Siegel and Byrne debate whether perceptual experiences present rich properties or exclusively thin properties.

This chapter focuses on the relationship between consciousness and knowledge, and in particular on the role perceptual consciousness might play in justifying beliefs about the external world. We outline a version of phenomenal dogmatism according to which perceptual experiences immediately, prima facie justify certain select parts of their content, and do so in virtue of their having a distinctive phenomenology with respect to those contents. Along the way we take up various issues in connection with this core theme, including the (...) possibility of immediate justification, the dispute between representational and relational views of perception, the epistemic significance of cognitive penetration, the question of whether perceptual experiences are composed of more basic sensations and seemings, and questions about the existence and epistemic significance of high-level content. In a concluding section we briefly consider how some of the topics pursued here might generalize beyond perception. (shrink)

This paper argues for deific perception, the idea that some perceptual experiences represent deific properties, as an explanation for a certain type of religious experience. Using Siegel's method of phenomenal contrast, a pair of experiences are compared: an ordinary perception of a black rose, and one where the rose seems imbued with religious significance. Intuitively, these have different phenomenologies. Deific perception posits that in the religiously-significant experience, a deific property like "being a creature of God" partly constitutes the visual phenomenology. (...) Rival explanations like differences in attention or cognitive penetration fail to account for the phenomenal contrast. Deific perception coheres with realism about religious properties and provides a naturalistic explanation of how some people directly sense the divine in nature. If valid, it suggests that with proper background beliefs and recognition capacities, perception can represent high-level deific properties, just as it may represent other abstract properties like natural kinds. The paper thus contributes to debates on the contents of perception and offers a sympathetic account of a class of numinous experiences. (shrink)

According to high-levelism, one can perceptually be aware of high-level properties such as natural kind properties. Against high-levelism, the Gestalt proposal suggests that instead of high-level properties, one can have a perceptual experience as of Gestalt properties, i.e., determinables of determinate low-level properties. When one looks at a bird, the high-levelist argues that one can perceive the property of being a bird, and the proponent of the Gestalt proposal argues that one first perceives the property of having the bird Gestalt (...) (shared by all and only birds) and only post-perceptually recognizes that it is a bird. In the present study, to resolve the dispute between high-levelism and the Gestalt proposal, I aim to test their abilities to explain the attribution of multiple perceptible properties to the same object by making use of various empirical studies on high-level aftereffects. I conclude that the Gestalt proposal fails the test and hence shall not be a viable alternative to high-levelism. (shrink)

The method of phenomenal contrast (in perception) invokes the phenomenal character of perceptual experience as a means to discover its contents. The method implicitly takes for granted that ‘what it is like’ to have a perceptual experience e is the same as ‘what it is like’ to imagine or recall it; accordingly, in its various proposed implementations, the method treats imaginations and/or recollections as interchangeable with real experiences. The method thus always contrasts a pair of experiences, at least one of (...) which is imagined or remembered rather than occurrent. Surveying all eighteen forms of implementing the method, I argue that in all of the proposed pairings, the substitution of imagination or recollection for perceptual experience in the method, is either inconceivable or impermissible. I identify four reasons why I think imagination cannot be substituted for real experience, and three reasons why recollection cannot be substituted for real experience. If my argument works, there is no form of implementing the method that is useful for discovering the contents of experience, and thus the method is not a well‐functioning tool to study the contents of perception. (shrink)

Philosophers of perception often claim that usual perceptual experiences not only present particulars but also phenomenally present them as particulars. Nevertheless, despite the initial plausibility of this thesis, it is not clear what exactly it means to say that particularity is phenomenally presented. The paper aims to provide a deeper analysis of the claim that perceptual experiences phenomenally present objects as particulars. In doing so, I distinguish two theses regarding phenomenally presented particularity: Generic Particularity and Specific Particularity. According to the (...) first thesis, vision phenomenally presents particularity of objects, understood as a general characteristic that may be shared by many entities. The second thesis states that vision phenomenally presents particularity of objects, understood as an individual characteristic unique to each particular. I argue that, relying on knowledge concerning the functioning of perceptual mechanisms, vision does not phenomenally present generic particularity but it has certain abilities for presenting specific particularity. (shrink)

This paper concerns the question of which properties figure in the contents of perceptual experience. According to conservatives, only low-level properties figure in the contents of perceptual experience. Liberals, on the other hand, claim that high-level properties, such as natural kind properties, artifacts, and even moral properties, can figure in the contents of perceptual experience. I defend a novel argument in favor of liberalism, the Epistemic Argument, which hinges on two crucial claims. The first is that many perceptual experiences of (...) even neurotypical human beings can justify beliefs in high-level properties without providing justification for their low-level constituents. The second claim, roughly, is that any experience that alone provides (defeasible) justification for beliefs about some property p, other things being equal, has p as part of its content. In short, certain perceptual experiences represent high-level but not low-level properties, which entails that liberalism is true. (shrink)

ABSTRACT The difference between perception and cognition seems introspectively obvious in many cases. Perceiving and thinking have also been assigned quite different roles, in epistemology, in theories of reference and of mental content, in philosophy of psychology, and elsewhere. Yet what is the nature of the distinction? In what way, or ways, do perception and cognition differ? The paper reviews recent work on these questions. Four main respects in which perception and cognition have been held to differ are discussed. First, (...) their phenomenal character, such as the often-remarked vivacity or immediacy of perception. Second, the way in which they represent the world, e.g. the non-propositional nature of the contents, or non-discursive character of the vehicles, that have been held to characterise perceptual representation. Third, their place in cognitive architecture, i.e., roughly, in the information-flow of the mind, such as their alleged (non-)modularity. Fourth, their mind-world relations, e.g. the way in which perceptions seem to be tightly causally linked with distal or proximal stimuli. Against this background, we distinguish some main options for an account of the perception/cognition distinction, in particular concerning whether there is one, several, or no interesting and principled distinction(s) to be drawn here. (shrink)

Whether perceptual experience represents high-level properties like causation and natural-kind in virtue of its phenomenology is an open question in philosophy of mind. While the question of high-level properties has sparked disagreement, there is widespread agreement that the sensory phenomenology of perceptual experience presents us with low-level properties like shape and color. This paper argues that the relationship between the sensory character of experience and the low-level properties represented therein is more complex than most assume. Careful consideration of mundane examples, (...) like looking at a coin from an oblique angle, show that the low-level properties represented in experience do not necessarily figure in the sensory character of the experience. Furthermore, the sensible properties invoked when characterizing the sensory character of a perceptual experience are not necessarily included in the sensible properties represented in a perceptual experience. On this basis it is argued that perceptual experience has a disunified metaphysics, consisting in distinct sensory and cognitive components. The account is developed in relation to existing unified and disunified accounts, and discussed in terms of its implications for cognitive penetration, the reliability of introspection, the transparency of experience, and cognitive phenomenology. (shrink)

This paper starts by distinguishing three views about the phenomenal character of perceptual experience. ‘Low-level theorists’ argue that perceptual experience is reducible to the experience of low-level properties, ‘high-level theorists’ argue that we have perceptual experiences of high-level properties, while ‘disunified view theorists’ argue that perceptual seemings can present high-level properties. The paper explores how cognitive states can penetrate perceptual experience and provides an interpretation of cognitive penetration that offers some support for the high-level view.

Restrictivists hold that visual experience only represents low-level properties such as shape, spatial location, motion, color, etc. Expansionists contend that visual experience also represents high-level properties such as being a pine tree. I outline a new approach to support expansionism called the conflict cross-modal argument. What I call the conflict cross-modal effects occur when at least two perceptual systems disagree about some property belonging to a common stimulus, and this disagreement causes a change in the representational and phenomenal content of (...) the perceptual experience associated with one, or both, modalities. The conflict cross-modal argument works by accepting that if a property figures in a conflict cross-modal effect, then prima facie that property is a strong common sensible between the two modalities, and vision and another modality disagree about a property that is high-level for vision. After outlining this argument, and showing how it overcomes two obstacles that face traditional methods employed to defend expansionism, I turn to the well known Mcgurk effect as a case where vision and audition disagree about phoneme properties in order to employ my argument for the conclusion that phoneme properties are represented in visual experience. The upshot is that since phoneme properties are high-level for vision, we have an argument supporting expansionism. (shrink)

In this paper, I discuss the use of after-effects as a criterion for showing that we can perceive high-level properties. According to this criterion, if a high-level property is susceptible to after-effects, this suggests that the property can be perceived, rather than cognized. The defenders of the criterion claim that, since after-effects are also present for low-level, uncontroversially perceptual properties, we can safely infer that high-level after-effects are perceptual as well. The critics of the criterion, on the other hand, assimilate (...) it to superficially similar effects in cognition and argue that the after-effect criterion is a cognitive phenomenon rather than a perceptual one, and that as a result it is not a reliable guide for exploring the contents of perception. I argue against both of these views and show that high-level after-effects cannot be identified either with low-level after-effects or with cognitive biases. I suggest an intermediate position: high-level after-effects are not cognitive, but they are nonetheless not a good criterion for exploring the contents of perception. (shrink)

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 is the relation between recognition-based properties and lower-level perceptual properties, 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, (II) are kind properties by virtue of being sortal properties, but (...) (III) they supervene on lower-level properties and so are unlikely to be natural kind properties. (shrink)

This paper argues that, assuming some widely held views about how vision justifies beliefs, there is an important epistemic asymmetry between visual perception and the perception of bodily sensations. This asymmetry arises when we consider the epistemic significance of the distinction between low-level and high-level properties in perceptual experience. I argue that a distinction exists between low-level and high-level properties of bodily sensations which parallels that distinction in the objects of visual experience. I then survey evidence revealing systematic unreliability in (...) an important dimension of our perception of low-level bodily sensational properties. I argue that this unreliability results in an epistemic asymmetry with vision. I conclude by sketching some implications of this asymmetry for developing a general, unified theory of perceptual justification. (shrink)

In this paper, I offer a new argument for the perceptual rationality thesis: the claim that perceptual experiences themselves can be rational or irrational. In her book The Rationality of Perception, Susanna Siegel has offered several intertwined arguments for this same thesis, and, as you will see, one of Siegel’s arguments is what inspires my own. However, I will suggest that the new argument is significantly better-supported than Siegel’s original argument.

Walking through the supermarket, I see the avocados. I know they are avocados. Similarly, if you see a pumpkin on my office desk, you can know it’s a pumpkin from its looks. The phenomenology in such cases is that of “just seeing” that such and such. This phenomenology might suggest that the knowledge gained is immediate. This paper argues, to the contrary, that in these target cases, the knowledge is mediate, depending as it does on one’s knowledge of what the (...) relevant kind of thing looks like. To make the case requires examining the nature of knowing what Fs look like. Is such knowledge to be understood as knowledge of a fact, or rather as a kind of ability? From the conclusion that the knowledge in the target cases is not immediate, the paper concludes that perception does not afford us immediate knowledge concerning objects’ kinds. (shrink)

There is ongoing philosophical debate about the kinds of properties that are represented in visual perception. Both “rich” and “thin” accounts of perceptual content are concerned with how prior assumptions about the world influence the construction of perceptual representations. However, the idea that biased assumptions resulting from oppressive social structures contribute to the contents of perception has been largely neglected historically in this debate in the philosophy of perception. I draw on neurobiological evidence of the role of the amygdala in (...) visual processing to show that the influence of biased assumptions on visual perception gives us a unique path to rich evaluative content that does not require an appeal to controversial mechanisms like top-down modulation. (shrink)

I argue that we sometimes visually perceive the intentions of others. Just as we can see something as blue or as moving to the left, so too can we see someone as intending to evade detection or as aiming to traverse a physical obstacle. I consider the typical subject presented with the Heider and Simmel movie, a widely studied ‘animacy’ stimulus, and I argue that this subject mentally attributes proximal intentions to some of the objects in the movie. I further (...) argue that these attributions are unrevisable in a certain sense and that this result can be used to as part of an argument that these attributions are not post-perceptual thoughts. Finally, I suggest that if these attributions are visual experiences, and more particularly visual illusions, their unrevisability can be satisfyingly explained, by appealing to the mechanisms which underlie visual illusions more generally. (shrink)

Recently, several theorists have proposed that we can perceive a range of high-level features, including natural kind features (e.g., being a lemur), artifactual features (e.g., being a mandolin), and the emotional features of others (e.g., being surprised). I clarify the claim that we perceive high-level features and suggest one overlooked reason this claim matters: it would dramatically expand the range of actions perception-based theories of action might explain. I then describe the influential phenomenal contrast method of arguing for high-level perception (...) and discuss some of the objections that have been raised against this strategy. Finally, I describe two emerging defenses of high-level perception, one of which appeals to a certain class of perceptual deficits and one of which appeals to adaptation effects. I sketch a challenge for the latter approach. (shrink)

Perceptual Dogmatism holds that if it perceptually seems to S that p, then S has immediate prima facie justification for the belief that p. Various philosophers have made the notion of a perceptual seeming more precise by distinguishing perceptual seemings from both sensations and beliefs to accommodate a) the epistemic difference between perceptual judgments of novices and experts, and, b) the problem of the speckled hen. Using somewhat different terminology, perceptual seemings are supposed to be high-level percepts instead of low-level (...) sensations. I argue that although it is right that perceptual seemings should not be identified with sensations, they should also not be identified with percepts. There is no strong reason to assume that sensations and percepts exist as separate conscious states, and it appears therefore best to identify perceptual seemings simply with perceptual experiences interpreted as entities incorporating aspects from both sensations and percepts. However, even with this plausible identification in hand, the speckled hen will remain problematic for PD. (shrink)

There is an ongoing debate in philosophy of mind and epistemology about whether perceptual experience only represents those “thin” features of our environment that are apprehended by our senses, or whether, in addition to these, at least some perceptual experiences represent more complex, “thick” properties. My aim in this paper is to articulate an important difference between thin and thick properties, and thus to diagnose a key intuitive resistance many proponents of the thin view feel towards the thick view. My (...) diagnosis then provides us with a novel and compelling argument against the thick view. In what follows, first I consider two unsuccessful versions of an alternative strategy against the thick view found in the literature. Next, I present my own argument. The argument involves proposing two constraints on the phenomenal contents of perceptual experience, which I call the Presentation Principle and the Containment Principle, and then reasoning from these principles to a conclusion that is fatal to the thick view—an outcome that I call the problem of Phenomenal Explosion. I conclude by responding to several objections. (shrink)

In this paper I will argue that the gender properties expressed by human voices are part of auditory phenomenology. I will support this claim by investigating auditory adaptational effects on such properties and contrasting auditory experiences, before and after the adaptational effects take place. In light of this investigation, I will conclude that auditory experience is not limited to low-level properties. Perception appears to be much more informative about the auditory landscape than is commonly thought.

I argue that chimericity is a property that we typically experience when listening to multi-instrumental music. It is the property of hearing as a unified whole a melody or a harmony that does not belong to any single sound source but instead consists of the assembling of melodic or harmonic fragments coming from different sources. Chimericity is not reducible to the low-level audible properties of pitch and loudness; it is cognized at the perceptual level thanks to the auditory mechanism of (...) primitive grouping. My aim is to show that chimericity is a perceptual property, one that we can genuinely hear. In developing this view, I engage with the debate within the philosophy of sense perception between rich vs thin views of the content of perceptual experience. (shrink)

I will investigate the auditory illusion of continuity, which is the phenomenon of auditory occlusion in which we are able to hear a sound as continuous even though it has been masked by another sound. This phenomenon seems to have a perceptual nature when it occurs in the context of everyday sounds, while it seems to have a cognitive nature when it occurs in the context of speech sounds. This difference has the following consequences: (1) We need to have a (...) differentiated approach to the study of this phenomenon; (2) the perceptual explanation of the phenomenon involving everyday sounds indicates that everyday sounds can be auditorily perceived; and (3) the cognitive explanation of the phenomenon involving speech sounds suggests, instead, that semantic properties cannot be auditorily perceived. From (2) and (3) it follows that while we have a good argument for the rich view when focusing on everyday sounds, we seem to lack an analogous argument to support the rich view in the context of speech sounds. Thus, I will suggest a new argument for the view that we do not hear semantic properties, as language understanding seems to be primarily a cognitive ability. (shrink)

In this paper, I respond to Millar’s recent criticism of naïve realism. Millar provides several arguments for the thesis that there are powerful phenomenological grounds for preferring the content view to naïve realism. I intend to show that Millar’s arguments are not convincing.

The standard assumption for what perception must do in order to represent a “higher level” content—say, tiger—is that it must represent the kind as such. I argue that this “as such condition” is not constitutive of what it means for a content to be “higher‐level”, and that embracing it produces a range of unfortunate dialectical consequences. After offering this critique, I give an alternative construal, the “extended perceptual space” view of higher‐level contents. This view captures the phenomena targeted by the (...) “higher‐level content” thesis, is empirically supported, and avoids the negative dialectical consequences of the as such condition. (shrink)

There has been a recent surge in interest in two questions concerning the nature of perceptual experience; viz. the question of whether perceptual experience is sometimes cognitively penetrated and that of whether high-level properties are presented in perceptual experience. Only rarely have thinkers been concerned with the question of whether the two phenomena are interestingly related. Here we argue that the two phenomena are not related in any interesting way. We argue further that this lack of an interesting connection between (...) the two phenomena has potentially devastating consequences for naïve realism. Finally, we consider the possibility of a disunified view of experience that takes perceptual experience to be a matter of both being directly perceptually related to mind-independent objects and property instances as well as consciously representing these entities. (shrink)

Are kind properties presented to us in visual experience? I propose an account of kind recognition that incorporates two conflicting intuitions: Kind properties a...

This paper aims to provide an empirically informed sketch of how our perceptual capacities can interact with cognitive processes to give rise to new perceptual attributives. In section 1, I present ongoing debates about the reach of perception and direct focus toward arguments offered in recent work by Tyler Burge and Ned Block. In section 2, I draw on empirical evidence relating to language processing to argue against the claim that we have no acquired, culture-specific, high-level perceptual attributives. In section (...) 3, I turn to the cognitive dimension; I outline how cognitive procedures can be involved in the acquisition of what ought to, nonetheless, be recognized as genuinely perceptual capacities. Finally, in section 4, I argue for the importance of distinguishing these conclusions from more familiar and radical claims about rampant “cognitive penetration” into the perceptual domain. (shrink)

John Morrison has argued that confidences are assigned in perceptual experience. For example, when you perceive a figure in the distance, your experience might assign a 55-percent confidence to the figure’s being Isaac. Morrison’s argument leans on the phenomenon of ‘completely trusting your experience’. I argue that Morrison presupposes a problematic ‘importation model’ of this familiar phenomenon, and propose a very different way of thinking about it. While the article’s official topic is whether confidences are assigned in perceptual experience, it (...) is also about two more general issues: how we can determine which properties are assigned in perceptual experience; and how we transition from perception to belief. (shrink)

A central debate in the philosophy of perception concerns the range of properties that can be represented in perceptual experience. Are the contents of perceptual experience restricted to ‘low-level’ properties such as location, shape and texture, or can ‘high-level’ properties such as being a tomato, being a pine tree or being a watch also be represented in perceptual experience? This paper explores the bearing of gist perception on the admissible contents debate, arguing that it provides qualified support for the claim (...) that certain kinds of high-level properties—such as being a natural scene —can be perceptually represented. (shrink)

The on-going debate over the ‘admissible contents of perceptual experience’ concerns the range of properties that human beings are directly acquainted with in perceptual experience. Regarding vision, it is relatively uncontroversial that the following properties can figure in the contents of visual experience: colour, shape, illumination, spatial relations, motion, and texture. The controversy begins when we ask whether any properties besides these figure in visual experience. We argue that ‘ensemble properties’ should be added to the list of visually admissible properties. (...) Ensemble properties are features that belong to a set of perceptible objects as a whole as opposed to the individuals that constitute that set. They include such features as the mean size of an array of shapes or the average emotional expression of an array of faces. Recent work in vision science has yielded compelling evidence that the visual system routinely encodes such properties. We argue that epistemological considerations provide strong reasons to think that these properties figure in visual experience. Judgements about ensemble properties are immediately warranted by our perceptual experience, and the only plausible way that a perceptual experience could confer this warrant is if it confers awareness of ensemble properties. (shrink)

This thesis motivates a novel account of desire as the best explanation of an intuitive datum. The intuitive datum is that often when an agent desires P she will immediately, outright know that she has a reason to bring P about. Existing explanations of the intuitive datum cannot simultaneously satisfy two desiderata. We want to explain how desires enable outright knowledge of reasons and also explain the fallibility of desires. Existing views satisfy the first desideratum at the expense of the (...) second, or vice versa. I propose an epistemological disjunctivist account of desire that satisfies both. On this view, a desire for P represents the value of P in a manner analogous to perception. Desires come in two distinct epistemic kinds: an awareness of value or an illusion of value. An awareness of value enables outright knowledge of reasons and allows the agent to tell by reflection that she has such knowledge. An illusion of value merely seems to provide grounds for knowledge, which explains the fallibility of desires. The proposed account is a strong candidate for the truth because it best explains central features of our practical agency. (shrink)

Upon first hearing sinewaves, all that can be discerned are beeps and whistles. But after hearing the original speech, the beeps and whistles sound like speech. The difference between these two episodes undoubtedly involves an alteration in phenomenal character. O’Callaghan (2011) argues that this alteration is non-sensory, but he leaves open the possibility of attributing it to some other source, e.g. cognition. I discuss whether the alteration in phenomenal character involved in sinewave speech provides evidence for cognitive phenomenology. I defend (...) both the existence of cognitive phenomenology and the phenomenal contrast method, as each concerns the case presented here. (shrink)

What is the correct procedure for determining the contents of perception? Philosophers tackling this question increasingly rely on empirically-oriented procedures in order to reach an answer. I argue that this constitutes an improvement over the armchair methodology constitutive of phenomenal contrast cases, but that there is a crucial respect in which current empirical procedures remain limited: they are unimodal in nature, wrongly treating the senses as isolatable faculties. I thus have two aims: first, to motivate a reorientation of the admissible (...) contents debate into a multimodal framework, charting its various significances. The second is to explore whether any experimental studies of multimodal perception support a so-called Liberal (or ‘high-level’ or ‘rich’) account of perception’s admissible contents. I conclude that the McGurk effect and the ventriloquist effect are both explicable without the postulation of high-level content, but that at least one multimodal experimental paradigm may necessitate such content: the rubber hand illusion. One upshot of this argument is that Conservatives who claim that the Liberal view intolerably broadens the scope of perceptual illusions, particularly from the perspective of perceptual psychology, should pursue other arguments against that view. (shrink)

In this paper, I make a consideration about the relationship between phenomenology and empirical sciences about conscious experience. Recently, it has been suggested by proponents of 'naturalized phenomenology' that phenomenology and cognitive sciences should exchange with each other. This proposal prompts us to abandon the 'puristic' conception of phenomenology, according to which phenomenology is independent from empirical sciences. I show that, though abandoning purism and exchanging with cognitive sciences is fruitful for phenomenology, proponents of naturalized phenomenology underemphasize an important feature (...) of phenomenology -- its autonomy of a certain kind. (shrink)