Perception as a contentful relation

Abstract

In this article, I critically examine two opposite conceptions about perceptual experience—the so-called “content view” and “the relational view”—in order to, ultimately, shed some light on how perception relates the mind to the world. After arguing that those views about experience do not allow us to understand how we can be immediately aware of the physical world, I propose an alternative conception of experience that is both relational and contentful. More specifically, I hold that perceptual experience has world-dependent content, a kind of content that is constituted both by the perceived things, along with their observable properties, and the subjects' background knowledge. The proposed view sheds some light, I suggest, on the problem of why perception has a crucial relevance to empirical knowledge.