Reply to Rescorla and Peacocke: Perceptual Content in Light of Perceptual Constancies and Biological Constraints

Origins of Objectivity makes, I think, four primary contributions. The first is an elaboration of perceptual anti-individualism—the view that the natures of perceptual states depend constitutively on relations, including non-representational causal relations, to an environment. The main innovation is to distinguish within non-representational causal relations an important subset of teleological relations—those (like eating) involved in fulfilling wholeindividual functions. The causal relations, between individuals and their environment, that are involved in fulfilling these non-representational teleological relations help set a framework within which representational natures of perceptual states are determined. The teleology grounds a system of natural norms—standards for well-functioning. Like the non-representational functions, and the acts and processes that fulfill them, these norms are prerepresentational. By reflecting on perceptual and higher-level capacities and their functions and norms in the context of pre-representational ones, we gain insight. The second primary contribution is a criticism of a syndrome of views that dominated twentieth-century philosophy and that still grip some philosophers. These views hold that representation of the physical environment requires a propositional, or even linguistic, capacity to represent constitutive conditions for such representation. I charge all forms of this idea with hyper-intellectualization, with controverting common sense about animals and young children, and, most importantly, with contradicting scientific knowledge about perception. Perceptually attributing properties to environmental entities does not require any of the higher-level capacities invoked by those views.