More on what we learn from experience
For the "Philosophische Club" at the university of Bielefeld, I've made a short paper out of that entry on perceptual content. The proposal is still that the information we acquire through perception is the information that we have just those perceptual experiences. But more needs to be said about what that amounts to: if "having just those experiences" means having experiences with this fundamental phenomenal charater, the proposal is incompatible with physicalism; if it means having just this brain state, the proposal is false. So I end up defending a kind of analytical functionalism even about demonstratives like "this experience". The main argument has something to do with skeptical scenarios. I won't repeat it here, as the paper itself is short enough.
The complete lack of references shows that I haven't read much on this matter yet, and I'm probably just repeating mistakes of other people. I have looked at several papers about perceptual content, but they all seem to be about other topics. As Susanna Siegel says in the Stanford Encyclopedia entry on perceptual content:
a basic constraint on the contents of an experience is that these should reflect (at least some) intuitions about when experiences are accurate or inaccurate. Another commonly-held constraint is that the contents must be adequate to its phenomenology: any proposal for what contents of a given experience are must in some way reflect the phenomenology of the experience.
I vaguely see why these might be constraints on conceptual analyses of our everyday notion of "perceptual content", but they seem to be quite irrelevant to what I'm interested in: to the question what information we acquire when we make perceptions.
Update: Doh, forgot to post the link to the paper.