ABSTRACT
Philosophy.—The term experience is used to refer to the locus of an encounter between the mind and reality (→MIND). It enables cognitive subjects to extract information from the signals that reach their sensory receptors (→INFORMATION). It seems inevitable that we characterize our experiences in terms of what they are experiences “of.” But one of the tasks of philosophers of perception is to construct a concept of perceptual experience that is compatible with nonveridical experiences (→PERCEPTION): in an illusion, experience makes an object appear real, but it does not present that object with its real properties; in a hallucination, no real object corresponds to the experience. Accordingly, the distinction is made between the intentional or representational content of experience and its subjective or qualitative content (→INTENTIONALITY, QUALIA, REPRESENTATION).
