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Perception famously has a presentational character. As Scott Sturgeon puts the point, your visual experience [of a moving rock] will place a moving rock before the mind in a uniquely vivid way. Its phenomenology will be as if a scene is made manifest to you. This is the most striking aspect of visual consciousness. It’s the signal feature of visual phenomenology.304

Clearly perception’s presentational character is not that it presents one’s environment in a “uniquely vivid way.” While it is true that perception stands apart from thought in its qualitative character, the point is not that perception is a particularly striking show of color- and object- experiences. Rather, the central point is that perception does present its objects; that, unlike in thought, the objects of perceptual experience appear quite literally present to one.

If presentational character is an important feature of perceptual experience, C.D. Broad has noted an interesting aspect of the phenomenon:

It is a natural, if paradoxical, way of speaking to say that seeing seems to ‘bring one into direct contact with remote objects’ and to reveal their shapes and colours.305

As Broad notes, the presentational character of experience may seem in some sense “paradoxical.” Objects are external to us, yet in experience they seem “right there, available to us” (Valberg 1992, p. 4).

304 _{Sturgeon 2000, p. 9.}

The version of presentationalism at issue in this chapter amounts to the idea of taking Broad’s paradox at face value. Perceptual awareness appears to present environmental items precisely because perceptual awareness is the presentation of such items. Experience consists, at least partly, of awareness in which the subject is presented with aspects of the environment, i.e., objects and (arguably) their properties, such that the relevant features are present to the subject.

For present purposes, I should note that presentation is a conception of experience’s epistemic value: presented aspects of the environment are what experience contributes for perceptual rationality specifically. I will have a lot to say about what such a conception involves, but first I should right away contrast this suggestion with three alternative, recently popular approaches to perceptual presentation.

(i) If we are justified in believing propositions based on experience, in virtue of what is this the case?306 Several recent philosophers have answered by reference to presentation specifically as an aspect of perceptual phenomenology.307 Consider Elijah Chudnoff’s formulation of the following principle (Chudnoff 2012, p. 25):

If an experience […] justifies you in believing that p, it does so in virtue of realizing the property of having presentational phenomenology with respect to p.

On Chudnoff’s specific development of “realizing the property of having presentational phenomenology,” perception both implicates propositional contents modeled on p and appears to present truth-makers f or p. Say I experience a tiger pouncing: for Chudnoff my experience bears

306 _{For John Foster, there is a “[p]resentational feel of phenomenal experience—the subjective impression that an} instance of the relevant type of environmental situation is directly presented” (Foster 2000, p.112. italics original]. For Michael Huemer experience bears a “forcefulness,” such that “[w]hen you have a visual experience of a tomato, it thereby seems to you as if a tomato is actually present, then and there” (2001, p. 77). For Jim Pryor experience provides “the feeling of seeming to ascertain that a given proposition is true” (2004, p. 357). This common focus on presentational “feeling” seems to me misplaced. For discussion, Ghijsen 2014.

307 On one version of the question, this is the “distinctiveness problem” (Ghijsen 2014), i.e., the question why perceptual experience provides grounds for belief where, say, imagination does not. I doubt this question merits a simple phenomenal answer. For subtle discussion, Martin Manuscript.

the content that the tiger is pouncing and, moreover, I appear to be presented with the very tiger (and its pouncing, perhaps) that make my experiential content true. For our purposes, the important point is that for Chudnoff it is experience’s appearing to present truth-makers for representational contents that provides the subject with justification for belief. On Chudnoff’s suggestion (2013, p. 180), it is “in virtue of” this type of presentational phenomenology that experience equips the subject with justification.308

The present approach to presentation diverges from approaches like Chudnoff’s since it follows from Chudnoff’s view that (2013, p. 92)

if a perceptual experience puts you in a position to know something about your environment, it does so because of something other than or in addition to its [presentational] phenomenology.

That is, while for Chudnoff presentation plays a role in providing the subject with perceptual justification, it cannot be the explanation of the way perception provides the subject with perceptual knowledge. After all, presentational phenomenology is not unique to cases of perception, but also can be true of cases like hallucinatory experience. Accordingly presentational phenomenology inevitably falls short of furnishing an opportunity for knowledge.309 By contrast, the aim in the current chapter is to understand presence as it plays a role in illuminating (1), on which experience’s epistemic value guarantees the truth of perceptual belief, and accordingly on which experience does not stop short of explaining knowledge. Accordingly, for present purposes to speak of the perceptual “presence” of aspects of the environment in visual experience is not to single out a phenomenal feature of experience, but to mark their availability for knowledge,

308 See Chudnoff’s discussion of the “in virtue of” relation at Chudnoff 2013, pp. 180-194.

309 _{Some philosophers deny non-perceptual experiences have phenomenology (Martin 2002, 2004; Fish 2009).} Chudnoff (2013, p. 174) suggests that these philosophers might exploit presentational phenomenology as sufficient for knowledge. But this seems to me wrong. Opportunities for knowledge must by nature trade on the actual presence of items to the mind: nothing in the notion of phenomenology as such seems to secure this. (That is, the mere fact that phenomenology might (in some relevant sense) have extended beyond perception disqualifies phenomenology from grounding knowledge.)

not merely justification (if this falls short). “Presence” precisely marks the critical difference between perceptual experience and other states like hallucinations.

(ii) Presence also does not mark a “naïve realist” position, which is the idea that objects are presented in a way that makes them part of what metaphysically constitutes the experience in which they are presented. Characterizing the epistemic value of experience in presentational terms is a different issue. As has recently been pointed out (Genone 2014), naïve realism is at least partly to be understood in terms of the idea that perception is not fundamentally a representational state.310 _{By contrast, I will suggest that quite plausibly a presentational construal of epistemic value}

is best understood in terms of a type of representational content.311 Coming at the distinction from the opposite end, “naïve realism” is also not committed to thinking of the epistemic character of experience in terms of the presence of objects (though this may be a natural choice, e.g., Fish 2009). For example, it is open to the naïve realist to hold that subjectively indistinguishable experiences have the same epistemic value, even as metaphysically only perceptions involve the presence of objects.312

(iii) The position at issue in this chapter must also be distinguished, though less substantially, from the epistemological view that the objects of experience constitute so-called “objectual reasons” which perception provides the subject (Cunningham 2017; Kalderon 2011; Brewer 2011, Manuscript).313 The idea of an “objectual reason,” on which this view centers, is that presented objects might constitute reasons for judgment in the specific sense that they are 310 _{“Not fundamentally” because there are many less fundamental senses in which naïve realists can accept}

representational contents. 311 _{E.g., McDowell 2013.}

312 _{For example, some naïve realists seem intent to forestall the impression of their view as entailing a form of} epistemological disjunctivism, such, as e.g, might aim to address skeptical worries. The motivation is rather merely to allow perception to be object-involving (see e.g., Martin 2006).

truth-makers for perceptual beliefs. Accordingly, a presented object o is an “objectual reason” in that o makes “o is F” true, and accordingly, if o is appropriately presented to the perceiver, o can in this sense serve as an “objectual reason” for the subject to judge “o is F.” This view is more specific than the presentationalism at issue here. “Objectual reasons” constitute one way of cashing out the idea that the epistemic value of experience consists in the presence of objects, but a presentational conception of epistemic value is consistent with a “factual” conception of perceptual reasons. For example, a subject’s perceptual reason for judging “o is F” might be, e.g., the fact that some items are perceptually present to her. Moreover, the idea of perception providing the subject with perceptual “reasons” is as such downstream from a presentational conception of epistemic value. The heart of the latter idea is that the epistemic significance of experience can be understood through the notion of presentation, whether or not it is reasons that perception thus presents.314 As I will suggest, in this context the idea of perception as presentation is more significant than that of a reason because, as I will explain, presentation constitutes a sui generis gloss on the nature of the link between experience and knowledge, which is something not captured by the notion of a reason as such.315

314 _{Consider, e.g., Joe Cunningham’s consideration of representational conceptions of experience’s epistemic value,} i.e., the idea that the epistemic value of experience can reside in the way experiences bear representational contents (Cunningham 2017). On the current conception, these views can take a presentational approach to epistemic value, but for Cunningham they constitute a competitor for the “reasons” view.

315 _{The idea of “objectual reasons” itself can serve to express just this point: the idea that in perception the very} truth-makers for propositions can be the subject’s reasons. But as I will make clear, it is more helpful to focus on the idea of presentation that makes this possible, rather than on the notion of reasons itself.