Purpose and Procedure in Philosophy of Perception

Arguably, part of the reason that many philosophical questions about perceptual experiences elude consensus is that there hasn’t been enough explicit discussion regarding how to go about answering them. Some think that we can discover the answers largely by reflecting on how our experiences seem to us, while others are deeply sceptical about how much we can learn in this way. Some think that science has all the answers, and so questions about perceptual experience should be left to the scientists (and the scientifically informed philosophers), while others think that the hard questions about experience are hard precisely because they can’t be answered satisfactorily by running experiments in a lab. Some think that perceptual experience must somehow ultimately boil down to neurons (or something else built up out of the entities physicists postulate in their theories), while others are open to the possibility that perceptual consciousness has to be something over and above such things.  In general, there is widespread (and largely implicit) disagreement concerning (i) what philosophical theories of perceptual experience are supposed to explain, (ii) the fixed points from which theorising should proceed, and (iii) the methodology that such theorising should employ.  

The goal of our project (entitled "Purpose and Procedure in Philosophy of Perception") is to move such methodological questions from the background to the fore, in order to facilitate progress where debates threaten to stagnate into impasse.  The project will be organised around six workshops and a capstone conference. The conference will be two days long, with three speakers on each day.  Each talk will have a commentator, and the talks will range across the theme of the whole project.