Appearance as reality: Direct perception and perceptual error

What is the nature of perceptual experience, and what role does it play in our mental lives? In my dissertation, I consider how best to account for two of the most central intuitions about perceptual experience: direct perception, the idea that what we are immediately aware of in perception are objects in the world around us; and perceptual error , the idea that perception can sometimes be misleading or mistaken. Despite the intuitiveness of these ideas, they can seem to be in conflict with each other. If perception simply puts us into direct contact with objects in the environment, how could it ever be mistaken? Resolving this tension is central to the development of a satisfying theory of perceptual experience. I reject representationalist approaches to this problem, propose an alternative view, and relate this view to empirical theories of perception.;The view I defend makes acquaintance with objects and their properties the central explanatory concept in a theory of direct perception. Acquaintance is a relation of conscious awareness to objects that is epistemically more basic than propositional knowledge of them. While it is easy to see how a theory of perception based on acquaintance might account for direct perception, it is more challenging to understand how it could explain perceptual error. I claim that the key is to understand appearances---which are usually thought of as subjective features of our experiential states---as instead properties of objects in the environment. My view holds that we should distinguish between intrinsic properties of objects, such as shape, color, and size, and their appearance properties, for example, the property of a coin appearing elliptical when viewed from an angle, or the property of a white wall appearing yellow in yellow lighting.;I argue that our understanding of the relationship between appearance properties and intrinsic properties is central to the epistemology of perception. This understanding is a non-inferential capacity to perceive the intrinsic properties of an object in virtue of knowing how it will appear in various circumstances. In cases of perceptual constancy, such as when a building is seen from far away (such that it projects a very small image on the retina but nevertheless appears very large), our understanding of appearances allows us to perceive the building's actual size. In cases of illusion, our failure to recognize the relationship between the way something appears in a given context and its intrinsic properties can lead us to form false beliefs about it, such as when we are fooled about an object's color by unfamiliar lighting conditions. I conclude that perception itself is never erroneous, and that what is usually described as perceptual error is instead a matter of mistaken judgment.;Currently popular representationalist views about perception hold that perceptual experiences have representational content, so that like beliefs, experiences can be evaluated for accuracy. I argue that the appeal of these theories lies in the mistaken assumption that they can provide explanations of both direct perception and perceptual error. Instead, I claim that representationalist views face significant difficulties on both accounts.;In particular, I argue that the representationalist account of perceptual error is incompatible with direct perception. If perception is direct, then what we are immediately aware of in experience is nothing other than objects in the world around us. Representationalism, however, claims that the phenomenology of illusory experiences is explained by how we represent objects as being---a property of experiences rather than of objects themselves. Since representationalism is committed to the claim that we are aware of properties of experiences, it fails to uphold the claim that perception is direct. I conclude that given the availability of the alternative view I propose, this difficulty undermines the motivation for accepting a representationalist theory of perception.;A final motivation for representationalism concerns the relationship between perception and cognition. Since perceptual experiences are generally thought to provide us with reasons for forming beliefs about the world around us, and since beliefs are paradigmatic representational states with conceptual contents, it is sometimes thought that perceptual experiences must be understood as representational and conceptual if they are to stand in a justificatory relationship to beliefs. I argue, however, that mental states can involve concepts without being representational states. When we understand the relationship between grasp of concepts and our ability to attend to objects and properties in the environment, we can see how perception makes grasp of concepts and the ability to represent the world in states like belief possible in the first place.