Higher Seminar in Theoretical Philosophy: Max Minden Ribeiro "Presence as Manifest Dependence"

Perceptual presence is a distinctive feature of perceptual phenomenal character that distinguishes perceptual experience from episodic memory and visual imagination. In this paper, I defend a positive account of perceptual presence:

(MD) Perceptual presence is an experience’s manifest dependence on mind-independent objects.

I identify three forms that manifest dependence can take: manifest change dependence, manifest spatial dependence and manifest temporal dependence, and argue that perceptual experience satisfies all three. In this first part of the paper, I show that this account can rationalise and advance upon a number of popular descriptions of perceptual presence that one might not otherwise want to take at face value. In the second part of the paper, I argue that naïve realism can accommodate perceptual experience’s manifest dependence in terms of the actual constitutive dependence of perceptual experience on natural, mind-independent objects. Moreover, naïve realism can do so without incurring an error theory of perceptual phenomenal character.