Roberto Pereira

In this paper, I take for granted the view of a long tradition tracing back to Kant that the content of perception is nonconceptual, nonpropositional, and iconic. However, I challenge the idea that this content is either an existentially quantified proposition (the existential view), an object-involving proposition (the particularist view), both (the pluralist view), or still that there is no fact of the matter about the elusive content of perception (Block). Instead, I propose an alternative hybrid model as the most suitable for perception, namely a mix of the representation of properties (relativistic content) and acquaintance with whatever causes the relevant token experience. Although this format is iconic or map-like, the best semantic model for understanding this relativistic content of perception is an open sentence with predicates and free variables. Since this content is neither particular nor existential, it is incomplete (at least in the light of Fregean semantics). That is, it is neither accurate nor inaccurate per se. Perceptions do not represent particulars, let alone the causal relationship between particulars or environmental conditions and the token experience. In other words, neither particulars nor causal relations belong to the content of the experience. Instead, particulars and causal relations belong to the evaluative circumstances of the content (Lewis's context-index pairs). Perceptions represent "de re" properties as accurate or inaccurate attributions to what is causally responsible for the relevant token experience.

This paper has the ambitious aim to clarify the putative different meanings of "consciousness" in Kant's Critique, particularly focusing on the concept of apperception. Often misinterpreted merely as the potential for self-attributions of experiences and mental states—technically, as the individual's ability to knowingly refer to himself—such readings overlook the pivot role of transcendental apperception in bridging the inherent gap between nonconceptual content of sensible intuitions and the higher-level conceptual content of propositional attitudes, essential for reasoning and the rational control of actions. In this context, "consciousness" or "self-consciousness" means cognitive accessibility (in Block's sense). But Kant's texts reveal additional meanings of consciousness. Notably, "sensation" means the raw material of intuition when it is apprehended through a synthesis of imagination without conceptual determination, capturing the subjective "what-it-is-like" phenomenal aspect of perception. Conversely, its objective correlate—the ability to discriminate and single out objects from their surroundings—embodies what can be described as "de re awareness" of a yet conceptually undetermined object of intuition.