2024.08.6 : View this Review Online | View Recent NDPR Reviews
David Papineau, The Metaphysics of Sensory Experience, Oxford University Press, 2021, 176pp., $53.00 (hbk), ISBN 9780198862390.
Reviewed by Matthew Fulkerson, University of California, San Diego
One of the central debates in the philosophy of perception over the past several decades has been about whether naïve realism or representationalism better captures the fundamental nature of perception. The former view treats the experience of seeing a yellow pencil on the table as constituted by our relation to that very object and its properties. An indistinguishable hallucination of a yellow pencil is something else entirely, and not explained by appeal to the relations that ground genuine perceptual experience. In contrast, the representationalist typically seeks to explain perception and hallucination in a unified way. Instead of focusing on the relation to existing objects and properties, they believe our experiences involve the representation of objects and properties. There are several flavors of representationalism aligned in…
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