Experience and its rational significance I: Contributions to a debate

There is little agreement among philosophers on the proper treatment of perception. The goals and even the grounds of a philosophical account of perception are contested. Fortunately, in the present debate, there is a fair bit of common ground among the participants. The four of us—Bill Brewer, John McDowell, Susanna Siegel, and I—agree that perceptual judgments issued in ordinary perceptual situations are often rational and even knowledgeable. We agree that it is fruitful to conceive of a perceptual situation in terms of experience. And we agree that experience makes a contribution to the rationality (and to the epistemic status) of perceptual judgments. Our disagreements center on how best to conceive experience and its rational significance. In thinking about these disagreements, it will be useful to work with a simple example. Let us imagine an ordinary perceptual situation in which a subject X enters a room, sees a yellow cube of fruit on a platter, and issues a perceptual judgment with these words: