Suppose you are walking into a park on a grey afternoon while talking on the phone with a friend. Suddenly, a dog comes bounding across the grass, having fun chasing a tennis ball. Then, it snatches the ball and comes back with its tail wagging. Suppose also that, since catching a certain distraction from you, your friend asks what you are looking at. Such a question seems rather easy. And yet a moment of reflection turns it into a philosophical puzzle. That you see the dog’s shape, its colour, the arc of its movements, and its tail wagging is pacific. However, do you strictly speaking see it as a dog? Do you, strictly speaking, see that it is having fun? More generally, does perceptual experience itself reach these kinds of features of perceived objects, or does it deliver only an array of lower-level properties? This is the issue of high-level perception, an issue that has recently taken centre stage in the philosophy of perception, especially after…
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