Does the empirical evidence support that perception has singular content?

Congratulations to Evan Robichaud for successfully defending their MA thesis, "Does the empirical evidence support that perception has singular content?" on June 22, 2026. The thesis was supervised by David Liebesman, and examined by Richard Zach, Jeremy Fantl.

We asked Evan to provide us with some insight into their thesis and their graduate studies experience in the Department of Philosophy at the University of Calgary. 

Tell us about your thesis topic:

My thesis is part of a philosophical research paradigm asking about the contents of perceptual experiences. This question jumps from a prominent view in philosophy of mind and cognitive science which says that perceptual states have representational contents. This is to say that perceptual states represent the world in a certain way, and they are accurate or inaccurate in doing so. But, what kinds of things feature in the accuracy conditions of perceptual states? The question I investigate is whether perceptual experiences that draw attention to particular objects have singular (object-involving) contents or general contents. The singular and general content distinction is drawn from the philosophy of language, and it can be shown by asking about the truth conditions of different sentences. Compare the sentence “there is one unique dog barking on my lawn” and the sentence “Fido is barking on my lawn”. Both sentences pick out a particular dog, but they do so in different ways, resulting in varying truth conditions. The former sentence could be made true by any dog in the right conditions, but the latter sentence can be made true only by Fido. The question, then, is whether perceptual contents are like the sentence concerning Fido and have singular contents, or if they are more like the other sentence which describes the dogs traits and have general contents. There are prominent arguments which suggest that psychological research on Multiple Object Tracking supports the singular content view. I undermine these arguments and propose that the general content view can best account for certain illusions.

What was the most valuable outcome of the Graduate program for you?

The Master’s program in philosophy at University of Calgary has done a great job of preparing me to do further work in the discipline of philosophy. My research and writing skills have improved significantly through the completion of course work and through individual meetings with faculty. Faculty members are very collegial and approachable, while maintain rigorous standards of the kind necessary for philosophical success. I also feel much better equipped to give conference presentations due to both explicit instruction and by having to prepare a presentation as part of the Proseminar course. Additionally, the philosophy department’s travel funding has allowed me to practice presenting at multiple conferences throughout my degree. Besides the improvements in writing and presenting philosophical ideas, I am very grateful for the connections that I have made with faculty and other graduate students at University of Calgary who have supported me and continue to support me in my studies.

What are the next steps/plans for you?

I am currently pursuing a PhD in philosophy at University of Massachusetts, Amherst, where I plan to continue researching topics related to Philosophy of Mind, Language, Epistemology, and Metaphysics.