The Relational and Representational Character of Perceptual Experience

Abstract

What is at stake in the debate on whether experience should be understood as having content? This question is discussed by distinguishing several ways of understanding the thesis that perceptual experience is a matter of being perceptually related to one’s environment as well as the thesis that perceptual experience is a matter of representing the environment. Against recent arguments to the contrary, the thesis that perceptual experience is fundamentally both relational and representational is defended. In being perceptually related to one’s environment one employs perceptual capacities that yield representational states. These perceptual capacities in turn can only be understood in terms perceptual relations to the environment. It is argued that perceptual relations to the environment and the content of experience should be recognized to be mutually dependent in any explanation of what brings about perceptual consciousness of the environment.

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