The distinction between perception and cognition frames countless debates in philosophy and cognitive science. But what, if anything, does this distinction actually amount to? In this introductory article, we summarize recent work on this question. We first briefly consider the possibility that a perception-cognition border should be eliminated from our scientific ontology, and then introduce and critically examine five positive approaches to marking a perception–cognition border, framed in terms of phenomenology, revisability, modularity, format, and stimulus-dependence.

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)

This paper investigates a capacity I call actuality-oriented imagining, by which we use sensory imagination in a way that's directed at representing the actual world. I argue that this kind of imagining is distinct from other, similar mental states in virtue of its distinctive content determination and success conditions. Actuality-oriented imagining is thus a distinctive cognitive capacity in its own right. Thinking about this capacity reveals that we should resist an intuitive tendency to think of the imagination’s primary function or (...) default mode as representing the non-actual or the fictional. Instead, the imagination is a cognitive faculty that often puts us in touch with the way things are in reality. (shrink)

A venerable view holds that a border between perception and cognition is built into our cognitive architecture and that this imposes limits on the way information can flow between them. While the deliverances of perception are freely available for use in reasoning and inference, there are strict constraints on information flow in the opposite direction. Despite its plausibility, this approach to the perception-cognition border has faced criticism in recent years. This article develops an updated version of the architectural approach, which (...) I call the dimension restriction hypothesis (DRH). According to DRH, perceptual processes are constrained to compute over a bounded range of dimensions, while cognitive processes are not. This view allows that perception is cognitively penetrable, but places strict limits on the varieties of penetration that can occur. The article argues that DRH enjoys both theoretical and empirical support, and also defends the view against several objections. (shrink)

There is compelling evidence that pain experience is influenced by cognitive states. We explore one specific form of such influence, namely placebo analgesia, and examine its relevance for the cognitive penetration debate in philosophy of mind. We single out as important a form of influence on experience that we termradical cognitive penetration,and argue that some cases of placebo analgesia constitute compelling instances of this phenomenon. Still, we urge caution in extrapolating from this to broader conclusions about cognitive penetration in perceptual (...) experience. Instead, we suggest that the cognitive penetration of pain raises distinctive psychological, epistemological, and ethical issues. (shrink)

Advancing a radically enactive account of cognition, we provide arguments in favour of the possibility that cultural factors permeate rather than penetrate cognition, such that cognition extensively and transactionally incorporates cultural factors rather than there being any question of cultural factors having to break into the restricted confines of cognition. The paper reviews the limitations of two classical cognitivist, modularist accounts of cognition and a revisionary, new order variant of cognitivism – a Predictive Processing account of Cognition, or PPC. It (...) argues that the cognitivist interpretation of PPC is conservatively and problematically attached to the idea of inner models and stored knowledge. In abandoning that way of understanding PPC, it offers a radically enactive alternative account of how cultural factors matter to cognition – one that abandons all vestiges of the idea that cultural factors might contentfully communicate with basic forms of cognition. In place of that idea, the possibility that culture permeates cognition is promoted. (shrink)

Among psychiatric conditions, delusions have received significant attention in the philosophical literature. This is partly due to the fact that many delusions are bizarre, and their contents interesting in and of themselves. But the disproportionate attention is also due to the notion that by studying what happens when perception, cognition, and belief go wrong, we can better understand what happens when these go right. In this paper, I attend to delusions for the second reason—by evaluating the epistemology of delusions, we (...) can better understand the epistemology of ordinary belief. More specifically, given recent advancements in our understanding of how delusions are formed, the epistemology of delusions motivates a proper functionalist account of the justification of belief. Proper functionalist accounts of the justification of belief hold that whether a belief is justified is partly determined by whether the system that produces the belief is functioning properly. Whatever pathology is responsible for delusion formation, restoring it to its proper function resolves the epistemic condition, an effect which motivates proper functionalism. (shrink)

Experience, it is widely agreed, constrains our thinking and is also thoroughly theory-laden. But how can it constrain our thinking while depending on what it purports to constrain? To address this issue, I revisit and carefully analyze the account of observation provided by Norwood Russell Hanson, who introduced the term ‘theory-ladenness of observation’ in the first place. I show that Hanson’s account provides an original and coherent response to the initial question and argue that, if suitably developed, his account provides (...) a distinctive, powerful, and attractive alternative to relationalist and standard representationalist conceptions of experience. (shrink)

Is action-guiding vision cognitively penetrable? More specifically, is the visual processing that guides our goal-directed actions sensitive to semantic information from cognitive states? This paper critically examines a recent family of arguments whose aim is to challenge a widespread and influential view in philosophy and cognitive science: the view that action-guiding vision is cognitively impenetrable. I argue, in response, that while there may very well be top–down causal influences on action-guiding vision, they should not be taken to be an instance (...) of cognitive penetration. Assuming otherwise is to assign a computational role to the influencing states that they cannot perform. Although questions about cognitive penetrability are ultimately empirical, the issues addressed in this paper are largely philosophical. The discussion here highlights an important set of considerations that help better understand the relations between cognition, vision, and action. (shrink)

This paper considers the cognitive penetrability of our experiences of the durations of everyday events. I defend an account of subjective duration based in contemporary psychological and neurobiological research. I show its philosophical adequacy by demonstrating its utility in explain-ing the phenomenology of duration experiences. I then consider whether cognitive penetrability is a problem for these experiences. I argue that, to the contrary, the problem presupposes a relationship between perception and belief that duration perceptions and beliefs do not exhibit. In-stead, (...) the assignment of epistemic features to particular processing stages appears to answer to pragmatic needs, not psychological facts. (shrink)

Perceptual experience has representational content. My argument for this claim is an inference to the best explanation. The explanandum is cognitive penetration. In cognitive penetration, perceptual experiences are either causally influenced, or else are partially constituted, by mental states that are representational, including: mental imagery, beliefs, concepts and memories. If perceptual experiences have representational content, then there is a background condition for cognitive penetration that renders the phenomenon prima facie intelligible. Naïve realist or purely relational accounts of perception leave cognitive (...) penetration less well-explained, even when formulated with so-called ‘standpoints’ or ‘third relata.’. (shrink)

Modular approaches to the architecture of the mind claim that some mental mechanisms, such as sensory input processes, operate in special-purpose subsystems that are functionally independent from the rest of the mind. This assumption of modularity seems to be in tension with recent claims that the mind has a predictive architecture. Predictive approaches propose that both sensory processing and higher-level processing are part of the same Bayesian information-processing hierarchy, with no clear boundary between perception and cognition. Furthermore, it is not (...) clear how any part of the predictive architecture could be functionally independent, given that each level of the hierarchy is influenced by the level above. Both the assumption of continuity across the predictive architecture and the seeming non-isolability of parts of the predictive architecture seem to be at odds with the modular approach. I explore and ultimately reject the predictive approach’s apparent commitments to continuity and non-isolation. I argue that predictive architectures can be modular architectures, and that we should in fact expect predictive architectures to exhibit some form of modularity. (shrink)

Siegel recently distinguishes between seven possible ways in which our perceptual access to social information can be biased by flawed practice of either individuals or social structures, two of which, namely attention and cognitive penetration, imply that it is the content of perception, as opposed to that of judgments, that is biased. Both attention and cognitive penetration, however, rely on cognitive states imposing top-down influences on perceptual states. As such, perceptual bias resulting from them is to a large extent merely (...) a derivation of cognitive bias. In this paper, I propose another way in which our perception can be biased, namely, as the result of faulty assumptions made by the visual system. Furthermore, I argue that in contrast to cognitive penetration and attentional direction, perceptual bias arising in this way is fundamentally perceptual and does not depend on inputs from one’s cognitive system. This sort of perceptual bias, if it exists, would have important implications for how we conceptualize social bias and pose special challenges to traditional interventions designed to counteract bias. (shrink)

Pains are subject to obvious, well-documented, and striking top-down influences. This is in stark contrast to visual perception, where the debate over cognitive penetrability tends to revolve around fairly subtle experimental effects. Several authors have recently taken up the question of whether top-down effects on pain count as cognitive penetrability, and what that might show us about traditional debates. I review some of the known mechanisms for top-down modulation of pain, and suggest that it reveals an issue with a relatively (...) neglected part of the cognitive penetrability literature. Much of the debate inherits Pylyshyn’s stark contrast between transducers and cognition proper. His distinction grew out of his running fight with Gibson, and is far too strong to be defensible. I suggest that we might therefore view top-down influences on pain as a species of transducer calibration. This provides a novel but principled way to distinguish between several varieties of top-down effect according to their architectural features. (shrink)

A series of experiments reveal that people are more likely to mistake black men as holding a gun than white men (Payne 2001; Payne et al., 2002; Correll et al., 2002). These data suggest that real-world cases of racially biased object-identification occur, such as in cases of police killings of unarmed black men. The aim of this paper is to correctly model what goes on in people’s heads, leading them to misidentify objects in these instances. One possibility is that people (...) are making the wrong judgment about the object in question; perception might proceed as it should, but the viewer may think that they’re seeing a gun due to a cognitive error. Instead, I present a model which construes the error as a result of a visual illusion: even though the object is a hand tool, erroneous visual processing causes them to have the illusory experience of a gun. (shrink)

Affective realism, roughly the hypothesis that you “perceive what you feel”, has recently been put forward as a novel, empirically-backed explanation of police shooting errors. The affective states involved in policing in high-pressure situations result in police officers literally seeing guns even when none are present. The aim of this paper is to (i) unpack the implications of this explanation for assessing police culpability and (ii) determine whether we should take these implications at face value. I argue that while affective (...) realism stands to diminish, if not eliminate, the moral and legal responsibilities of officers who have made shooting errors, the empirical data itself does not directly support such a radical rethink of police culpability. (shrink)

Predictive processing accounts of perception assume that perception does not work in a purely bottom-up fashion but also uses acquired knowledge to make top-down predictions about the incoming sensory signals. This provides a challenge for foundationalist accounts of perception according to which perceptual beliefs are epistemically basic, that is, epistemically independent from other beliefs. If prior beliefs rationally influence which perceptual beliefs we come to accept, then foundationalism about perception appears untenable. I review several ways in which foundationalism might be (...) reconciled with PP from both an internalist and externalist perspective, and argue that an externalist foundationalism provides the best match with PP. (shrink)

In this paper, we consider how certain longstanding philosophical questions about mental representation may be answered on the assumption that cognitive and perceptual systems implement hierarchical generative models, such as those discussed within the prediction error minimization framework. We build on existing treatments of representation via structural resemblance, such as those in Gładziejewski :559–582, 2016) and Gładziejewski and Miłkowski, to argue for a representationalist interpretation of the PEM framework. We further motivate the proposed approach to content by arguing that it (...) is consistent with approaches implicit in theories of unsupervised learning in neural networks. In the course of this discussion, we argue that the structural representation proposal, properly understood, has more in common with functional-role than with causal/informational or teleosemantic theories. In the remainder of the paper, we describe the PEM framework for approximate Bayesian inference in some detail, and discuss how structural representations might arise within the proposed Bayesian hierarchies. After explicating the notion of variational inference, we define a subjectively accessible measure of misrepresentation for hierarchical Bayesian networks by appeal to the Kullbach–Leibler divergence between posterior generative and approximate recognition densities, and discuss a related measure of objective misrepresentation in terms of correspondence with the facts. (shrink)

Recent research in cognitive and computational neuroscience portrays the neocortex as a hierarchically structured prediction machine. Several theorists have drawn on this research to challenge the traditional distinction between perception and cognition – specifically, to challenge the very idea that perception and cognition constitute useful kinds from the perspective of cognitive neuroscience. In place of this traditional taxonomy, such theorists advocate a unified inferential hierarchy subject to substantial bi-directional message passing. I outline the nature of this challenge and then raise (...) two objections to the cognitive architecture it proposes as a replacement: first, standard ways of characterising this inferential hierarchy are in tension with the representational reach of conceptual thought; second, there is compelling evidence that commonsense reasoning is structured around highly domain-specific intuitive theories that are difficult to situate within a single hierarchy. (shrink)

Phenomenology presents itself not as an explanation or interpretation of phenomena but as a description of them. Describing experience means making its internal structure explicit, which, in phenomenology, is an eidetic structure. The method of phenomenological explication or clarification is, however, by no means univocal. This paper aims to isolate the two fundamental ways in which phenomenological description is achieved. The first refers to a phenomenology of manifestation, based on the concept of determination or datum, which is realized in the (...) phenomenological-static approach and, in particular, on the concept of extensive quality. The second refers to a phenomenology of disposition, based on the concept of tension or force – which is realized in the genetic approach as well as in Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology of perception – and, in particular on the concept of intensive or forceful quality. The analysis of the difference between the two approaches allows us to introduce the crucial distinction between digital and analogue dimensions within phenomenology. (shrink)

The problem of the cognitive penetrability of perception pertains to whether perceptual processing may be impacted by higher-order cognitive processes. It may be understood in a twofold sense: 1) whether what a perceptual system computes may be altered in a way that is semantically coherent to one’s cognitive states; 2) whether perceptual experience may be influenced by cognitive processes. It has been argued that the cognitive penetrability problem is not scientifically tractable since we have no direct access to other persons’ (...) subjective experiences and, therefore, we have to rely on their reports, which are mediated by higher-order processes (e.g., judgments). In this paper, I analyze the scope of methods harnessed in contemporary work on the penetrability of perception, focusing particularly on methods from experimental psychology and neuroscience. Among them, I indicate the most promising techniques and paradigms, as well as those that are inadequate to successfully tackling the problem. I also discuss experimental results which unequivocally suggest direct influences on perception which have not been addressed to date by supporters of the view that perception is impenetrable. I also describe the predictive processing theory of cognition, focusing on how it contributes to our understanding of cognitive penetrability, and discuss scientific results validating the theory. In conclusion, converging empirical evidence seems to suggest that perception is cognitively penetrable and we seem to be at the dawn of the ultimate solution of the problem. (shrink)