Kinds of experience and the five senses

Abstract

In this paper I am going to argue that two commonly held views about perceptual experience are incompatible and that one must be given up. The first is the view that the five senses are to be distinguished by appeal to the kind of experiences involved in perception; the second is the view – called Representationalism – that the subjective character of perceptual experience is solely determined by what the experience represents. We could take their incompatibility as a reason for rejecting Representationalism; but I will suggest that it’s open to the Representationalist to claim that the experiences of a single sense need have no common character.