# WRITING ON THE PAGE OF CONSCIOUSNESS **Opening (not a real abstract):** ‘Sensation’, writes Charles Sanders Peirce, ‘is, as it were, the writing on the page of consciousness’ (Peirce 1866, p. 473). One way of framing the issue I will be concerned with in this paper is in terms of the question as to whether, or in what sense, it is right to say that conscious perceptual experience is a matter of sensation. One way of unpacking Peirce’s metaphor in this context construes ‘the writing’ as a gerund. Sensation, on this way of unpacking the metaphor, is simply the continuous process of things registering in consciousness through the operation of our senses, however this is to be elucidated further. This gives us a relatively undemanding sense in which perceptual experience might be understood to be a matter of sensation. Another way of unpacking Peirce’s metaphor, on which ‘the writing’ is construed as a noun, is metaphysically **Authors:** [[CHRISTOPH HOERL]]