The Contents of Visual Experience (Philosophy of Mind)

To ask other readers questions about The Contents of Visual Experience , please sign up. Be the first to ask a question about The Contents of Visual Experience. Lists with This Book. This book is not yet featured on Listopia. Feb 20, Alina rated it it was amazing. Many philosophers who defend Gibsonian and embodied cognition theories rely on a combination of appeals to claims from Husserl, Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty among other continental phenomenologists and to empirical studies that are relevant to such claims e.

Noe, Hutto, Gallagher, Zahavi, and Thompson.

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Sometimes one worries about the conceptual looseness and contingency on theoretical traditions of these approaches. However, Siegel is different. She does a stunning job in arguing for Gibsonian Many philosophers who defend Gibsonian and embodied cognition theories rely on a combination of appeals to claims from Husserl, Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty among other continental phenomenologists and to empirical studies that are relevant to such claims e. She does a stunning job in arguing for Gibsonian views in a rigorous analytic style, with more conceptual distinctions and a more careful and explicitly articulated methodological approach compared to these other philosophers.

More specifically, Siegel's book has two main parts, the first defends the "Content View" and the second argues for the "Rich Content View"; the latter account builds on the former. The Content View claims that visual perceptual experience involves contents that are exhausted by their phenomenological character and manifest their own veridicality conditions.

That means the experiences in perception involve more general-level properties that are not determined by the literal objects in the environment but rather come from the perceiver's inner states, and these properties refer to accuracy conditions that can be more or less satisfied by the properties of a particular experience. Then the question follows: Siegel argues for the "Rich Content View" which claims there are more properties than the typically assumed ones of shape, color, size, and illuminance.

• 2011.06.07.
• Philosophy of Mind: The Contents of Visual Experience by Susanna Siegel (2012, Paperback).
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Most philosophers intuitively assume that these three kinds of properties are too cognitively complex to be found at the level of visual experience, and are rather processed downstream from the visual stage at the levels of inference or judgement. Siegel masterfully shows that it makes most sense for these properties to be found at the level of visual experience.

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Siegel makes her case with her unique method of "phenomenal contrast". Phenomenal contrast identifies pairs of situations that are located in the same environment and involve the same objects, but the two differ significantly on the target properties. The target properties, in this book, are the class, causal, and independence properties whose standing as inherent in visual experience or as given to experience by non-sensory factors or other alternative conditions is questioned. Siegel poses the pair situations and then makes a thorough inventory of all the main possible accounts that could be given to explain the perceptual difference of target properties between them.

Such accounts include the utilization of theories of "raw feel", perceptual disjunctivism or externalism, or other non-sensory factors like attitudes or cognitive states.

Siegel shows the deep flaws of all these accounts. Only her explanation that the target properties are a change at the level of contents of visual perception can avoid these flaws and stands as most empirically plausible and conceptually sound. I would highly recommend this book for anyone interested in the nature of perception: Is it limited to typical visual features, or can it also include "meaning-based" elements?

Also, anyone interested in new ways to defend Gibsonian ecological theories will fall in love with Siegel's book. Alfredo Vernazzani rated it really liked it Dec 12, Ege rated it it was amazing Dec 03, Shawn rated it it was amazing Jan 11, Brad rated it it was ok Mar 24, Cassie Greenwald rated it liked it Sep 22, We are visually conscious of colors and shapes, but are we also visually conscious of complex properties such as being John Malkovich?

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This book develops a framework for understanding the contents of visual experience, and argues that these contents involve all sorts of complex properties. The book starts by analyzing the notion of the contents of experience, and by arguing that theorists of all stripes should accept that experiences have contents.

It then introduces a method for discovering the contents of experience: This method relies only This method relies only minimally on introspection, and allows rigorous support for claims about experience. It then applies the method to make the case that we are conscious of many kind properties, of all sorts of causal properties, and of many other complex properties. The book goes on to use the method to help analyze difficult questions about our consciousness of objects and their role in the contents of experience, and to reconceptualize the distinction between perception and sensation.

The book's results are important for many areas of philosophy, including the philosophy of mind, epistemology, and the philosophy of science. They are also important for the psychology and cognitive neuroscience of vision. As a result of a number of philosophers questioning this view [1] , however, defenders of perceptual content have begun to address doubts about the framework. Susanna Siegel's book is partly aimed at this issue, and the early chapters focus on formulating and arguing for a precise sense in which perceptual experiences can be said to have contents, a thesis she calls "the Content View.

Siegel argues that the contents of perception represent a wide array of simple and complex properties, such as kind properties and causal properties, and calls this thesis "the Rich Content View," in contrast to views which hold that the contents of perception are more austere and that rich contents are inferred on the basis of what is perceived.

She also argues that although perceived objects do not play an essential role in characterizing visual perceptual experiences, certain relations between perceivers and objects they see or seem to see are represented in perception. Siegel's book is an important contribution to the contemporary literature on the nature and structure of perception, particularly on the topic of what is sometimes called "the admissible contents of experience" the question of which properties we experience in perception. It brings together several of her previously published papers on this topic in a systematic and updated form and relates this inquiry to debates about perceptual content.

One of the interesting features of the book is that the notion of perceptual content is developed in such a way as to avoid many of the most controversial issues in the recent literature on the question of whether perceptual experience is representational. This is not unintentional, because by arguing for a conception of perceptual content that she believes all theorists are obliged to accept, Siegel aims to provide a framework for addressing questions about which properties figure in perception that is independent of other debates.

Because the notion of perceptual content she argues for doesn't interact with much of the controversy surrounding the question of whether perception is representational, however, the content framework turns out to be unnecessary for formulating many of the questions that occupy her attention throughout the rest of the book. Instead of asking whether kind properties or causal properties are represented in visual perception, for example, she could have asked instead whether we are ever visually aware of kind properties or causal properties.

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As is apparent from many of her examples, the method of phenomenal contrast, which Siegel introduces as a way of deciding what the contents of perception are, can be applied just as easily to the question of what we are visually aware of as to the question of what we visually represent. So if one remains unmoved by the arguments in the early chapters in favor of Siegel's notion of perceptual content, there is still much to be gained from the later chapters despite the fact that many of the claims and arguments are formulated in terms of the content framework.

In the rest of this review, I'll discuss Siegel's conception of perceptual content and explain why, assuming her arguments go through, the resulting notion of content steers clear of the main debates about whether perception is representational.

I will then turn to the question of which properties are involved in visual perceptual experiences, and after describing Siegel's phenomenal contrast method for answering this question, I'll suggest a reservation about her application of the method to the case of kind properties. In the first chapter, Siegel develops the notion of a "visual perceptual experience," which is the mental state she means to explore in the chapters that follow. According to Siegel, visual perceptual experiences are individuated by their phenomenal character and, notably, states of seeing do not count as visual perceptual experiences.

The primary reasons for this are that states of seeing that are intuitively distinct in virtue of involving different perceived objects could have the same phenomenal character, and cases of seeing with different phenomenal character could be identically constituted p. Isolating visual perceptual experiences in this way suggests that the salient mental states for theorizing about perception are those of perceptually experiencing, not states of actually perceiving. This methodological starting point is a departure from that of inquiries into the nature of perception which begin by focusing on the objects of perception [2] and may strike some readers as problematic.

There are considerable epistemological pressures to avoid working with experiential states individuated by their phenomenology for the purposes of theorizing about perception. If the states we are concerned with need not be cases of successfully perceiving, then the beliefs one forms on the basis of perceptual experience will only have as much justification as can be attached to cases of say total hallucination.

While this point won't bother anyone sympathetic to epistemic internalism, it is a fairly weighty commitment for the purpose of characterizing the subject matter of an inquiry into the nature of perception. Siegel addresses the worry that her characterization of perceptual experiences is too restrictive by claiming that, "the main arguments for each thesis [the Content View and the Rich Content View] can be straightforwardly extended to many states of seeing, regardless of whether those states of seeing are phenomenal states" p.

This may be so, but given the reservation just noted, some might wish the inquiry to have focused on perceptual-success states in the first place. Siegel then turns to the question of whether, and in what sense, visual perceptual experiences have content.