Presence without Presentation

Recent psychological research suggests that sensory vividness is an important diagnostic cue in perception-imagination monitoring. I argue that visual imagery that is quite abstract and schematic can be experienced as externally generated, as illustrated by certain cases of amodal completion. 

Such cases show that perception-imagination monitoring does not operate solely by tracking sensory signal strength. They also motivate a distinction between the phenomenology of direct presentation and that of perceptual presence, with the latter offering a better characterization of the epistemic feeling involved in perception-imagination monitoring. Finally, I draw out an epistemological implication of this distinction for the recent revival of acquaintance-based accounts of perceptual knowledge.