How to think about higher‐level perceptual contents

Abstract

The standard assumption for what perception must do in order to represent a “higher level” content—say tiger— is that it must represent the kind as such . I argue that this “as such condition” is not constitutive of what it means for a content to be “higher-level”, and that embracing it produces a range of unfortunate dialectical consequences. After offering this critique, I give an alternative construal, the “extended perceptual space” view of higher-level contents. This view captures the phenomena targeted by the “higher-level content” thesis, is empirically supported, and avoids the negative dialectical consequences of the as such condition.