Consider an experience as of a white rabbit. This experience represents a creature that is furry, has floppy ears and bucked teeth, is coloured white etc. These descriptions capture some of the ways in which the rabbit appears to me. This experience will be accurate if there is indeed a rabbit present in my environment having the features I have just described. What is it for my experiences to have these intentional features? I claim my experience has these intentional features in virtue of the ways in which it presents the world as seeming to me. The world seems to me to contain a rabbit, and this is what makes it the case that I am undergoing an experience which represents the presence of a rabbit.
I call intentionality which is constitutively determined by an experience’s phenomenal properties, “phenomenal intentionality”. In this paper I will exploit the enactive view of perception to explain how our experiences get their phenomenal intentionality. The philosopher Alva Noë and the vision scientist Kevin O’Regan have recently proposed an account of conscious visual experience which explains the contents of experience in terms of knowledge of what they call “sensorimotor contingencies”*. This knowledge consists in an understanding a subject has of how patterns of sensory stimulation change either with the subject’s own movements or with the movement of the thing the subject perceives. I argue that we can explain what it is for an experience to present the world as seeming to contain a rabbit for instance, in part by appealing to this kind of practical understanding.
How does my account of perceptual content differ from other proponents of the enactive approach such as Noë? I am using the enactive approach to offer an account of phenomenal intentionality. Noë eschews talk of internal representation. I am more conservative. I identify perceptual experiences with representational states and attempt to account for the kind of intentional content that attaches to our perceptual experiences.
Like Noë however I understand perception in the context of what the perceiving animal is doing. Doing so suggests a novel account of what it is for an experience to be assessable for accuracy. What we will be assessing for truth or falsity will be the expectations and anticipations that form a large part of an experience’s intentional content. Which expectations and anticipations the perceiving animal frames will depend on what the perceiving animal is trying to do. Thus the account I give of a perceptual experience’s truth conditions will be a pragmatist one. A perceptual experience is assessable for truth or falsity, I will argue, in virtue of the contribution it makes to successful action.
* See for instance Alva Noë Action in Perception (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2004).