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This chapter articulates and defends the view that a perceptual belief is a belief that is the output of a perceptual system, i.e., a perceptual module, where the notion of a perceptual module is defined in nonepistemic and nonexperiential terms. The concept of a perceptual module, like the more general concept of a cognitive system, is derived from methodological presuppositions of contemporary cognitive neuroscience. The central thesis of this chapter gives us a principled and naturalistic distinction between perceptual beliefs and other beliefs, and, it is argued, it gives us an intuitively correct one. The theory entails that “zombies” and other creatures utterly lacking in perceptual experiences can nonetheless have (justified) perceptual beliefs.

This chapter focuses on the justification of perceptual beliefs. It begins by considering various theories of justification. It argues that the most attractive view of perceptual justification is that perceptual beliefs are justified in virtue of their relation to propositional-content-bearing experiences. A problem for this attractive view is discussed.

The broad representative theory (BRT) claims that, whenever someone perceives a physical item, his perceptual contact with it is psychologically mediated, i.e. it is constituted by the combination of his being in a more fundamental psychological state, which is not in itself physical‐item perceptive, and certain additional facts that do not involve anything further about his current psychological condition. One worry about BRT, in whatever form it is developed, is that, granted that the relevant psychological states are not in themselves perceptive, there is a prima facie difficulty in understanding how the subject's perceptual awareness can reach beyond the boundaries of his own mind. With the emergence of the sense‐quale theory (SQT) as the correct account of the nature of phenomenal experience, this worry turns into a decisive objection. For it is clear that, under SQT, the subject does not genuinely perceive external items at all. All he genuinely perceives—all that form genuine objects of his perceptual awareness—are sense‐qualia, which, because of the interpretative components of his phenomenal experiences, he (mistakenly) perceives as external items. However, if we do not have perceptual access to the physical world, it turns out that we do not have epistemic access either: we cannot acquire knowledge of the physical world or even well‐grounded beliefs about it. But this leaves us with a problem. For the conclusion that we have neither perceptual nor epistemic access to the physical world is one that, even from the standpoint of philosophical reflection, we cannot bring ourselves to accept.

This chapter begins by outlining the main goal of this book, which is to determine the content of Reid's theory of perception. This theory includes his analyses of: the intentionality of cognition, the senses themselves, sensory experience, the nature of secondary and primary qualities, and the formation of conceptual content in perceptual belief. Reed's philosophical development is then discussed. An overview of the subsequent chapters is presented.

This chapter argues that at least some of the mental representations that are causally implicated in the formation of perceptual beliefs are indeed non-conceptual. The line of argument offered goes like this: on the one hand, it is (empirically) plausible that at least some of these representations are ‘iconic’ (rather than ‘discursive’); and, on the other hand, it is in the nature of iconic representations not to be conceptual.

Perceptual capacities need not be reflected as such in perceptual consciousness. Thus, a subject could possess multisensory perceptual capacities while perceptual consciousness remains sense specific. For instance, a subject could detect and differentiate novel intermodal features without corresponding, irreducibly multisensory perceptual awareness. In response, this chapter argues that perceptual awareness of an object or feature sometimes is constitutively, irreducibly multisensory. In particular, it argues that the exercise of multisensory perceptual capacities can serve to make features that are not otherwise perceptible available to conscious subjects for use in thought, reasoning, and rational action. Multisensory perception thereby fixes which features are occurrently accessible to conscious perceiving subjects. The implication is that multisensory perceptual awareness cannot fully be captured in terms of sense-specific awareness.

According to the phenomenal belief account, perceptual experiences are a kind of belief. They have contents of a certain form: They ascribe ‘phenomenal’ properties to ordinary material objects, properties such as looking red or looking round. Such an account can easily accommodate the epistemic role of experience as a provider of defeasible reasons for (further) empirical belief—a central part of our pre-theoretic conception of experience. This chapter further develops this account by arguing, first, that there is a use of ‘looks’, the so-called phenomenal use, that is best interpreted as capturing part of the propositional content of experience—not as an attitude-operator used for reporting the attitude taken toward that content. And second, it argues that the intuitive inferential integration of experience into our system of beliefs provides one of the strongest motivations for construing experiences as having propositional content in the first place.