UC San Diego

Perception not only registers property instances, but also connects with and attributes properties to individual entities—so-called sensory individuals, or SIs. But what are SIs? The most-discussed answers are: (i) SIs are ordinary material objects—cohesive, temporally persistent objects extended and bounded in space, and (ii) SIs are locations or regions in spacetime. I will argue for the object view of SIs on the grounds that its rival, the locational view, faces obstacles concerning the relationship between SIs and spacetime: it makes a mystery of perception's representation of SIs as occupying locations in and moving in ordinary spacetime.