# Afterimages and Sensation **Opening (not a real abstract):** According to purists, visual experience can be exhaustively characterised in terms of a subject’s apparent perspective on external, public reality. Visual experience presents us (or if we are subject to illusion, apparently presents us) with aspects of the world beyond us—nothing more, nothing less. According to sensationalists, we cannot adequately characterise experience solely in terms of a subject’s apparent perspective on external, public reality. In addition, or instead, we must appeal to visual sensation, in some sense of that vexed term.1, 2 Afterimages have long formed a core part of the sensationalist’s critique of purism. Afterimages, so the argument goes, are manifestly different in character to ordinary perceptual experiences of the publicly visible world. As a result, they cannot be accounted for solely in terms **Authors:** [[Phillips]]