The Relational View

DANIEL KALPOKAS

Córdoba

Workshop; III Workshop on Concepts and Perception; 2017

Nowadays, some philosophers hold that perceptual experiences have no representational content at all. Experience, they claim, should not be understood as a matter of the subject?s taking things in the world to be this or that way. Rather, it is just a matter of being presented with things, of being in a certain kind of relation to them, which makes it available to us, nevertheless, to be represented in judgment or belief. This conception has been called (among other names) ?the relational view?. In this article I critically examine that view. I argue that it faces two basic and insuperable problems: (i) the provided characterization of the phenomenal character of experience is not adequate; and (ii) it cannot successfully explain the epistemological role of experience.