Cover design: Sandra Siegel. That’s my mother. She also painted the cover of The Rationality of Perception. See that book →
What do we see? We are visually conscious of colors and shapes, but are we also visually conscious of complex properties such as being John Malkovich? This book develops a framework for understanding the contents of visual experience, and argues that these contents involve all sorts of complex properties. I start by analyzing the notion of the contents of experience, and by arguing that theorists of all stripes should accept that experiences have contents. I then introduce a method for discovering the contents of experience: the method of phenomenal contrast. My method relies only minimally on introspection, and allows rigorous support for claims about experience. I then apply 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. Using this method helps us 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. These results are important for many areas of philosophy, including the philosophy of mind, epistemology, and the philosophy of science, as well as for the psychology and cognitive neuroscience of vision.
Critical discussions of The Contents of Visual Experience
James Genone in Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews (2011)
Heather Logue in Mind (2012)
B. Maund in Analysis (2012)
John Bengson in Nous: “Presentation and Content” (2013)
John Campbell in Philosophical Studies (2013)
Jesse Prinz in Philosophical Studies: “Siegel’s Get Rich Quick Scheme” (2013)
Charles Travis in Philosophical Studies (2013)
My Replies to Campbell, Prinz and Travis (2013)
Since the book was published in 2010, there has been a lot of work on high-level contents of perception in moral philosophy, aesthetics, philosophy of psychology, audition, and social perception, as well as discussions of this topic in relation to older philosophical figures including Thomas Reid, Frederick Nietzsche, and Iris Murdoch. You can find some examples on the PhilPapers page on the high-level contents of experience. Here is a sampling, far from comprehensive.
Debate with Alex Byrne
Rich or Thin? (2017)
EDITED Volumes
Evaluative Perception, ed. A. Bergqvist and R. Cowan (2018)
Special issue of Philosophical Studies, ed. B. Brogaard (2013)
Special issue of Philosophical Quarterly on the Admissible Contents of Experience, ed. F. Macpherson (2011)
* Reissued as a book by Wiley-Blackwell
Philosophical Compass entry by Grace Helton
Social perception
Eleonora Neufeld on perceiving mental states
Elvira di Bona on auditory perception of male/female voices
Theory of mind
Berit Brogaard on perception of personality
Grace Helton on perception of intention
Aesthetics
Raamy Majeed: “Do Gestalt Effects Show That We Perceive High-Level Aesthetic Properties?”
Dustin Stokes: “Rich Perceptual Content and Aesthetic Properties”
Semantics
Jennifer Matey: “You Can See What ‘I’ Means”
Casey O’Callaghan: “Against Hearing Meanings”
Psychology
Eric Mandelbaum on high level contents
Tim Bayne on ensemble representation
Moral philosophy
Preston Werner: “Moral Perception and the Contents of Experience” and “Which Moral Properties Are Eligible for Perceptual Awareness?”
Eli Chudnoff: “Moral Perception: High-Level Perception or Low-Level Intuition?”
Treatments of the issue in the 18th–20th century
Becko Copenhaver on Reid
Paul Katsafanas on Nietzsche and Murdoch