Unity and particularity in perception
Philosophical Psychology March 17, 2026 Kael Mccormack
Philosophical accounts of object perception typically split between explaining objects as unified wholes through general representations and explaining them as particular individuals through unrepeatable representations. Susanna Schellenberg's capacitism—which treats perception as the exercise of capacities to discriminate concrete perceptual particulars—aims to reconcile these views but struggles to account for perceptual structure without invoking non-perceptual capacities. The author proposes a solution: a distinct capacity to discriminate unity, whose successful exercise yields a representation of an object bound with its properties, enabling direct awareness of an object's unity. This preserves both the particularity and the structured wholeness of perceived objects.