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I argue that any account of perceptual experience should satisfy the following two desiderata. First, it should account for the particularity of perceptual experience, that is, it should account for the mind-independent object of an experience making a difference to individuating the experience. Second, it should explain the possibility that perceptual relations to distinct environments could yield subjectively indistinguishable experiences. Relational views of perceptual experience can easily satisfy the first but not the second desideratum. Representational views can easily satisfy the second but not the first desideratum. I argue that to satisfy both desiderata perceptual experience is best conceived of as fundamentally both relational and representational. I develop a view of perceptual experience that synthesizes the virtues of relationalism and representationalism, by arguing that perceptual content is constituted by potentially gappy de re modes of presentation.There are two radically different conceptions of perceptual experience. According to relationalism, perceptual experience is fundamentally a matter of standing in an awareness or an acquaintance relation to objects. According to representationalism, perceptual experience is fundamentally a matter of representing objects. Relationalism and representationalism are widely considered to be in conflict. 1 I aim to show that they are not in conflict with one another and, indeed, that perceptual experience is best thought of as fundamentally both relational and representational.

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Perception is our key to the world. It plays at least three different roles in our lives. It justifies beliefs and provides us with knowledge of our environment. It brings about conscious mental states. It converts informational input, such as light and sound waves, into representations of invariant features in our environment. Corresponding to these three roles, there are at least three fundamental questions that have motivated the study of perception. How does perception justify beliefs and yield knowledge of our environment? How does perception bring about conscious mental states? How does a perceptual system accomplish the feat of converting varying informational input into mental representations of invariant features in our environment? This book develops a unified account of the phenomenological and epistemological role of perception that is informed by empirical research. So it develops an account of perception that provides an answer to the first two questions, while being sensitive to scientific accounts that address the third question. The key idea is that perception is constituted by employing perceptual capacities—for example the capacity to discriminate instances of red from instances of blue. Perceptual content, consciousness, and evidence are each analyzed in terms of this basic property of perception. Employing perceptual capacities constitutes phenomenal character as well as perceptual content. The primacy of employing perceptual capacities in perception over their derivative employment in hallucination and illusion grounds the epistemic force of perceptual experience. In this way, the book provides a unified account of perceptual content, consciousness, and evidence.

I offer an explanation of how subjects are able to perceive the intrinsic spatial properties of objects, given that subjects always perceive from a particular location. The argument proceeds in two steps. First, I argue that a conception of space is necessary to perceive the intrinsic spatial properties of objects. This conception of space is spelled out by showing that perceiving intrinsic properties requires perceiving objects as the kind of things that are perceivable from other locations. Second, I show that having such a conception of space presupposes that a subject represent her location in relation to perceived objects. More precisely the thesis is that a subject represents her location as the location from which she both perceives objects and would act in relation to objects were she to act. So I argue that perception depends on the capacity to know what it would be to act in relation to objects.It is striking that only agents are perceivers. I argue that it is no coincidence. Perceivers are not just passive receivers of information. They are agents in the world. The thesis that perception is dependent on action has a long history in philosophy, but has rarely been argued for in any detail. Aristotle can be read as arguing in De Anima that only beings that are self-movers can perceive. More recently, Gibson (1979), Baldwin (1998Baldwin ( , 2003, Hurley (1998), Kelly (2001;, Valera (2001), andNoë (2004, forthcoming) have argued in different ways that perception and action are interrelated. 1 I will defend a version of the thesis that perception depends on action. I reject the thesis that perception depends on token actions and will argue that perception depends rather on the capacity to act.In section one, I discuss Noë's sensorimotor knowledge thesis. The basic idea of the thesis is that perceiving the spatial properties of objects involves practical knowledge of how the appearances of objects change as our spatial relation to perceived objects changes. This thesis is subject to a host of objections. In the rest of the paper, I present a different understanding of the relation between action and perception. My argu-1 Arguably our perceptions guide our actions by presenting objects in ways appropriate for high-level action selection. Clark (2001) and Matthen (2005) defend different versions of such an instrumental relation between perception and action. I am not denying that action and perception are related in an instrumental manner, but the thesis that I am arguing for is stronger than that perception is instrumentally related to action. The thesis is that perception is constitutively dependent on action.