Perception and Content

It is close to current orthodoxy that perceptual experience is to be characterized, at least in part, by its representational content, roughly, by the way it represents things as being in the world around the perceiver. Call this basic idea the content view (CV). There is debate within (CV) concerning the extent to which such content captures the subjective nature of experience; and, indeed, this issue poses something of a dilemma for (CV). For, consider the content of any particular perceptual experience. Is this very content also the content of a possible non-experiential thought or belief by the subject? If so, then what is added to it, in perception, to produce the characteristically conscious, subjective nature of the experience? If not, then how are we to explain its status as an essentially experiential representational content – a genuine content, which nevertheless cannot be the content of anything other than perceptual experience? This dilemma is in my view ultimately fatal, although I do not pursue it directly here. My aim is rather to bring out as clearly as I can what I regard as the core errors of (CV) which lie behind the dilemma.