Block/Phillips Debate on Unconscious Perception

To avoid ‘getting bogged down in theories of perception’, Prinz (2015) stipulates that ‘unconscious perception’ is to mean the ‘unconscious transduction of information ... useable by the organism that transduces it’. But this will not suffice if our interest is in defending the philosophically substantive thesis that episodes of the same fundamental kind as episodes of conscious perception can occur unconsciously (Block 2012: 11-12; Burge 2010: 374-5; cf. Prinz 2010: 310). A traditional idea is that perception essentially involves occupying a subjective perspective on an objective world. Pursuing this idea, Burge characterizes perception as constitutively a matter of ‘objective sensory representation by the individual’ (2010: 368). So characterized, not all useable transduced information constitutes perception. For an informational state to constitute perception it must: (a) have objective content, representing how particulars are arranged in the subject’s external environment; and (b) be attributable to the individual, not merely, say, to their visuomotor system.