Document Type

Article

Publication Date

10-21-2025

Published In

Philosophical Studies

Abstract

This article explores the epistemology of a particular dimension of perceptual experience: its affective character. This includes the ‘badness’ of, for example, the smell of garbage or the pain of a stubbed toe and the ‘goodness’ of the taste of chocolate, touch of sunshine, or sound of a musical chord. I take the view that affective character is epistemically significant, disclosing objective axiological relations in which elements (garbage, bodily harm, sunshine, chocolate, and consonance) stand to perceivers. To this end I analyze two representationalist approaches to valenced perception—evaluativism and attitudinalism—which serve as exemplars of, respectively, cognitivism and non-cognitivism. Cognitivists claim that valence supervenes on the empirically significant element of a perception—its content—while non-cognitivists suggest that it supervenes on elements that are not truth-apt and therefore not a direct source of the perception’s empirical significance. Considering principled objections that they each face, I propose a non-representationalist alternative—one that aims to explain not only why perceptual pleasure and pain are epistemically significant, but why they are themselves (non-instrumentally and pro tanto) good and bad for subjects.

Keywords

Affective character, Phenomenal character, Perceptual violence, Pleasure, Pain, Affect, Representationalism, The content view, Empiricism, Cognitivism, Non-cognitivism, Attitudinalism, Evaluativism, Relationalism

Creative Commons License

Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

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This work is freely available under a Creative Commons license.

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