Extract

Dominic Gregory’s Showing, Sensing, and Seeming offers an intriguing theory of ‘distinctively sensory representations’—a category which Gregory takes to include photographs, pictures, audio recordings, films, mental images (e.g. a mental image of a red cube), and sensory memories (e.g. an auditory memory of hearing a loud screeching noise). The book’s main thesis, articulated in the introduction and chapter one, is that these diverse specimens are distinguished by their intimate connection with our sensory states. For example, a picture shows things as looking a certain way, an auditory memory shows things as sounding a certain way, and an olfactory mental image shows things as smelling a certain way. More generally, sensory representations ‘show things as standing sensorily certain ways’ (p. 10). In contrast, the sentence ‘A red cube is resting on a round table’ may accurately describe a scene, but it does not show how things look when one perceives the scene.

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