Cognitive penetration and the tribunal of experience
Perception purports to help you gain knowledge of the way the world is even if the world is not t... more Perception purports to help you gain knowledge of the way the world is even if the world is not the way you expected it to be. Perception also purports to be an independent tribunal against which you can test your beliefs. It is natural to think that in order to serve these and other central functions, perceptual representations must not causally depend on your prior beliefs and expectations. In this paper, I clarify and then argue against the natural thought above. All perceptual systems must solve an under-determination problem: the sensory data they receive could be caused by indefinitely many arrangements of distal objects and properties. Using a Bayesian approach to perceptual processing, I argue that in order to solve the under-determination problem, perceptual capacities must rely on prior beliefs or expectations of some kind. I then argue that perceptual states or processes can help ground knowledge of the world whether the ‘beliefs’ necessary for perceptual processing are e...
The Rationality of Perception : Replies to Lord, Railton, and Pautz
Discussion of Susanna Siegel's “Can perceptual experiences be rational?”
Analytic Philosophy
A critical discussion of Susanna Siegel's "Can perceptual experiences be rationa... more A critical discussion of Susanna Siegel's "Can perceptual experiences be rational?", with her response. Co-authored with M. Chirimuuta, R. Rosenhagen, S. Siegel, D. Smithies and A. Springle.
for comments and discussion, and to Aaron Glasser for research assistance. 1 One could also seman... more for comments and discussion, and to Aaron Glasser for research assistance. 1 One could also semantically remember falsehoods. 2 For a contrasting attempt to assimilate episodic to semantic memory see Barclay (1994). 3 Some mental phenomena combine procedural and semantic memories, such as when one recognizes something or someone one has seen before. If you know what avocados look like, you are skilled at identifying the avocados at the produce stand, but you presumably also know some facts about what visible features avocados have, such as their typical shapes, size, and texture. For discussion of this phenomenon, see McGrath (forthcoming).
My inferentialist analysis of hijacked experiences allows that these experiences can be conclusio... more My inferentialist analysis of hijacked experiences allows that these experiences can be conclusions of inference. If experiences are conclusions of inference in these cases, what kinds of mental states can figure as the inputs to the inferences? In Brewer's initial gloss on these cases, the input to such inference is always another experience, and that experience always has a baseline amount of epistemic power. He then asks how this gloss would apply to memory color, where one ends up experiencing a banana as yellowish.
Phenomenal character: the first-person perspective in perceptual experience. Epistemic contributi... more Phenomenal character: the first-person perspective in perceptual experience. Epistemic contribution: the contribution of perceptual experience to empirical knowledge. * The main ideas here emerged on two walking discussions in California in 2017: with John Campbell in the Berkeley hills and Christopher Peacocke in San Diego. I thank them for many discussions and for their writings on perception from which I've learned much over the years. For helpful comments and criticism I
The main thesis of The Rationality of Perception is that both perceptual experiences and the proc... more The main thesis of The Rationality of Perception is that both perceptual experiences and the processes that give rise to them can be rational or irrational. If the Rationality of Perception thesis is true, then experiences themselves can manifest an epistemic status. I call that status "epistemic charge".
How is wishful seeing like wishful thinking? Susanna Siegel A Simple Argument It is a commonplace... more How is wishful seeing like wishful thinking? Susanna Siegel A Simple Argument It is a commonplace that beliefs can be epistemically appropriate or epistemically inappropriate. Suppose Frank wishfully believes that today, all his best features are evident even to the most casual observation. Passers-by who greet him with neutral expressions are holding back their appreciation of him, because they're embarrassed to show it. Anyone who seems displeased with him is feeling inadequate in the face of his many assets. These interpretations make sense to Frank given his original wishful belief, but they are unreasonable, and that belief is the source of their unreasonableness. Can a perceptual experience ever be a source of unreasonableness, because of its dependence on a desire? Could wishful seeing compromise the rational support offered by experience, just as wishful thinking compromises the rational support offered by Frank's wishful belief? For instance, suppose that because of Frank's wishful belief, a passerby wearing a neutral expression looks to Frank as if she is wearing an approving expression. If Frank took his visual experience at face value, would his visual experience provide the usual amount of rational support for believing that the passerby's expression is approving? Both answers to this question can seem plausible. On the one hand, from Frank's point of view, concluding that the passerby is as she looks seems eminently reasonable. On the other hand, it seems odd that Frank could gain evidence that the passerby is approving from his experience, when that experience is generated by his wishful belief that the passerby is approving. Here is a simple argument favoring the second answer. Wishful thinking is a route to belief, wishful seeing is a route to perceptual experience. Premise: Beliefs can be ill-founded by wishful thinking. Premise: Wishful seeing is possible. Premise: If wishful thinking can ill-found beliefs, then wishful seeing can ill-found perceptual experiences. Conclusion. Perceptual experiences can be ill-founded by wishful seeing. The argument's conceit is that wishful seeing and wishful thinking are sufficiently analogous that they both have ill-founding effects. There are many places to probe the Simple Argument, starting with whether the idea of wishful seeing makes sense to begin with. Even if it does make sense, one might suspect that equivocation on "ill-foundedness" is unavoidable, on the grounds that beliefs are ill-founded if they are formed or maintained epistemically inappropriately, but experiences are not governed by epistemic norms. And even if equivocation on "ill-founded" can be avoided, why should anyone believe the third premise? Nothing in the argument explains why the fact that wishful thinking can ill-found beliefs should tell us anything about what wishful * Thanks to audiences at the 2013 Rutgers Epistemology Conference,
The thesis that we can visually perceive causal relations is distinct from the thesis that visual... more The thesis that we can visually perceive causal relations is distinct from the thesis that visual experiences can represent causal relations. I defend the latter thesis about visual experience, and argue that although they are suggestive, the data provided by Albert Michotte's experiments on perceptual causality do not establish this thesis. Turning to the perception of causality, I defend the claim that we can perceive causation against the objection that its arcane features are unlikely to be represented in experience.
Forthcoming in Does Perception Have Content? Ed. B. Brogaard. Oxford University Press. 2014. A ho... more Forthcoming in Does Perception Have Content? Ed. B. Brogaard. Oxford University Press. 2014. A hole in the ground protects some creatures but endangers others. Dry ground is passable by creatures who walk, but fatal for a fish. These environments provide different possibilities for different creatures. J. J. Gibson invented the word "affordance" to denote possibilities of action for a creature that are given by the environment. 1 He proposed that we perceive affordances, and that the paradigmatic perceptions are byproducts of action plans. These proposals inspired an "action-first" approach to visual perception, which foregrounds the role of the perceiver as an actor. The action-first approach to visual perception can be contrasted with the "spectator-first" approach, which foregrounds the role of the perceiver as an observer. This approach is heir to David Marr's computational theory of vision, and like Marr's theory, it gives a central role in perception to belief-like representations. Here the paradigmatic perceptions are observations of scenes with which one does not necessarily interact, such as watching a sunset. In recent years, both of these approaches have been used to investigate the nature of perceptual experience, leading to a divide over the centrality of representation in analyzing perception. 2 On the surface, the two approaches are easily reconciled by the hypothesis that affordances are on par with color and shape as properties represented in experience. 3 But even if affordances could in principle be represented in experience, it is reasonable to ask whether they have to be so represented-or whether instead we simply experience affordances without representing them. If any representations of affordances would be an idle wheel in * For extensive discussion and criticism, thanks to audiences at Harvard,
Uploads
Papers by Susanna Siegel