Purpose and Procedure in Philosophy of Perception

Book excerpt: Contemporary philosophy of perception is dominated by highly polarized debates. The polarization is particularly acute in the debate between naïve realist disjunctivists and their opponents, but divisions seem almost as stark in other areas of dispute, for example, the debate over whether we experience so-called 'high-level' properties, and the debate concerning individuation of the senses. The guiding hypothesis underlying this volume is that such polarization stems from insufficient attention to how we should go about settling these debates. In general, there is widespread, largely implicit disagreement concerning what philosophical theories of perception are supposed to explain, the claims that we should hold fixed in the course of theorizing, and the methods that such theorizing should employ. The goal of this volume is to move such methodological questions from the background to the front of the debate, in the hope of facilitating progress. The contributions constitute an initial effort to spur more explicit, systematic discussion of methodology in philosophy of perception, covering a wide range of relevant topics, from the relation between scientific and philosophical theorizing about perception, to lessons we can learn from the history of philosophy of perception.