A rediscovery of presence

Abstract

When we see Wilfrid Sellars's favorite object, an ice cube pink through and through, we see the very pinkness of it. Inner awareness of our visual experience finds the ice cube to be experientially present, not merely representationally present to our consciousness. Its pinkness and other properties are present not merely metaphorically, not merely in the sense that the experience represents or is an occurrent belief in the ice cube's being there before us. Despite his behavioristic inclinations, Sellars acknowledges experiential presence and gives an account of it in terms of a perceptual experience's having two intrinsic components, a sensation and a conceptual response to the sensation that ultimately refers to the sensation although it normally takes the sensation for the environmental item that produced it. Problems with Sellars's account include the inadequacy of the causal and referential relations postulated between the two components of a perceptual experience, and the experimentally demonstrated fact (Michotte, Thines and Crabbe, 1964/1991) that, although sensations may be necessary for perceptual experience, experiential presence of a particular environmental property does not always require corresponding sensations. If someone with Sellars's extraordinary philosophical sophistication could not avoid rediscovering experiential presence, what chance do others have who travel the same theoretical path as he did.