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Précis of
 The Unity of Perception

How does perception justify beliefs and yield knowledge of our environment? How does it bring about conscious mental states? How does a perceptual system accomplish the feat of converting varying informational input into mental representations of invariant features in our environment? The Unity of Perception develops a unified account of the phenomenological and epistemological role of perception that is informed by empirical research (Schellenberg, 2018). As such, it develops an account of perception that in equal measures aims to answer the first two questions above, while being sensitive to evidence from neuroscience, cognitive psychology, and psychophysics in addressing the third. Most accounts of perception focus on one or the other of these three questions and struggle to provide plausible answers to the other two questions. What makes my view distinctive is that it answers all three questions in terms of one fundamental property of perception: the employment of perceptual capacities. Indeed, a two-word summary of the book is: capacities first. The book treats capacities as explanatory basic and analyzes perceptual content, consciousness, evidence, and knowledge in terms of employing capacities. The relevant capacities are capacities to discriminate and single out particulars in the environment. Employing perceptual capacities constitutes phenomenal character as well as perceptual content. The primacy of employing perceptual capacities in perception over their derivative employment in hallucination and illusion grounds the epistemic force of perceptual experience. In this way, the book provides a unified account of perceptual content, consciousness, and evidence. Due to the grounding role of perceptual capacities, I call the view capacitism. Such a unified account of perception opens up a new understanding of the nature of perceptual content, perceptual particularity, the phenomenological basis of evidence, the epistemic force of evidence, the origins of perceptual knowledge, the relationship between content and consciousness, as well as the relationship between consciousness and reference. Moreover, it clears the way for solving a host of unresolved problems, such as the relation between attention and perceptual knowledge, and the perceptual basis for demonstrative reference. A central theme of the book is that perception is particular and general all the way down. It is particular all the way down because every case of perception involves perceiving and representing at least one particular, where that particular could be an object, event, or a property-instance in the environment. Perception is general all the way down because we perceive particulars by employing perceptual