Seeing and Thereby Knowing

Abstract Understanding the relation between perception and knowledge is an intricate affair if only because profound questions can arise at both ends. What, if anything, can we know by perception? And what knowledge, if any, do we need to have in order to perceive? The aim of the chapter is not so much to try and answer these traditional questions as to examine the way they converge in the later work of Barry Stroud. I think Stroud is perfectly right that in order to know the things we know by perception we must be capable of perceiving that such-and-such is so. However, the explanation of this fundamental perceptual capacity is prone to an understanding, according to which propositional perception can be analysed by means of objectual perception. Based on a comparison with Fred Dretske’s definition of ‘propositional seeing’, I argue that this is a mistake resulting from the ill-founded belief that propositional seeing is not perceptual. Relatedly, I also address the question of whether propositional seeing just is a way of knowing, dispelling Quassim Cassam’s concern that propositional seeing without objectual seeing is explanatorily idle.