Making your acquaintance: perspectival experience as sensorimotor accomplishment

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Making your acquaintance: perspectival experience as sensorimotor accomplishment

Britten-Neish, Andrew George Atkinson; (2024) Making your acquaintance: perspectival experience as sensorimotor accomplishment. Doctoral thesis (Ph.D), UCL (University College London). Green open access

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Abstract

My thesis argues for a relational account of the content and structure of perceptual experience, the sensorimotor acquaintance view. This claims that a core class of perceptual episodes, perspectival experiences, are grounded in the exercise of sensorimotor capacities on environmental objects and the obtaining of representational states in the brain. Relational models of perception are at the centre of two approaches in contemporary philosophy of mind and cognitive science that are typically opposed to representational explanation. Naïve realists argue that perception is a ‘personal-level’ relation of acquaintance with environmental objects; enactivists claim that the ‘subpersonal basis of perception involve similar concrete relations between perceivers and their environment. The sensorimotor view brings together these two strands of thought, drawing on the work of Susan Hurley (a prominent influence on the work of many contemporary enactivists), whose account of how personal and subpersonal levels relate is a crucial feature of the view. Setting Hurley’s work in a context that includes many of the philosophical influences on naïve realism, I argue that the central claims naïve realists make about perceptual experience are best articulated through this account.

Type:	Thesis (Doctoral)
Qualification:	Ph.D
Title:	Making your acquaintance: perspectival experience as sensorimotor accomplishment
Open access status:	An open access version is available from UCL Discovery
Language:	English
Additional information:	Copyright © The Author 2024. Original content in this thesis is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International (CC BY-NC 4.0) Licence (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/). Any third-party copyright material present remains the property of its respective owner(s) and is licensed under its existing terms. Access may initially be restricted at the author’s request.
UCL classification:	UCL UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL SLASH UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL SLASH > Faculty of Arts and Humanities UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL SLASH > Faculty of Arts and Humanities > Dept of Philosophy
URI:	https://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/10192024