Perception, Intentionality and Self-Reference

According to J. R. Searle's account of perception developed in his book Intentionality, perception is "causally self-referential, " in the sense that the representative content of a perceptual experience involves reference to that very experience. This claim is untenable, and it derives from a failure to draw a sharp distinction between the representative contents of Intentional states and their conditions of satisfaction. An account of Intentional states can accommodate the alleged self-referentiality of perception without commitment to Searle's treatment of it, and given a proper treatment, it can be shown that the representative contents of perceptual experiences are not self-referential in the properly semantical sense.