Introduction: Perception Without Representation

reducible to nor explicable in terms of representational states or content.1 In particular, advocates of non-representational views of perception maintain that the phenomenal character of veridical perception—broadly, “what it is like” (Nagel 1974) for the subject to undergo the relevant experience—is explained by the obtaining of a non-representational psychological relation to external mind-independent objects. This places the resulting views in opposition not only to representational or intentional theories, but also to adverbialism (Ducasse 1942; Chisholm 1957; Tye 1984), sense-datum theory (Broad 1952; Moore 1953), and nonrepresentational qualia or ‘mental paint’ (Block 1996, 2010) views of perception. In contrast to this representationalist orthodoxy, relational views characterise perceptual experience in terms of a primitive non-representational relation to external objects, facts or events. While both Naïve Realist2 and sense-datum theories claim that perception involves an irreducible relation to, or “acquaintance” (Russell 1912) with, objects, the theories differ with respect to the kinds of objects with which we are perceptually acquainted. According to Naïve Realism, these are the everyday external objects or events and their properties that we seem to perceive, where this may include perceptual ephemera such as rainbows, sounds or clouds. According to sense-datum