# PERCEPTUAL KINDS AS SUPERVENING SORTALS **Abstract:** It seems intuitive that in situations of perceptual recognition, additional properties are represented. While much has been written about the significance of such properties for perceptual phenomenology, it is still unclear (a) what the relation between recognition-based properties and lower-level perceptual properties is and (b) whether it is justified to classify them as kind properties. Relying on results in cognitive psychology, I argue that recognition-based properties (I) are irreducible, high-level properties, and (II) are kind properties by virtue of being sortal properties but (III) supervene on lower-level properties and so are unlikely to be natural kind properties. One of the main topics in debates regarding perceptual content concerns whether human perception represents only low-level properties, such as colours or shapes, or also high-level properties describing the kinds of objects, causal relations, or aesthetic qualities (e.g. Siegel, 2006, 2009; Bayne, 2009). In the context of kind properties, some authors are willing to accept that in situations of perceptual recognition, for instance, when one not only perceives an object as being big, black, and orange but when an object also starts to look like a tiger, a new high-level property is represented. However, others claim that a change in the way an object looks, as a result of perceptual recognition, can be sufficiently explained in terms of representing additional lower-level properties. In this paper, I ana **Authors:** [[BŁAŻEJ SKRZYPULEC]]