A philosophical paper argues that perceptual content can be understood through an 'activist' theory of propositions, recently developed by Scott Soames and Peter Hanks, on which mental acts like predication and reference constitute propositions. The author extends this model to perceptual content, addressing a problem of unity among intellectual acts and applying it to experiential consciousness and perceptual representation. The conclusion is that experiential unity is central to the role perceptual representation plays in cognition, not merely a phenomenal feature of consciousness.
The higher-order-thought (HOT) theory of consciousness, as developed by Rosenthal, can be interpreted in two ways: a one-component view and a two-component view. The two-component view aligns better with Rosenthal's aim of making HOT an explanatory theory applicable to empirical science, but it fails to account for cases of radical confabulation. The authors argue that neither interpretation adequately handles these counterexamples, and adopting a disjunctive strategy that includes both versions offers no empirical or explanatory benefit.