Summary |
If you see a frog on the chair, you have a visual experience. But things from your perspective could seem exactly the same, even if you were hallucinating a frog on a chair. So if two experiences are typed the same according to how things are from your perspective, then there's a single type of experience that is instantiated in both cases. Since there is no frog in the hallucination case, it would seem that your experience does not constitutively involve the frog or your perceptual relation to the frog. On the other hand, when you see the frog on the chair, your experience puts you in contact with the frog. It puts you in a position to succeed in making demonstrative reference to the frog (e.g., by saying something like "that is a frog"). So there is another useful way to type experiences that includes the frog and your perceptual relation to it. How are these two ways of typing experiences related? If we focus on the phenomenal character of the experience, what is the relationship between the frog and the phenomenal aspects of the experience? What structures of experience best reflect these relationships? By virtue of what features of experience can they tell us about particular objects, as opposed to objects that are distinct but qualitatively identical to the ones we see? Other issues about objects concern the status of objects as mind-independent. Are objects presented to us in experience as mind-independent, or is experience neutral on this question? |