Argumenta – Journal of Analytic Philosophy

The paper addresses the question of whether the representability of high-level properties in the content of perceptual experience is compatible with a purely sensory characterization of high-level perceptual phenomenology. Two positions are distinguished, sensory liberalism and cognitive liberalism, which respectively provide an affirmative and a negative answer to the above question. After presenting the “conceptualist argument” against sensory liberalism and the main challenges that it raises, the paper proceeds to show how sensory liberalism can be defended and why it should be preferred to its main competitor within the liberal camp.

A debate that has recently taken centre stage in the philosophy of perception concerns the width of the range of perceivable properties (Siegel 2006, 2010; Bayne 2009; Fish 2013; Reiland 2014; Burnston 2023). Two main parties have up to now dominated the camp, namely, the so-called conservative party that claims that that range only encompasses low-level properties (LLPs) such as colour, shape, motion (as for the visual modality), and the liberal party that claims that the range of perceivable properties also encompasses high-level properties (HLPs). The unity of the liberal camp has recently been challenged by the emergence of a position that has brought into question the way in which the liberals have characterized the nature of high-level perceptual phenomenology. Although this issue had not received much attention among the leading proponents of the liberal position, the somewhat implicit consensus was that the phenomenology of high-level perception was, like the phenomenology of low-level perception, purely sensory. And yet, some people who take themselves to be liberals have recently challenged this implicit assumption putting forward a version of liberalism that…

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