Centre for the Study of Perceptual Experience

The primary aim of the Centre for the Study of Perceptual Experience is to conduct and facilitate analytical philosophical research into the nature of perceptual experience. A secondary aim is to facilitate communication and collaboration between philosophers and researchers in other disciplines, throughout Scotland and beyond, whose research remit includes perceptual experience.

The research remit of the Centre is sharply delineated: to investigate perceptual phenomena within an analytical philosophical framework.

An overarching issue that needs to be tackled in this area is to explain how conscious experience arises. However, recognising that finding such an explanation appears to be some distance in the future, the Centre will concentrate on more specific and concrete philosophical problems that explore the nature of perceptual experience. It is hoped that once progress is made on some of these more tangible issues, answers to the larger questions will be forthcoming.

There is much philosophical work to be carried out on the nature of perceptual experience and the list of topics that can be addressed is large. These include:

• What is the nature of perceptual content?
• Can one give a satisfactory naturalistic theory of perceptual content?
• How ought one to individuate the sensory modalities?
• What is the relationship between the sensory modalities?
• What is the nature of hallucination and illusion?
• What are the admissible contents of experience?
• What is the nature of the knowledge that we have about our own perceptual experience?
  
• What account should one give of mental phenomena that are in some forms akin to perceptual phenomena, such as memory or imagination?
• What is the relation between sensation, emotion and perception? Are sensation and emotion kinds of inner perception of the body?
• What is the correct account of our experience of pictures?
• To what extent do empirical findings about the brain and behaviour affect philosophical accounts of perception and perceptual experience? For example, do the recently uncovered phenomena of change blindness, synaesthesia and sensory substitution devices confirm or confute philosophical theories of mental phenomena or do they suggest new philosophical approaches?

The nature of the research topic is such that while the Centre will primarily be a focus for philosophical research, it will be possible to collaborate with researchers from other departments whose remit includes the study of perception. This will most obviously include staff from Departments of Psychology and Neuroscience.