Overview of the Book

This book provides a comprehensive account of the intentionality of perceptual experience. With special emphasis on vision, Searle explains how the raw phenomenology of perception sets the content and the conditions of satisfaction of experience.

Central Questions and Concepts

The central question concerns the relation between the subjective conscious perceptual field and the objective perceptual field. Everything in the objective field is either perceived or can be perceived. Nothing in the subjective field is perceived nor can be perceived precisely because the events in the subjective field consist of the perceivings, whether veridical or not, of the events in the objective field.

Critique of Classical Theories

Searle begins by criticizing the classical theories of perception and identifies a single fallacy, what he calls the Bad Argument, as the source of nearly all of the confusions in the history of the philosophy of perception.

Justification of Presentational Intentionality

He next justifies the claim that perceptual experiences have presentational intentionality and shows how this justifies the direct realism of his account.

Theoretical Developments

In the central theoretical chapters, he shows how it is possible that the raw phenomenology must necessarily determine certain forms of intentionality. Searle introduces, in detail, the distinction between different levels of perception from the basic level to the higher levels and shows the internal relation between the features of the experience and the states of affairs presented by the experience.

Applications and Related Topics

The account applies not just to language possessed by human beings but to infants and conscious animals. He also discusses how the account relates to certain traditional puzzles about spectrum inversion, color and size constancy, and the brain-in-the-vat thought experiments.

Final Chapters and Conclusions

In the final chapters, he explains and refutes Disjunctivist theories of perception, explains the role of unconscious perception, and concludes by discussing traditional problems of perception such as skepticism.