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In the center of stability is how things persist amidst varying state of changes from the casual process of daily routine and endurance of an object specifically explained in the example of a book still intact despite being spilled by coffee. This chapter considers the philosopher David Lewis's attack on properties as relations to times in his book ‘On the Plurality of Worlds’. Temporary processing of features is considered a phase on the ideal and it only shows that people change just as materials due over the course of time by reflecting on an individual's differing state of mind in different moments. The immateriality of people accounts for the inescapable changes and theories of persistence may have something to do with the decision to change.

This chapter develops a separate promising account of experiential intentionality, as free of any tracking-based relations. This is the adverbial theory of experiential intentionality. After laying out some relevant background (Section 3.1), two arguments against tracking-based accounts of experiential intentionality—including higher-order tracking theories—are considered (Sections 3.2–3.3). The main considerations behind them is then used as a launching pad for an alternative adverbial account (Section 3.4). Finally, certain objections are discussed, including one genuinely damaging objection (Section 3.5). The conclusion compares the relative merits and demerits of this account and the higher-order tracking theory.

A “general theory of intentionality” is one that tells us, for any intentional item whatsoever, what makes it an intentional item at all (rather than a non-intentional item) and what makes it the intentional item it is (rather than a different intentional item). Thus it addresses the following question: For any intentional item x and property F, what would make it the case that F figures in the intentional content of x? An answer to this question can be obtained by combining the results of previous chapters. The chapter considers two answers: the first combines the higher-order tracking theory of experiential intentionality with the interpretivist theory of non-experiential intentionality (Section 5.1), the second combines the adverbial theory of experiential intentionality with the interpretivist theory of non-experiential intentionality (Section 5.2).

Bradley and James’s disagreement as to how the explanation of attention should proceed can be traced to a disagreement about the metaphysical category in which attention belongs. This chapter gives an account of the distinction between their two rival views of attention’s metaphysical category. James assigns attention to the ‘process-first’ category. Bradley assigns it to the ‘adverbial’ category. The distinction is explained by deriving it from a more fundamental distinction between those taxonomies that classify events on the basis of properties had by the events themselves and those taxonomies that classify events on the basis of properties of the objects that participate in those events. This account enables us to see that Bradley’s claim was distinct from (and explanatorily more consequential than) more recent claims about multiple realizability, natural kinds, and levels of explanation. The chapter concludes by relating this distinction to different claims about attention’s supervenience base.

The previous chapter argued that relationism is the general approach that best meshes with a scientific understanding of perceptual utility and success. The next task is to outline the specific version of relationism which is underwritten by perceptual science. This chapter introduces a new theory—colour adverbialism—which has three salient features: 1. Colour is to be analysed in terms of processes occurring, not things subsisting. The idea of perception as an activity is central. 2. The processes in terms of which colour is to be analysed relate perceivers to their environment. In this sense it is a relational theory. 3. An unorthodox view of color attribution. Strictly speaking, colors are not properties which can be attributed to extra-dermal objects or to perceivers. The closing sections of this chapter discuss the implications of the first two of these features. This leaves us with a sketch of the chromatic properties in the “scientific image”. The task of the following two chapters will be to discuss objections to the theory which arise from common claims about color in the “manifest image”, so the issue of attribution is left to Chapter 7.

This chapter addresses some obvious objections to color adverbialism which arise from considering the dominant theories within the philosophy of perception, such as the problem of perceptual error. The motivations for color adverbialism stem largely from consideration of the theoretical commitments and conceptual needs of perceptual science. As such, the theory is not intended as an ontology which will make sense of ordinary color discourse, or as an analysis of color visual experience. However, it is still beneficial to see how it stands with respect to such doctrines in the philosophy of perception as representationalism and naïve realism. In this chapter it is argued that color adverbialism is compatible with versions of representational and naïve realist theories, and that it has the resources to distinguish examples usually classified as color illusions from instances of veridical perception.

Numerous authors have claimed that color relationism is simply not compatible with the deliverances of introspectible experience. But is the non-relationality of color as easily recovered from experience as has been claimed? This chapter addresses this major objection to relationism, and tackles the implications for color adverbialism in particular. It is argued that the objectors to relationism have yet to demonstrate that experiences of color per se—and not experiences of objects with color, shape, size, and numerous other properties—are the source of their intuition that colors are out there in the world, and perceiver independent. Phenomenology, it is argued, is uncommitted about the ontological issues. Moreover, the objectors have yet to show that their supposed phenomenological facts are independent of theoretical views about the nature of color. Color adverbialism is no more vulnerable to phenomenological objections than other versions of relationism. Finally, the material presented suggests new ways to think about the phenomena of color constancy.

Which of the three premises of the Problem of Secondary Qualities should we dismiss for the sake of Direct Realism? Surprisingly, the Non-Physicality Thesis. Attempts to reject the Spreading Principle and Observation Claim create more problems than they are worth. This chapter entertains and rejects five approaches to harmonizing Direct Realism and the Non-Physicality Thesis including Behaviourism, Disjunctivism, Adverbialism, and Eliminative Materialism. The Non-Physicality Thesis receives some prima facie justification from scientists, but we should examine the case more deeply before closing the Direct Realism.

In the first of the Three Dialogues between Hylas and Philonous, Hylas distinguishes two parts or aspects of every perception, namely a sensation, which is an act of mind, and an object immediately perceived. Hylas concedes that sensations can exist only in a mind, but maintains that the objects immediately perceived have a real existence outside the mind; they are qualities of material objects. This distinction and Philonous’s response to it are the topic of this essay. It considers the implications of this response for understanding Berkeley’s theory of perception and concludes that it supports attributing to Berkeley an object-first theory of perception, according to which it is the special kind of object involved in perception that is philosophically significant.

On the Reductionist View, the fact of a person’s existence and that of her identity over time just consist in the holding of certain more particular facts about physical and mental events and the relations between these events. These more particular facts are impersonal—they do not presuppose or entail the existence of any person or mental subject. In Reasons and Persons, Derek Parfit claims that if the Reductionist View is true, then ‘it is … more plausible to focus, not on persons, but on experiences, and to claim that what matters morally is the nature of these experiences’. But why think that the Reductionist View has this implication? As critics such as Robert Adams, David Brink, Mark Johnston, Christine Korsgaard, and Susan Wolf have suggested, it is not clear why the Reductionist View should have any implications regarding the moral importance of persons. This chapter argues that in contrast to Non-reductionist views, Psychological Reductionism, a version of the Reductionist View that assumes a psychological criterion of personal identity, supports the kind of impersonal moral outlook that Parfit describes.

Attention is a central and scientifically well-studied aspect of our minds. This chapter argues that despite the wealth of scientific knowledge about the behavioral and cognitive effects of attention and about its neuronal and computational underpinnings, we lack a satisfactory account of what it is that has those effects and underpinnings. The argument draws on a distinction between reductive accounts that explain a phenomenon and reductive accounts that deliver an account of the nature of a phenomenon. It proceeds by providing empirical evidence for the view that while we can explain much about attention a reductive account of the nature of attention is probably not forthcoming. This indicates that attention is a subject-level phenomenon: what it is for something to be the phenomenon of attention is for a subject to attend to various things, to have her attention captured, and to do various things attentively.

There seems to be an unbridgeable gulf between the physical realm and the qualitative realm, but this intuition can be explained away, and all of the philosophical arguments for property dualism can be defeated, if we recognize that awareness of qualitative states is representational, and therefore admits of an appearance/reality distinction—a distinction between the way qualitative states are represented as being, and the way that qualitative states are in themselves. The chapter examines how this plays out in the case of visual awareness. It also considers several theories of the metaphysical nature of visual qualia—for example, the view that they are Lockean secondary properties, defined by their power of causing internal states. The chapter finds problems with all of these options, but points out that the unsettled character of questions about the specific physical nature of qualia is no objection to the general representationalist case for physicalism.

This chapter argues for two main claims. First, it is argued that, unlike the notion of intentionality central to modern philosophy of mind, Brentano’s notion of intentionality has nothing to do with mental states’ capacity to track elements in the environment; rather, it has to do with a phenomenal feature in virtue of which conscious experiences present something to the subject. Secondly, it is argued that, contrary to common wisdom in Brentano scholarship, there is no real evidence that Brentano took intentionality to be a relation to immanent objects; rather, his mature theory clearly casts intentionality as an intrinsic, non-relational property, and a property in the first instance of subjects (rather than of subjects’ internal states).

This chapter presents a hybrid view of color that depends on a view of objective color that can be called “the multiple-aspect view.” The multiple-aspect view of color holds that we can perceive the unchanging objective color of an object, even while it presents us with a variety of color appearances. On the hybrid view, it is only these color appearances that can be truly characterized using precise color language. Objective colors, on the other hand, can only be truly described at a coarser level of grain. The hybrid view allows us to capture the common-sense claims we would like to make about color while still allowing that there is considerable variation in precise color appearance across viewers and viewing circumstances, and that it would be arbitrary to pick out only a very small subset of these appearances as uniquely correct. The chapter also defends adverbialism as a view of color appearances.

Neopragmatism is an anti-metaphysical approach to philosophical problems. It addresses such problems by taking the focus off of metaphysics, and turning it onto language. That is, the neopragmatist seeks philosophically uncontentious explanations of the sort of talk that often gives rise to the sense that there is a deep philosophical puzzle to solve. In the domain of perception, reflection on apt ways of describing perceptual experiences have led to various metaphysically committing theories, including (i) sense data theory, (ii) representationalism, and (iii) naïve realism. This chapter uses neopragmatist techniques to undermine the case for the last of these. The attack is two-pronged. First, some of the metaphysical commitments of naïve realism are criticized. Second, neopragmatism is used to explain some of the ideas that were thought to lend naïve realism support. These include the idea that perceptual experience has a peculiar sort of openness or presentational character, and the related idea that such experience gives insight into the mind-independent character of the world. Beyond forming the basis for criticizing other views, neopragmatism also suggests a positive view of perception. This is a form of adverbialism that relies on the idea that our sensory states are information-bearing, but not, in any robust sense, representational.

Although there is much disagreement within the philosophy of perception, there is one thing that the majority of philosophers agree on: our philosophical account of perceptual experience should be compatible with physicalism. The aim of this paper is to explore the impact this has had within the philosophy of perception, and to point out some of the problems a physicalist approach must face. Representationalism is the leading account of perception, and was developed precisely to meet the physicalist’s criteria. This chapter supports and expands on an existing argument that representationalism fails in this aim. It then points out a problem with the new view—non-relationalism—which has arisen as a result of the failure of standard representationalism to qualify as a genuinely physicalist view. Non-relationalist accounts have difficulty doing justice to the idea that our perceptual experiences are assessable for accuracy or veridicality.

This chapter makes a number of arguments. Direct realism is true, when properly understood. The issue of its truth or falsity must be kept separate from the issue of scepticism regarding an external world. No defensible version of direct realism denies the existence of things that can be rightly called ‘mental representations’. Direct realism neither requires nor entails ‘disjunctivism’, and ‘disjunctivism’ neither requires nor entails direct realism. Direct realism doesn’t require the truth of ‘transparentism’. There is some truth in transparentism, but we need to distinguish Moore’s version from the Reid-James version. A defensible version of transparentism must acknowledge, firstly, the sense in which we are fully aware of our sensations in conscious perceptual experience, and, secondly, the fact that we are in everyday life often aware of our experiences considered specifically as such.

The qualitative view is distinguished from sense-datum theories. Introspection is distinguished from attention. An account of sensory introspection is developed. A new theory of phenomenal concepts is outlined. The qualitative theory is compared with adverbialism and shown not to be subject to the same criticisms. The qualitative theory is shown to transform the debate about rich contents and allow a wide range of such contents.