Immediacy and the Representational Character of Perceptual Experience

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.

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Abstract

Abstract In this paper, I attempt to uncover motivations for the main premise that supports essential representationalism about perceptual experience (ER), namely the Immediacy thesis . ER claims that for every phenomenal property in the class Φ, there is some representational property R such that, necessarily, having Φ entails having R. The Immediacy thesis is that, roughly, the very phenomenal relation to the experience’s qualitative profile entails a representational relation to the qualitative profile of the represented object, and that these two profiles are type-identical. In § 2, I clarify ER’s commitments. Then I attempt to uncover the role of the Immediacy thesis in the four arguments for representationalism: the argument from transparency (§ 3), the argument from inference to the best explanation (§ 4), the argument from perceptual seemings (§ 5), and the argument from perceptual capacities (§ 6). In § 7, I conclude by wrapping up the results of my analyses in §§ 3–6 and elaborating on the role of the so-called Immediacy thesis in the dialectic of representationalist arguments.