Do Mere Natural Functions Make an Epistemic Difference?

Susanna Schellenberg’s capacitism opens up a novel way of theorizing about perceptual experience. While representationalists explain experience’s phenomenal and epistemic features by drawing on the notion of representation, and while relationalists explain the same by drawing on the notion of an acquaintance relation, Schellenberg’s capacitism steps in a new direction: It suggests that perceptual experiences are fundamentally constituted by employments of perceptual capacities; and it is this constitution that explains why experiences have representational content, phenomenal character and epistemic force. Here I wish to focus on capacitism’s account of experience’s epistemic force. While I wholeheartedly applaud capacitism’s invocation of capacities in its account of experience’s epistemic force, I also worry that if the invocation is to succeed, the account needs to be further developed.