We can be sure that an experience has nonconceptual content if it has a kind of nonparasitic content that either determines or is determined by the intuitive character of an act. But why think that perception has content at all? Recently, a number of philosophers have endorsed the view that we can partially or even completely describe the character of a veridical perceptual experience merely by citing the objects that it is of, together with the conditions under which they are perceived. M. G. F. Martin, who favors such a view, writes: “According to naïve realism, the actual objects of perception, the external things such as trees, tables, and rainbows, which one can perceive, and the properties which they can manifest to one when perceived, partly constitute one's conscious experience” (Martin, 2009a: 93). Campbell goes further: “On a Relational View, the qualitative character of the experience is constituted by the qualitative character of the scene perceived” (Campbell 2002: 114–15). And Brewer, having abandoned his earlier commitment to experiential conceptualism, now endorses what he calls the “object view,” according to which “the core subjective character of perceptual experience is to be given simply by citing its direct object” (Brewer 2008: 171). In this chapter, I will argue that the relational view is incorrect and that perceptual states have intuitive nonconceptual content.

THE RELATIONAL VIEW

The most obvious piece of supporting evidence for the relational view is phenomenological: in perception, mind-independent objects and their properties are directly present to us.