Illusory Looks

One debate the Pyrrhonian skeptics had with the Epicureans concerned the relation between sense perceptions and beliefs. The debate centers on the Epicurean claim that all perceptions are true, a claim rejected by the Skeptics, who proceed on the assumption that there is no judgment component in perception, and it echoes widely through today’s philosophy of perception. In the past the author has defended a non-standard version of intentionalism, according to which (visual) experiences indeed are beliefs, but have contents—so-called looks-contents—that, if ever, very rarely are false. This chapter works out how this view can nevertheless account for non-veridical experience. It harnesses the rational role of experience to work out a precise way of characterizing non-veridical experience in terms of misleadingness.