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Discusses the role of conscious experiences in the acquisition of empirical knowledge. Most epistemology of perception takes a person's possession of beliefs about the mind‐independent world for granted and goes on to ask what further conditions these beliefs must meet if they are to be cases of knowledge. I argue that this approach is completely mistaken. Perceptual experiences must provide reasons for empirical beliefs if there are to be any determinate beliefs about particular objects in the world at all. So there are epistemic requirements upon the very possibility of empirical belief. The crucial epistemological role of experience lies in its essential contribution to the subject's understanding of certain perceptual demonstrative contents, simply grasping which provides him with a reason to endorse them in belief. I explain in detail how this is so; defend my position against a wide range of objections; compare and contrast it with a number of influential alternative views in the area; and bring out its connection with Russell's Principle of Acquaintance, and its consequences for the compatibility of content externalism with an adequate account of self‐knowledge.

It is close to current orthodoxy that perceptual experience is to be characterized, at least in part, by its representational content, roughly, by the way it represents things as being in the world around the perceiver. Call this basic idea the content view (CV). There is debate within (CV) concerning the extent to which such content captures the subjective nature of experience; and, indeed, this issue poses something of a dilemma for (CV). For, consider the content of any particular perceptual experience. Is this very content also the content of a possible non-experiential thought or belief by the subject? If so, then what is added to it, in perception, to produce the characteristically conscious, subjective nature of the experience? If not, then how are we to explain its status as an essentially experiential representational content-a genuine content, which nevertheless cannot be the content of anything other than perceptual experience? This dilemma is in my view ultimately fatal, although I do not pursue it directly here. My aim is rather to bring out as clearly as I can what I regard as the core errors of (CV) which lie behind the dilemma.The obvious model of representational content, for expounding (CV), is that of a person's thought about the world around him, as this is expressed in his linguistic communication with others, and registered by their everyday attitude ascriptions to him. Let us begin, then, with S's thought that a is F: a thought about a particular object in his environment, a, to the effect that it is F. Call this the initial model for content, (IM).Motivated in part by the need to achieve a satisfactory relation between the content and the consciousness of perception, in the context of (CV), McDowell insists at this point upon a crucially qualified application of (IM) to the case of perceptual experience, by stressing that the singular components of genuinely perceptual contents are object-dependent demonstrative senses (see esp. McDowell 1998a, 1998b, Lect. III, and 1998c. We therefore move from S's thought that a is F to his thought that that (man, say) is F. He adds a further qualification, that a person has no real control over which such contents come to him in perception: given the way things are in the world around him, and the various interests and concerns which he has in attending to it as he does, he is simply 'saddled' with determinate such contents (see esp. McDowell 1994). Thought, on the other hand, is an operation of his spontaneity: he is in a certain sense free in his active formulation of the content 'a is F' in thought. 1 I endorse both of these qualifications in Perception and Reason (1999). Not wishing to do any injustice to the properties which we perceive the things around us to have, though, in comparison with the objects themselves which we perceive

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