Husserl and the metaphysics of perception: A unification story

The two dominant theories of perception nowadays are representationalism and relationism. Representationalists hold that perceptual experience is a representation of the world as being one way rather than another, whether it really is that way or exists at all. Relationists hold that perceptual experience is a non-representational relation to actually existing objects and property-instances. Relationists notoriously have a hard time explaining many perceptual phenomena for which the representationalist has simple and intuitive accounts. Despite this, relationists alone seem able to account straightforwardly for the ability of perceptual experience to provide de re knowledge of particulars. To this extent, a theory of perception that is able to unify representationalism and relationism would have tremendous explanatory payoff. I argue that Edmund Husserl had such a unifying theory, according to which perceptual experience is fundamentally both representational and relational. I show that on Husserl’s ontology of perception, the explanatory resources of representationalism and relationism do not compete. I show, too, that the account I attribute to Husserl has notable advantages over a well-known attempt to unify representationalism and relationism, due to Susanna Schellenberg.