e.g., being a yellow-cube-straight-ahead) that are either veridical or falsidical of particulars in contexts and indexes. In this relativist framework, I can also accommodate the relational claim that our experience of particulars must be understood as a fundamental cognitive relation rather than as a representation. In this way, particulars also play a key role in individuating perceptual experiences. Two token experiences, e and e′, are different when one of the following conditions is met: first, if two different particulars, a and a′, are causally responsible for the token experiences e and e′, respectively, regardless of the time and location in which the perceptual experiences take place; second, if the same particular a, which is causally responsible for both e and e′, is either located in a different place or is in the same location but at a different time.
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de Sá Pereira, R.H. Combining the representational and the relational view. Philos Stud 173, 3255–3269 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-016-0662-y
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-016-0662-y