{"product_id":"a-theory-of-sentience","title":"A Theory of Sentience","description":"\u003cp\u003eAusten Clark offers a general account of the forms of mental representation that we call `sensory'. To sense something, one must have some capacity to discriminate among sensory qualities; but there are other requirements. What are they, and how can they be put together to yield full-blown sensing? Drawing on the findings of current neuroscience, Clark proposes and defends the hypothesis that the various modalities of sensation share a generic form that he calls 'feature-placing'. Sensing proceeds by picking out place-times in or around the body of the sentient organism, and characterizing qualities (features) that appear at those place-times. Such feature-placing is a primitive kind--probably the most primitive kind--of mental representation. Once its peculiarities have been described, many of the puzzles about the intentionality of sensation, and the phenomena that lead some to label it 'pseudo-intentional', can be resolved. The hypothesis casts light on many other troublesome phenomena, including the varieties of illusion, the problem of projection, the notion of a visual field, the location of after-images, the existence of sense-data, and the role of perceptual demonstratives. A Theory of Sentience will interest anyone interested in the topics of sensation, representation, or phenomenal consciousness.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Austen Clark","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":43577426542653,"sku":"9780198238515","price":342.0,"currency_code":"AUD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0597\/7689\/2989\/files\/9780198238515.jpg?v=1788645153","url":"https:\/\/www.palmleaf.com.au\/products\/a-theory-of-sentience","provider":"Palmleaf","version":"1.0","type":"link"}