Transparency, intentionalism, and the nature of perceptual content

Moore’s idea here is often summarized by saying that experience is transparent: when we try to examine the features of an experience, we end up ‘looking through’ the experience and examining features of what the experience is an experience of. Though there is widespread agreement that the transparency of experience shows something important about perception, there is little agreement about what it shows. Many have argued that we can use it to decide questions about the objects of experience — whether they are sense data, propositions of some sort, or external particulars and their properties. I agree that there is something important to be learned from Moore’s observation: but I think that it concerns the contents, not the objects, of perception. These two topics are not the same. To ask whether perceptual experiences have objects is to ask whether the having of a perceptual experience is a matter of instantiating a certain monadic property or of bearing a certain relation — call it ‘perceptual awareness’ — to something. To ask what the objects of perception are is to ask, given that the latter view of the metaphysics of perception is correct, what sorts of things the second relata of the perceptual awareness relation can be. To ask about the nature of the contents of perceptions is to ask, given that there are ways that perception represents the world as being — what are these ‘ways’? On certain views, there may well be connections between the objects and contents of perceptual experiences. But it is not obvious that everyone must recognize a close link here. An adverbialist thinks of the having of a perceptual experience as instantiation of a certain monadic property, and therefore denies that there are such things as the objects of perception, in the above sense. Must the adverbialist therefore deny that perceptions have contents — that perceptions sometimes represent a table as brown, or