Immediacy and the Representational Character of Perceptual Experience
Philosophia June 23, 2026 Paweł Grad
This paper examines the motivations behind the Immediacy thesis, which is the main premise supporting essential representationalism about perceptual experience (ER). ER holds that every phenomenal property necessarily entails a representational property. The Immediacy thesis states that the phenomenal relation to an experience's qualitative profile inherently involves a representational relation to the qualitative profile of the represented object, with both profiles being type-identical. The author clarifies ER's commitments and analyzes the role of the Immediacy thesis in four arguments for representationalism: transparency, inference to the best explanation, perceptual seemings, and perceptual capacities. The conclusion synthesizes these analyses and elaborates on the Immediacy thesis's dialectical role.