Looks and the immediacy of visual objectual knowledge

Self Cite

Ernest Sosa has suggested that we distinguish between animal knowledge, on the one hand, and reflective knowledge, on the other. Animal knowledge is direct, immediate, and foundationally structured, while reflective knowledge involves a knower's higher-order awareness of her own mental states, and is structured by relations of coherence.Although Sosa's distinction is extremely appealing, it also faces serious problems. In particular, the sorts of processes that would be required for reflective knowledge, as Sosa understands it, are not processes that are instantiated in human cognition. Philosophical Issues. 2019;29:241-253.wileyonlinelibrary.com/journal/phis

Section: The Second Problem For Strong Reflective Knowledgementioning

confidence: 99%

Expanding the scope of reflective knowledge: From MINE to OURS

Shieber

2019

Self Cite

“…55I focus on children, but see Shieber (2017) for an argument that non‐human animals are capable of visual recognition without being capable of having beliefs about looks.…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

“…1515See McGrath (2017) for an argument that not just any recognitional capacity will work to counter his “only‐because” argument, and see Shieber (2017) for discussion.…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

Do looks constitute our perceptual evidence?

Ghijsen¹

2020

Many philosophers take experience to be an essential aspect of perceptual justification. I argue against a specific variety of such an experientialist view, namely, the Looks View of perceptual justification, according to which our visual beliefs are mediately justified by beliefs about the way things look. I describe three types of cases that put pressure on the idea that perceptual justification is always related to looks-related reasons: unsophisticated cognizers, multimodal identification, and amodal completion. I then provide a tentative diagnosis of what goes wrong in the Looks View: it ascribes a specific epistemic role to beliefs about looks that is actually fulfilled by subpersonal perceptual processes.

“…1313See Shieber (2017) for other arguments. McGrath only uses the principle as a test, it is worth noting.…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

Non‐epistemic perception as technology

Sylvan

2020

Some epistemologists and philosophers of mind hold that the non-epistemic perceptual relation of which feature-seeing and object-seeing are special cases is the foundation of perceptual knowledge. This paper argues that such relations are best understood as having only a technological role in explaining perceptual knowledge. After introducing the opposing view in §1, §2 considers why its defenders deny that some cases in which one has perceptual knowledge without the relevant acquaintance relations are counterexamples, detailing their case for lurking inferential epistemology. § §3-4 suggest that this strategy fails in many other cases. While there is a computational tale that might be deemed 'inferential' in these cases, there is no corresponding tale in epistemic structure, not even if one rejects what Siegel (2017) calls the 'Reckoning Model' of inference. §5 offers a more fundamental dilemma. §6 concludes that there is only a technological role for non-epistemic perception in grounding perceptual knowledge, but allows that it might play a more-than-technological role elsewhere.