A Theory of Sentience [Hardcover]

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.

1. Quality Space; 2. Qualities and their Places; 3. Places Phenomenal and Real; 4. Sensing and Reference; 5. The Feature-Placing Hypothesis; 6. True Theories, False Colours; References; Index

Austen Clark is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Connecticut, Storrs.