Searle on the Intentional Content of Visual Experiences
Searle on the Intentional Content of Visual Experiences

Summary/Abstract: There is no unique idea regarding the form of the (Intentional) content part of visual experience in the specification. The philosophers’ approaches diverge as to whether the content of visual experience is equivalent to a sentence expressing proposition or not. Some of them (mainly philosophers from the phenomenological tradition) consider that one must use a proposition for the specification of the content only when the subject, while having a visual experience, exercise a concept or judge. For the other cases, which can be called simple seeing, a noun phrase is preferable. I argue that, holding that the specification of Intentional content of the visual experience should be in the form of a proposition, John Searle gives up the first-person Intentionality and therefore bypasses the first-person important distinction between simple seeing and judgmental seeing. The specification of the content only in the form of the proposition does not allow making such a distinction on the level of description. Then I argue that the feature of the causal self-referentiality of the visual experience belongs to its psychological mode but not, as Searle holds, to the Intentional content of the visual experience.

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