The epistemic force of perceptual experience

What is the metaphysical nature of perceptual experience? What evidence does experience provide us with? These questions are typically addressed in isolation. In order to make progress in answering both questions, perceptual experience needs to be studied in an integrated manner. I develop a unified account of the phenomenological and epistemological role of perceptual experience, by arguing that sensory states provide perceptual evidence due to their metaphysical structure. More specifically, I argue that sensory states are individuated by the perceptual capacities employed and that there is an asymmetric dependence between their employment in perception and their employment in hallucination and illusion. Due to this asymmetric dependence, sensory states provide us with evidence. Perceptual experience plays at least three different roles in our lives. It justifies our beliefs about our environment. It brings about conscious mental states. It converts informational input, such as light and sound waves, into representations of features that we attribute to the world. Corresponding to these three roles, there are at least three fundamental questions that have motivated the study of perceptual experience. Epistemology-question: How does perceptual experience justify our beliefs and yield knowledge of our environment given that perceptual experience can be misleading (we may be subject to illusion or hallucination)? Mind-question: How does perceptual experience bring about conscious mental states in which our environment appears or seems a certain way to us (irrespective of the way our environment actually is)? S. Schellenberg (&) Department of Philosophy, Rutgers University, New Brunswick, NJ, USA e-mail: [email protected] 123 Philos Stud DOI 10.1007/s11098-013-0167-x