1 Is perception inadequate? Husserl’s case for non-sensory objectual phenomenology in perception Matt E. M. Bower membower@gmail.com Texas State University Abstract: One key difference between perceptual experience and thought is the distinctly sensory way perception presents things to us. Some philosophers nevertheless suggest this sensory phenomenal character doesn’t exhaust the way things are made manifest to us in perceptual experience. Edmund Husserl is maintains that there is also a significant non-sensory side to perception’s phenomenal character. We may experience, for instance, an object’s facing surface in a sensory mode and, as part of the same perceptual experience, also that object’s out-of-view surface in a non-sensory mode. To the extent that perceptual experience makes things available to us in a non-sensory mode, Husserl calls it inadequate. Here I reconstruct four arguments for the conclusion that perceptual experience is inadequate found in various of Husserl’s writings and critically evaluate then. My aim is both to showcase the variety and sophistication of Husserl’s reasons for thinking perceptual experience is inadequate and to problematize that idea. Keywords: Edmund Husserl; perception; perceptual content; visual phenomenology; phenomenal character 1 Perception’s Inadequacy and the Problem of Non-Sensory Objectual Phenomenology 1.1 Objectual Phenomenology There’s little about perceptual experience that philosophers find uncontroversial. One of the least controversial ideas is that perceptual experiences exhibit intentionality. I look before me and – let’s restrict ourselves to vision in this discussion – I see a potted cactus on the windowsill. My visual experience is intentional in the sense that it’s about something, in this instance, the cactus on the windowsill. Let’s take this idea for granted. Another idea with broad currency about perceptual experience is that it is transparent (Harman 1990, 667). When I open my eyes and examine the cactus, I seem to be presented immediately with the cactus and the scene in which it’s embedded and little if anything of the experience itself, as distinct from what the experience is about, is available to my conscious awareness. This is a claim about the phenomenal character of perceptual experience, about what it’s like to have that sort of experience. Let’s also assume that perceptual experience is transparent in this sense. I take it that the point of saying perceptual experience is transparent is to block or render implausible certain views of the objectual or presentational side of perceptual experience. 1 One major target in that regard is sense-datum theories according to which what we directly encounter in perceptual experience are mind-bound mental entities called sense data that serve as stand ins for what lies before us in the external world. There may be other facets of the perceptual experience that don’t 1 I follow John Foster and Elijah Chudnoff in considering this side of perceptual phenomenology in its own right and speaking of it as “presentational phenomenology.” See Foster 2000, 112 and Chudnoff 2012, 51-56.