Perceptual Knowledge of the External World

Abstract

This chapter explains how exemplarization of experience can provide representational evidence for perceptual claims. The perceptual subject experiences a smell of the spray of a skunk and knows what the sensation is like before he learns the origin of it. To know what the sensation is like in itself requires the subject has some conception or representation of what it is like. The representation of the experience is the result of using the experience as a reflexive exemplar representation of a kind of sensation of which it is an instance. As the subject learns that the exemplar sensation is the odor of the spray of a skunk, it becomes part of the meaning and, consequently, evidence for external object description by exhibiting what the objects are like for us. The evidence of truth is fallible but when not defeated by error it provides defensible knowledge of external things.