Abstract:
Visual experience and perception are investigated in the following way. I Iook at what the so-called transparency of visual experience is hiding from the subject of experience, and how this impacts on the debate between representational realists (like G.E.Moore, Howard Robinson and others) and Tepresentationalists (like Gilbert Harman, Michael Tye, Frank Jackson and others). The point is to assist representationalism, the view that experience is to be explained in terms of its representational content rather than its nature as a (subjectively apparent) representation, and to defend a certain version of it in particular. What is being hidden from the subject is chiefly the intermediate sensory causation of experience, so some account of that is given in addition to philosophical debates. But also there may be reason to think that some or all of visual experience itself\s hidden from the subject, indeed this is what 'transparency' means. How representationalism in certain forms, with the help of the subjectively hidden aspects of experience or its causation, overcomes difficulties in the explanation of visual perception at the expense of its chosen rivals, is the chief problem to be addressed. Along the way matters such as illusion, veridicality, and qualia, are examined. But with a special focus on what the subjectively hidden causal (or other) mediation of visual experience may contribute to philosophical explanation, if anything. The conclusion is that representationalism succeeds as well or better than representational realism, and that in one of its forms exemplified especially by Harman, it has more resources available to explain visual perception and experience than is usually thought to be the case.