Experimental Phenomenology in contemporary percep- tion science

Phenomenological issues in the perception science Contemporary perception science attempts at laying down a common framework. Different disciplinary approaches, methods and research results about the questions in which perception could be decomposed are indeed deemed to converge. Hence, concerns over consistency and commensura-bility have been occurring. Besides, since Jackendoff (1987) a further re-quest of phenomenological adequacy has been put forward. It runs as fol-lows: a computational theory, though complete, definite and successfully tested may it be, can not by itself account for what marks off a perceptual experience as that particular one in the way it is instantiated in that envi-ronment and from that specified standpoint. Then a theory or a model of visual perception must explain those features that make up the sense of copying with objects located in the outer world, endowed with inner sur-face and orientation shape properties coupled with peculiar patterns of spread out qualia, if it is to recover the phenomenology for a definite class of observers. This adequacy request is in general assumed to mean the commitment to identify features of the perceptual states that characterize the phenomenal facts in the way they are experienced, to be mapped either in the theory’s descriptive base or in the relevant model functions. So far, this claim raised questions that differ a lot as their scope and implications. Anyway, they can be broadly summed up as follows. The first question is dubbed since Levine (1983) the explanatory gap between a physical or physiological account of perception and its phe-nomenal experience. The relevant literature is inclined to capture a phe-nomenal feature under the concept of a what it is like to be-property. That is, to explain what the perception of x consists of is to explain what the x-experience is like for the perceiver O. Thus, the phenomenological descrip-tion of what x looks like would amount to explaining what it is for x being one of O’s seemings given some to be specified constrains