Inferentialism and Cognitive Penetration of Perception

Abstract

Cognitive penetration of perception is the idea that what we see (hear, taste, etc.) is influenced by such "cognitive" states as beliefs, expectations, and so on. A perceptual belief that results from cognitive penetration may be less justified than a nonpenetrated one. Inferentialism is a kind of internalist view that tries to account for this by claiming that (a) experiences are epistemically evaluable, on the basis of why the perceiver has More precisely, the idea is that the contents of perceptual states can be influenced in a particular, more or less direct, top-down way, by the cognitive states of the organism. CP is a 1 controversial empirical thesis (Zeimbekis and Raftopoulos 2015), but I won't be concerned here with whether it is true or not. Instead I will focus on the epistemological implications of the view if it is true, although of course the question is much more interesting if the kinds of CP at issue are empirically plausible.For more details, see .

The Eye's Mind: Perceptual Process and Epistemic Norms

“…Jack Lyons, for instance, identifies a kind of passivity that arises from the modularity of perception. As he puts it “the outputs of perceptual processing are given, or receptive, in the sense that the perceiver is not agentially involved in their construction” (Lyons, : 26). Facts about sub‐personal processing leave this kind of person‐level passivity untouched.…”

“…The nature of evidence is contested along various dimensions (Kelly, ), and I wish to remain neutral as far as possible on many of these debates. It is sometimes doubted that perception could constitute a form of evidence, on the grounds that our relationship with it is more direct than an evidential relation can adequately capture (Austin , Lyons a). My willingness to describe perceptual experience as a form of evidence has no interesting bearing on the immediacy of the perceptual relationship, since I understand evidence in such minimal terms.…”

Basic Beliefs and the Perceptual Learning Problem: A Substantial Challenge for Moderate Foundationalism

“…(Lyons 2008) and (Cecchi 2014), but these focus primarily on the physical instantiation of perceptual learning, rather than on the epistemological status of expert perceptual beliefs, which will be our point of focus here.…”

Cognitive penetration of early vision in face perception

“…If the perceptual process is corrupted by our cognitive or affective background, we might not see the world as it is but as we want or expect it to be (Fodor, 1983, p. 68;Pylyshyn, 1980). Therefore, we might fail to know the world (Clark, 2016;Lyons, 2011Lyons, , 2015Lyons, , 2016Macpherson, 2012Macpherson, , 2017Siegel, 2012).…”