Research on experience can now characterize perceptual, mnemonic, imaginative, affective, and cognitive content with impressive precision. Yet increasingly fine-grained descriptions of content do not by themselves explain why experience is given in a first-personal way at all. This article argues that content and perspective should be treated as distinct explananda. Content concerns what is perceived, remembered, imagined, felt, or thought. Perspective concerns the organization through which experience is given as present to someone, from somewhere, across time, and with a determinate reality status. Drawing on phenomenology, bodily self-consciousness, temporal continuity and large-scale intrinsic organization, and reality monitoring, the article argues that first-personal givenness cannot be reduced to self-related or first-order content alone. The distinction is methodological before it is metaphysical: its purpose is to keep first-personal givenness visible as an explanatory target in its own right.
Ilya Tarasov (Tue,) studied this question.