Against the Conceptualist Argument against Sensory Liberalism

The paper addresses the question of whether the representability of high-level properties in the content of perceptual experience is compatible with a purely sensory characterization of high-level perceptual phenomenology. Two positions are distinguished, sensory liberalism and cognitive liberalism, which respectively provide an affirmative and a negative answer to the above question. After presenting the “conceptualist argument” against sensory liberalism and the main challenges that it raises, the paper proceeds to show how sensory liberalism can be defended and why it should be preferred to its main competitor within the liberal camp.