Perception

Robinson's controversial introduction surveys this major topic in epistemology and philosophy of mind. The discussion covers perception theory from Descartes and the empiricists through Wittgenstein on privacy to contemporary physicalist theories. The focus, however, is on the sense-datum theory of perception. Robinson concludes that, despite attacks over the years, a modified version of this theory is essentially correct, overturning the consensus that has dominated the philosophy of perception for nearly half a century.

Questions about perception remain some of the most difficult and insoluble in both epistemology and in the philosophy of mind. This controversial but highly accessible introduction to the area explores the philosophical importance of those questions by re-examining what had until recent times been the most popular theory of perception - the sense-datum theory. Howard Robinson surveys the history of the arguments for and against the theory from Descartes to Husserl. He then shows that the objections to the theory, particularly Wittgenstein's attack on privacy and those of the physicalists, have been unsuccessful. He argues that we should return to the theory sense-data in order to understand perception. In doing so he seeks to overturn a consensus that has dominated the philosophy of perception for nearly half a century.

Preface 1. The Classical Empiricist Conception of the Content of Perceptual Experience 2. The Traditional Arguments for the Empiricist Conception of Sense-Contents: the Argument from Illusion 3. Further Arguments against Naive Realism 4. Sense-Data and the Anti-Private-Language-Argument 5. Contemporary Physicalist Theories of Perception 6. The Revised - and Successful - Causal Argument for Sense-Data 7. The Intentional and Adverbial Theories 8. The Nature of Sense-Data 9. Sense-data and the Physical World

Howard Robinson