Transparency of experience

The transparency of experience, also called the transparency thesis, is the idea in the philosophy of mind that perception is phenomenally transparent. This means that perception presents properties of objects—like the redness of a tomato—but never the properties of experience itself. In this way, it is said that "we see right through" experience, making it difficult or even impossible for introspection to reveal its intrinsic properties.

This idea has been interpreted in many ways. Most commonly, it is used to argue for the idea that mental experiences are fundamentally representational, a view called intentionalism or representationalism. This argument is sometimes extended to claim that there are no purely phenomenal aspects of experience, or qualia, because all phenomenal experiences also have representational content. The transparency thesis has also been used to argue for direct realism, disjunctivism, and various other views in the philosophy of mind and philosophy of perception.

The transparency of experience arguably first arose in modern philosophy from figures such as Thomas Reid, but it became more prominent in twentieth century philosophy due to famous passages in the works of G. E. Moore and Gilbert Harman.