Susanna Schellenberg, "The Unity of Perception: Content, Consciousness, and Evidence" (Oxford UP, 2018)
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What is the central problem that Susanna Schellenberg’s book aims to solve?
Hello and welcome to New Books in Philosophy, a podcast channel with the New Books Network. I'm Carrie Figdor, Professor of Philosophy at the University of Iowa, and I'm co-host of the channel along with Robert Talise, Alexis McLeod, and Sarah Tyson. Together, we bring you conversations with philosophers about their new books in a wide range of areas of contemporary philosophical inquiry. Today's interview is with Susanna Schellenberg, Professor of Philosophy and Congress. Cognitive science at Rutgers University. Her new book, The Unity of Perception, Content, Consciousness, Evidence, is just out from Oxford University Press. How does perception result in thoughts about items in the world, such as dogs or flowers, and result in conscious states of many kinds, such as experiences of seeing red?
How does perception provide evidence for our beliefs, such as the belief that there is a red rose? In her new book, Schellenberg considers these questions about the role of perception in mind and knowledge. She offers a unified account of perception as the capacity to discriminate and single out particulars. And she defends the explanations that her view, which she calls capacitism, provides of the difference between perception, hallucination, and illusion, the relation between perception and consciousness, and the way in which hallucinators and perceivers share some types of evidence for their beliefs, but differ importantly in others. Let's turn to the interview. Hello, Susanna. Welcome to New Books in Philosophy.
Hi, Carrie.
Thanks for having me.
I'm looking forward to talking about the unity of perception. It's a very there's there's so much to talk about. Um we probably won't get to uh you know well we'll get to some of it but at least uh we'll be able to get some to some of the main main points that you discuss. Um but before we do that I want to uh get a little bit of background about you. Um what brought you to philosophy. Um, how did you come to work on this book and be interested in this particular topic?
Um yeah, so let me think. So throughout my teenage years I was planning to become a professional classical musician, but um I guess I saw a bit too much of the classical music world too early and I didn't find it or I didn't see myself as part of that world and so that prompted me to change plans and For a very short while I sort of dabbled in jazz, but I wasn't really cool enough to be a jazz musician. And then I started studying math and, you know, fairly quickly switched to philosophy for um You know, reasons I found the questions intriguing. I was captivated by various specific topics. Um Um yeah, that's um and then um how did I get to um thinking about the issues in this book? I mean, I was I was interested in perception and experience for a very long time.
I made lots of detours and thinking about it. And then as a graduate student. I sort of had this growing sense that in order to make progress in figuring out the nature of perception, we need to address sort of the issues in a much more integrated way than is typically done. Um so it's kind of standard to, you know, explain the epistemological role of perception. More or less independently of perceptual consciousness. Um, you know, I mean obviously there are many um Views that appeal to the fact that perceptual states have phenomenal character to explain the epistemological role of perception. But typically nonetheless, even if they appeal to it, their explanation for why perceptions have epistemic force.
And what accounts for their phenomenal character does not intersect and Um that struck me um as or strikes me still as a mistake and Um, that's kind of at the core of the motivation behind the book and Uh, which is, you know, to give a unified account of perceptual content, perceptual consciousness and And um the epistemic force of experience, so perceptual evidence.
Okay. Um so uh the subtitle itself kind of refers to these three aspects. You you start the book, um, establishing these motivations in terms of three questions.
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Chapters
8 chapters
1
What is the central problem that Susanna Schellenberg’s book aims to solve?
0:07–6:33
2
How does Schellenberg describe her personal journey to the study of perception?
6:33–12:00
3
What are the three core questions (epistemology, consciousness, information) that structure the book?
12:00–17:49
4
What is ‘capacitism’ and how does it differ from traditional accounts of perception?
17:49–22:50
5
Why does Schellenberg argue that discrimination of mind‑independent particulars is the core of perception?
22:50–28:27
6
What is the ‘singular content thesis’ and how does it relate to perceptual capacities?
28:27–33:38
7
How does the view of ‘mental activism’ explain perceptual consciousness?
33:38–39:51
8
What distinguishes perceptual evidence from hallucination and illusion in Schellenberg’s framework?
39:51–1:06:33
Speakers
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