Ontology and the phenomenology of perception. On the privacy and fleetingness of phenomenal entities

The phenomenal entities that we directly experience in perceptions, dreams and hallucinations tend to be viewed as essentially private and ephemeral (fleeting), i.e., necessarily incapable of being directly experienced by more than one subject and incapable of re-occurring more than once. Among phenomenal entities are the “object-shaped” gestalts studied in Gestalt psychology. The traditional ontological dichotomy of universals and particulars is appealed to, in order to make a distinction between (phenomenal) gestalt-types and gestalt-tokens. It is then proposed that the former are not essentially private and ephemeral. As regards the latter, it is argued that they are indeed essentially private, but ephemeral at most only in a contingent sense. The relevance of these claims for our perceptual judgments about external objects is briefly investigated at the end of the paper.