Sensory disclosure: Neither a propositional, nor a factive, attitude

This chapter presents a general theory of color perception that focuses on something close to what Wilfred Sellars called "the sensory core", something well-described in a passage from H. H. Price's Perception. It develops the implications of that theory for (i) the distinctive epistemology of perception, which in the best case involves something better than mere knowledge, (ii) the nature of ganzfelds, film color, highlights, lightened and darkened color, auras, after-images, color hallucinations and the like, (iii) the account of when things are predicatively colored, and (iv) the nature of the category of quality. The chapter argues that as a consequence of understanding the sensory core we should reject the two most influential views in the philosophical theory of perception. Our most basic perceptual experiences are not adequately modeled as attitudes directed upon propositions. Nor are they adequately modeled as directed upon facts, understood as items in our perceived environment.