A Theory of Sentience

by Austen Clark

Austen Clark offers a general account of the forms of mental representation that we call "sensory." Drawing on the findings of current neuroscience, Clark defends the hypothesis that the various modalities of sensation share a generic form that he calls "feature-placing." Sensing proceeds by picking out place-times in or around the body of the sentient organism, and characterizing qualities (features) that appear at those place-times. The hypothesis casts light on many other troublesome phenomena, including the varieties of illusion, the problem of projection, the notion of a visual field, and the existence of sense-data.

Genres: Philosophy

304 pages, Hardcover

First published March 9, 2000

Reviews

[Larry · Rating 2 out of 5]

Sentience is like judgement: it has a referential and a predicative element. You can successfully refer to a space-time point but get the predication wrong. Poof, I’ve just saved you the trouble of reading the 260 page-long account of how that goes!