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The Phenomenal Content of Experience
Author(s) -
Raftopoulos Athanassios,
Müller Vincent C.
Publication year - 2006
Publication title -
mind and language
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.905
H-Index - 68
eISSN - 1468-0017
pISSN - 0268-1064
DOI - 10.1111/j.0268-1064.2006.00311.x
Subject(s) - content (measure theory) , perception , cognitive psychology , cognitive science , motion (physics) , cognition , computer science , psychology , orientation (vector space) , artificial intelligence , mathematics , geometry , neuroscience , mathematical analysis
We discuss in some length evidence from the cognitive science suggesting that the representations of objects based on spatiotemporal information and featural information retrieved bottom‐up from a visual scene precede representations of objects that include conceptual information. We argue that a distinction can be drawn between representations with conceptual and nonconceptual content. The distinction is based on perceptual mechanisms that retrieve information in conceptually unmediated ways. The representational contents of the states induced by these mechanisms that are available to a type of awareness called phenomenal awareness constitute the phenomenal content of experience. The phenomenal content of perception contains the existence of objects as separate things that persist in time and time, spatiotemporal information, and information regarding relative spatial relations, motion, surface properties, shape, size, orientation, color, and their functional properties.