On the Epistemological Significance of Value Perception

[Introduction]: "A recent flurry of articles and books defend the possibility of value perception, with a guiding thought being that the question of whether there is value perception is of significant import to value epistemology. I examine this thought. Most of the paper focuses on what I call the high-level theory of value perception, an increasingly popular theory (or, rather, family of theories). At a first pass, a high-level theory says that at least some ordinary perceptual experiences – whereby ‘ordinary’ denotes the traditional five-senses – can in certain instances have veridical evaluative content. (We’ll see below why this is called ‘high-level’.) My central claim is that value epistemologists needn’t take sides in difficult debates about high-level value perception; it just isn’t an important epistemological question. But I close the paper by noting that it may matter a great deal whether a certain other picture of value perception is true. This alternative picture has it that desiderative and/or emotional experiences often involve perceptual experiences of value."