ABSTRACT
Human beings have been singled out as a kind of living beings differentiated from others by rationality. In human beings, knowledge, including the knowledge yielded by perception, is rationality at work. There is an obvious rationality in judging that things are some way if the judging subject can ground her judgment on an experience in which it is manifest to her that things are that way. Perceptual experience, in the sense of experience in which the subject is perceiving, as opposed to merely seeming to be perceiving, affords human beings the grounds for the judgments that are the units of their perceptual knowledge. The idea of a capacity to have it perceptually manifest to one in one’s experience that things are some way makes sense only as the idea of part of a more extensive capacity for empirical knowledge, including a capacity for knowledge inferentially grounded on what one perceives to be the case.
