Abstract: Recent debates between representational and relational theories of perceptual experience sometimes fail to clarify in what respect the two views differ. In this essay, I explain that the relational view rejects two related claims endorsed by most representationalists: the claim that perceptual experiences can be erroneous, and the claim that having the same representational content is what explains the indiscriminability of veridical perceptions and phenomenally matching illusions or hallucinations. I then show how the relational view can claim that errors associated with perception should be explained in terms of false judgments, and develop a theory of illusions based on the idea that appearances are properties of objects in the surrounding environment. I provide an account of why appearances are sometimes misleading, and conclude by showing how the availability of this view undermines one of the most common ways of motivating representationalist theories of perception. Truth or illusion is not in the object, in so far as it is intuited, but in the judgment about it, in so far as it is thought. It is therefore correct to say that the senses do not err—not because they always judge rightly but because they do not judge at all. (Kant 1787/1929, A294/B350) I am not disclosing a fact about myself, but about petrol, when I say that petrol looks like water. (Austin 1962, p. 43)Perceiving the way objects appear to us is one of the most fundamental means by which we become aware of how things are in the surrounding environment. Given the epistemic centrality of appearances, explaining the observation that things are not always as they appear to be is one of the primary aims of philosophical theorizing about perception. To account for misleading appearances, some have proposed that the immediate objects of perception are sense-data existing only in the mind, which may or may not correspond to mind-independent objects. Others have suggested that perception is an adverbial state—we experience objects in different ‘ways’ (e.g., red-ly or round-ly), where the way an object is experienced explains why it appears to have particular properties. Still others have argued that perception is a representational state like belief, the content of which characterizes the way things appear to the perceiving subject, and which can succeed or fail to accurately represent perceived objects. A common feature of these theories is that they treat appearances as subjective, psychological facts about individual perceivers. If a red tomato appears orange in yellow lighting, this is something to be explained in terms of goings on in the mind of the perceiver: she is seeing an orange sense-datum, experiencing the tomato orange-ly, or representing the tomato as orange. Against these views, I will suggest that appearances are not properties of psychological states, but rather are mind-independent properties instantiated by objects in the surrounding environment. I will explain how accepting this view provides the means for understanding how perception, while sometimes misleading, never itself involves any error. Instead, I will claim that perceptual illusions can be understood as experiences that tend to produce false judgments. While the claims that appearances are objective properties and that illusions can be explained in terms of false judgments are not entirely novel1 , combining them within a single view provides explanatory resources that neither claim possesses on its own.e idea that appearances are psychological gains a large part of its credibility from the account it provides of the commonality between normal perceptual experiences and indiscriminable illusory or hallucinatory ones. On accounts of this sort, the reason a red tomato seen in yellow lighting looks just like an orange tomato seen in white lighting is that both experiences involve the same appearance. The common appearance is then explained in "terms-senses". --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/yours-cube/message Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.