Several theories of delusions suggest that anomalous perceptual experience is necessary for delusion formation. This study evaluated levels of anomalous perceptual experience in a large group of nonclinical participants from the general population (N = 337), a group of psychotic inpatients (N = 20), and 2 groups of hallucinating (N = 24) and nonhallucinating (N = 24) deluded patients. The aims ...

The idea is proposed that whereas perceptual experience is underconstant in one sense, it is virtually constant insofar as it is functionally stable and predictable. The possibility of distinguishing perception and cognition is explored in experiments on the perception of surface orientation. These experiments are related to the study of selfmotion perception and space perception. An experiment...

Recently, the thesis that experience is fundamentally a matter of representing the world as being a certain way has been questioned by austere relationalists. I defend this thesis by developing a view of perceptual content that avoids their objections. I will argue that on a relational understanding of perceptual content, the fundamental insights of austere relationalism do not compete with per...

"Naive realism" is the common-sense view that the world we see, hear, feel, taste, and smell about us is one and the same as the so-called physical world, existing apart from ourselves. It is called naive realism for it is a view of reality which every one of us naively assumes as we are growing up. It is not so much a matter of "indoctrination" by our educational systems that we are naive real...

The contents of perceptual experience, it has been argued, often include a characteristic “non-conceptual” component (Evans, 1982). Rejecting such views, McDowell (1994) claims that such contents are conceptual in every respect. It will be shown that this debate is compromised by the failure of both sides to mark a further, and crucial, distinction in cognitive space. This is the distinction be...