ABSTRACT Cognitive penetrability refers to the possibility that perceptual experiences are influenced by our beliefs, expectations, emotions, or other personal-level mental states. In this paper, I focus on the epistemological implication of cognitive penetration, and examine how, exactly, aetiologies matter to the justificatory power of perceptual experiences. I examine a prominent theory, according to which some cognitively penetrated perceptual experiences are like conclusions of bad inferences. Whereas one version of this theory is psychologically implausible, the other version has sceptical consequences. (...) In the second half of the paper, I suggest an alternative theory, drawing on recent empirical research on imagining-perception interaction and the epistemology of imagining. (shrink)

According to phenomenal conservatism or dogmatism, perceptual experiences can give us immediate justification for beliefs about the external world in virtue of having a distinctive kind of phenomenal character—namely phenomenal force. I present three cases to show that phenomenal force is neither pervasive among nor exclusive to perceptual experiences. The plausibility of such cases calls out for explanation. I argue that contrary to a long-held assumption, phenomenal force is a separate, non-perceptual state generated by some metacognitive mechanisms that monitor one’s (...) first-order mental processes and states. This new account advances our understanding of the nature of phenomenal force. (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)

In this paper we claim, first, that there are high-level visual experiences of grouping properties, i.e., properties that an array of elements we see can have to be organised in a certain way. Second, we argue that there are auditory experiences of groupings that share certain important properties with visual experiences of groupings, thereby being perceptual and high-level as well. Third, these results enable us to understand the nature and structure of our meaning experiences. We claim that, although meaning experiences (...) depend on the auditory experiences we discuss, they are not perceptual, for they lack one of the features that make those auditory experiences perceptual; namely, being holistically attended to. (shrink)

After introducing the new field of cultural evolution, we review a growing body of empirical evidence suggesting that culture shapes what people attend to, perceive and remember as well as how they think, feel and reason. Focusing on perception, spatial navigation, mentalizing, thinking styles, reasoning (epistemic norms) and language, we discuss not only important variation in these domains, but emphasize that most researchers (including philosophers) and research participants are psychologically peculiar within a global and historical context. This rising tide of (...) evidence recommends caution in relying on one’s intuitions or even in generalizing from reliable psychological findings to the species, Homo sapiens. Our evolutionary approach suggests that humans have evolved a suite of reliably developing cognitive abilities that adapt our minds, information-processing abilities and emotions ontogenetically to the diverse culturally-constructed worlds we confront. (shrink)

In this paper, I want to claim that, in conformity with overall intuitions, there are some aesthetic properties that are perceivable. For they are high-level properties that are not only grasped immediately, but also attended to holistically—just like the grouping properties they depend on and that are responsible for the Gestalt effects or switches through which they are grasped. Yet, unlike such grouping properties, they are holistically attended to in a disinterested modality, where objects and their properties are regarded for (...) their own sake. (shrink)

: In Cognitive penetrability and the epistemic role of perception Athanasios Raftopoulos provides a new defense of the thesis that, unlike early vision, late vision is cognitively penetrable, in accordance with a new definition of cognitive penetrability that is centered on the ideas of direct influence of cognition upon perception and of the epistemic role of perception. This new definition allows him to maintain that late vision is a genuinely perceptive stage of the perceptual process. In this paper, I try (...) to discuss not only whether this new definition has plausible consequences that allow only late vision to be cognitively penetrable but also whether the claim that late vision is genuinely perceptual allows it to have the kind of hybrid content, half nonconceptual and half conceptual, that Raftopoulos now wants to ascribe to it. Keywords: Cognitive Penetrability, weak, strong, and superstrong; Early and Late Vision; Nonconceptual Content Penetralibità cognitiva e visione secondaria Riassunto: In Cognitive penetrability and the epistemic role of perception Athanasios Raftopoulos dà una nuova difesa della tesi secondo cui, a differenza della visione primaria, la visione secondaria è penetrabile cognitivamente, secondo una nuova definizione della nozione di penetrabilità cognitiva centrata sulle idee di influenza diretta della cognizione sulla percezione e di ruolo epistemico della percezione. Questa nuova definizione gli consente di sostenere che la visione secondaria è una fase genuinamente percettiva del processo percettivo. Nell’articolo, provo a discutere non solo se la nuova definizione ha conseguenze plausibili che consentono solo alla visione secondaria di essere penetrabile cognitivamente, ma anche se l’idea che la visione secondaria sia genuinamente percettiva consente ad essa di avere il contenuto ibrido, in parte nonconcettuale e in parte concettuale, che Raftopoulos vuole ora ascriverle. Parole chiave: Penetrabilità cognitiva debole, forte e superforte; Visione primaria e secondaria; Contenuto nonconcettuale. (shrink)

Many artists, art critics, and poets suggest that an aesthetic appreciation of artworks may modify our perception of the world, including quotidian things and scenes. I call this Art-to-World, AtW. Focusing on visual artworks, in this paper I articulate an empirically-informed account of AtW that is based on content related views of aesthetic experience, and on Goodman’s and Elgin’s concept of exemplification. An aesthetic encounter with artworks demands paying attention to its aesthetic, expressive, or design properties that realize its purpose. (...) Attention to these properties make percipients better able to spot them in other entities and scenes as well. The upshot is that an aesthetic commerce with artworks enlarges the scope of what we are able to see and has therefore momentous epistemic consequences. (shrink)

Many artists, art critics, and poets suggest that an aesthetic appreciation of artworks may modify our perception of the world, including quotidian things and scenes. I call this Art-to-World, AtW. Focusing on visual artworks, in this paper I articulate an empirically-informed account of AtW that is based on content-related views of aesthetic experience, and on Goodman’s and Elgin’s concept of exemplification. An aesthetic encounter with artworks demands paying attention to its aesthetic, expressive, or design properties that realize its purpose. Attention (...) to these properties make percipients better able to spot them in other entities and scenes as well. The upshot is that an aesthetic commerce with artworks enlarges the scope of what we are able to see and has therefore momentous epistemic consequences. (shrink)

Expertise is a cognitive achievement that clearly involves experience and learning, and often requires explicit, time-consuming training specific to the relevant domain. It is also intuitive that this kind of achievement is, in a rich sense, genuinely perceptual. Many experts—be they radiologists, bird watchers, or fingerprint examiners—are better perceivers in the domain(s) of their expertise. The goal of this paper is to motivate three related claims, by substantial appeal to recent empirical research on perceptual expertise: Perceptual expertise is genuinely perceptual (...) and genuinely cognitive, and this phenomenon reveals how we can become epistemically better perceivers. These claims are defended against sceptical opponents that deny significant top-down or cognitive effects on perception, and opponents who maintain that any such effects on perception are epistemically pernicious. (shrink)

Does the scope of beliefs that people can form on the basis of perception remain fixed, or can it be amplified with learning? The answer to this question is important for our understanding of why and when we ought to trust experts, and also for assessing the plausibility of epistemic foundationalism. The empirical study of perceptual expertise suggests that experts can indeed enrich their perceptual experiences through learning. Yet this does not settle the epistemic status of their beliefs. One might (...) hold that the background knowledge of experts is the cause of their enriched perceptual experience – what is known as cognitive permeation – and so their subsequent beliefs are only mediately justified because they are epistemically dependent on this background knowledge. I argue against this view. Perceptual expertise is not the result of cognitive permeation but is rather the result of perceptual learning, and perceptual learning does not involve cognition in a way that entails cognitive permeation. Perceptual expertise thus provides a means of widening the scope of the immediately justified beliefs that experts can form. (shrink)

Perceptual processes differ from cognitive, this paper argues, in functioning to be causally controlled by proximal stimuli, and being modular, at least in a modest sense that excludes their being isotropic in Jerry Fodor's sense. This claim agrees with such theorists as Jacob Beck and Ben Phillips that a function of stimulus-control is needed for perceptual status. In support of this necessity claim, I argue, inter alia, that E.J. Green's recent architectural account misclassifies processes deploying knowledge of grammar as perceptual. (...) _Pace_ Beck and Phillips, however, I argue a function of stimulus-control is insufficient for perceptual as opposed to cognitive status. One consideration in favour of such insufficiency, noted but (I argue) not convincingly rebutted by these theorists, concerns perpetually grounded demonstrative thought. Two other considerations trade on the fact that a function of stimulus-control can arise not from blind nature but intentional design or social institutions, where so-functioning processes may but need not be perceptual. I offer two cases where such processes are cognitive, viz. skilful play-by-play announcing of ongoing events, and voluntary visualizing of ongoing events under the guidance of apt play-by-play announcements, dubbed announcement-driven visualizing (ADV). The cognitive status of these three diverse phenomena cannot be explained by an absence of a perception-like representational format or content (for ADV has such) or by a presence of personal-level mental states causally mediating between stimuli and outputs (for perception has such). A bettter explanation invokes, I argue, the non-modular character of the generating process. (shrink)

I aim to show that perception depends counterfactually on the action we want to perform. Perception is not all-purpose: what we want to do does influence what we see. After clarifying how this claim is different from the one at stake in the cognitive penetrability debate and what counterfactual dependence means in my claim, I will give a two-step argument: one’s perceptual attention depends counterfactually on one’s intention to perform an action and one’s perceptual processing depends counterfactually on one’s perceptual (...) attention. If we put these claims together, what we get is that one’s perceptual processing depends counterfactually on one’s intention to perform an action. (shrink)

: In this article I discuss Athanasios Raftopoulos’ view on the epistemic role of attention and early vision, as outlined in his most recent book. I start by examining his view on attention, which he illustrates during his discussion of structured cognitive contents and their interactions with perceptual contents, as well as during his discussion of selection effects. According to Raftopoulos, attention not only operates pre-perceptual input selection, but also influences perceptual processing during late vision biasing the sampling of the (...) iconic image for perceptual hypotheses-testing. Afterwards, I critically assess Raftopoulos’ conclusions about the epistemic role of early vision, which are based on his view about the role of attention. From this assessment, I raise a potential concern for his proposal in the form of a new problem of selection: the interesting epistemic consequences of cognitive penetrability either follow or do not follow from selection effects, depending on how these selection effects are construed, but regardless of the stage of visual processing in which they take place. Keywords: Cognitive Penetration; Attention; Constructivism; Selection Effects; Perceptual Epistemology Il ruolo epistemico della visione primaria: penetrazione cognitiva e selezione attentiva Riassunto: In questo articolo discuto la proposta di Athanasios Raftopoulos riguardo al ruolo epistemico dell’attenzione e della early vision, contenuta nella sua recente monografia. La mia discussione comincia da un esame delle sue idee riguardo all’attenzione, che illustra sia durante la sua discussione dei contenuti cognitivi strutturati e delle loro interazioni con i contenuti percettivi, sia durante la sua discussione degli effetti di selezione. Secondo Raftopoulos, l’attenzione non opera solamente una selezione pre-percettiva degli input, ma influenza anche i processi percettivi di late vision orientando il processo di valutazione delle ipotesi percettive sulla base dell’immagine iconica. Successivamente, valuto criticamente le conclusioni di Raftopoulos’ riguardo al ruolo epistemico di early vision, fondate sulla sua concezione del ruolo dell’attenzione. Da questo esame, evidenzio una potenziale criticità nella sua proposta costituita da un nuovo problema della selezione: le conseguenze epistemiche della penetrabilità cognitiva seguono o non seguono dai processi di selezione, a seconda di come tali effetti sono concepiti, ma indipendentemente dal livello nella serie dei processi visivi nel quale si verificano. Parole chiave: Penetrabilità cognitiva; Attenzione; Costruttivismo; Effetti di Selezione; Epistemologia percettiva. (shrink)

There are many more philosophical discussions of emotions than of moods. One key reason for this is that emotions are said to have a robust connection to beliefs while moods are said to lack that connection. I argue that this view, though prevalent, is incorrect. It is motivated by examples that are not representative of how moods typically change. Indeed, once we examine the notion of belief-responsiveness and look at a wider range of examples, we can see that moods are (...) belief-responsive and can be evaluated for appropriateness along a number of dimensions. Moreover, for all cases in which moods seem to be disconnected from beliefs, I argue that there are analogous cases for emotions. In other words, the connection between moods and beliefs on the one hand and the connection between emotions and beliefs on the other are, in fact, very similar. This means that not only should we take belief-responsiveness to be a core feature of moods but also potentially pursue a unified theory for why moods and emotions would have this connection to belief. (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)

How tight is the conceptual connection between imagination and perception? A number of philosophers, from the early moderns to present-day predictive processing theorists, tie the knot as tightly as they can, claiming that states of the imagination, i.e. mental imagery, are a proper subset of perceptual experience. This paper labels such a view ‘perceptualism’ about the imagination and supplies new arguments against it. The arguments are based on high-level perceptual content and, distinctly, cognitive penetration. The paper also defuses a recent, (...) influential argument for perceptualism based on the ‘discovery’ that visual perception and mental imagery share a significant neural substrate: circuitry in V1, the brain’s primary visual cortex. Current neuropsychology is shown to be equivocal at best on this matter. While experiments conducted on healthy, neurotypical subjects indicate substantial neural overlap, there is extensive clinical evidence of dissociations between imagery and perception in the brain, most notably in the case of aphantasia. (shrink)

Semantic perceptualism is the thesis that meaning experiences are forms of perceptual experiences. According to its defenders, this view is motivated not only by philosophical considerations, but also by empirical evidence. In the present article, I shall provide the first comprehensive and critical review of the empirical evidence in support of semantic perceptualism, including a detailed analysis of the relevant neuroanatomical data. The conclusions of my analysis are largely pessimistic. I believe that the relevant behavioral, cognitive, and patient data are (...) suggestive but hardly conclusive. Moreover, neuroanatomical data speak strongly against semantic perceptualism. (shrink)

There are some complex experiences, such as the experiences that allow us to understand linguistic expressions and pictures respectively, which seem to be very similar. For they are stratified experiences in which, on top of grasping certain low-level properties, one also grasps some high-level semantic-like properties. Yet first of all, those similarities notwithstanding, a phenomenologically-based reflection shows that such experiences are different. For a meaning experience has a high-level fold, in which one grasps the relevant expression’s meaning, which is not (...) perceptual, but is only based on a low-level perceptual fold that merely grasps that expression in its acoustically relevant properties. While a pictorial experience, a seeing-in experience, has two folds, the configurational and the recognitional fold, in which one respectively grasps the physical basis of a picture, its vehicle, and what the picture presents, its subject, that are both perceptual, insofar as they are intimately connected. For unlike a meaning experience, in a seeing-in experience one can perceptually read off the picture’s subject from the picture’s vehicle. Moreover, this phenomenological difference is neurologically implemented. For not only the cerebral areas that respectively implement such experiences are different, at least as far as the access to those experiences’ respective high-level content is concerned. As is shown by the fact that one can selectively be impaired in the area respectively implementing the meaning vs. the seeing-in experience without losing one’s pictorial vs. semantic competence respectively. But also, unlike meaning experiences, the area implementing the seeing-in experiential folds is perceptual as a whole. For not only a picture’s subject can be accessed earlier than an expression’s meaning, but also the neural underpinnings of such folds are located in the perceptual areas of the brain. (shrink)

On the basis of a new criterion for a property to be perceivable–a property is perceivable iff it is not only given immediately and non-volitionally, but also grasped via a holistic form of attention–in this paper we will claim that not only facial properties, but other high-order properties located in a hierarchy of high-order properties, notably gender and racial properties, are perceivable as well. Such claims will be both theoretically and empirically justified.

Proponents of cognitive penetration often argue for the thesis on the basis of combined intuitions about categorical perception and perceptual learning. The claim is that beliefs penetrate perceptions in the course of learning to perceive categories. I argue that this "diachronic" penetration thesis is false. In order to substantiate a robust notion of penetration, the beliefs that enable learning must describe the particular ability that subjects learn. However, they cannot do so, since in order to help with learning they must (...) instruct learners to employ previously existing abilities. I argue that a better approach recognizes that we can have sophisticated causal precursors to perceptual learning, but that the learning process itself must operate outside of cognitive influence. (shrink)

Some stories generate in us a peculiar experience of intense narrative engagement. This common experience, which we call narrative immersion, has been the object of a vast literature in psychology and other disciplines. Philosophers, however, have only recently engaged with this topic and the tendency has been to explain it by postulating specific kinds of mental states. We propose a different approach, explaining narrative immersion by means of a particular distribution of attention over the content of ordinary mental states. First, (...) we provide a characterization of narrative immersion based on studies by psychologists and other theorists. Then, we discuss alternative views and develop our own proposal. We articulate how attention works as we engage with the narrative, and how the adequate distribution of attention over the mental states involved in understanding the storyworld can offer the resources to explain the characteristic features of narrative immersion. Unlike alternative proposals, ours avoids the need to postulate controversial mental states. (shrink)

Albert Newen and Petra Vetter argue that neurophysiological considerations and psychophysical studies provide striking evidence for cognitive penetration. This commentary focuses mainly on the neurophysiological considerations, which have thus far remained largely absent in the philosophical debate concerning cognitive penetration, and on the cognitive penetration of perceptual experiences, which is the form of cognitive penetration philosophers have debated about the most. It is argued that Newen and Vetter's evidence for cognitive penetration is unpersuasive because they do not sufficiently scrutinize the (...) details of the empirical studies they make use of-the details of the empirical studies are crucial also when the studies are used in philosophical debates. The previous does not mean that cognitive penetration could not occur. Quite the contrary, details of the feedback connections to the visual perceptual module and one of the candidates presented by Newen and Vetter suggest that cognitive penetration can occur in rare cases. (shrink)

Are we really sure to correctly know what do we feel in front ofan artwork and to correctly verbalize it? How do we know what weappreciate and why we appreciate it? This paper deals with the problem ofintrospective opacity in aesthetics (that is, the unreliability of self-knowledge) in the light of traditional philosophical issues, but also of recentpsychological insights, according to which there are many instances ofmisleading intuition about one’s own mental processes, affective states orpreferences. Usually, it is assumed that (...) aesthetic statements are intuitivelyclear and self-evident. However, a long tradition in psychological researchhas called the idea of introspective transparency and the infallibility of self-knowledge into question (Wilson 2002). This topic has only recently beenrecognized as an interesting problem in aesthetics (Melchionne 2011, Irvin2014). In this paper I will discuss the main shortcomings in introspective self-knowledge, mostly referring to psychological findings. As a consequence, thedevelopment of a folk psychological account of aesthetic experience could beneeded, investigating how people develop intuitive and naïve theories abouttheir aesthetic reactions, taste, and feelings, distinct from a more objectiveand empirically grounded account of how judgment and preferences areactually formed in ourselves, even on a neurobiological level. However, itwill also be argued that bypassing the individual judgment and his expressedchoices in favor of allegedly more objective levels of description would notbe an innocent step to take. (shrink)

In the September 2020 edition of Perception, Alan Gilchrist published an editorial entitled “The Integrity of Vision” (Gilchrist, 2020). In it, Gilchrist critiques motivated perception research. His main points are as follows: (1) Motivated perception is compromised by experimental demand: Results do not actually show motivated perception but instead reflect subjects’ desires to comply with inferred predictions. (2) Motivated perception studies use designs that make predictions obvious to subjects. These transparent designs conspire with experimental demand to yield confirmatory but compromised (...) results. (3) Motivated perception research lacks guiding theory and cannot explain what appear to be contradictory results. (4) Motivated perception presents an unsupportable assault upon the impermeability of perception. The present commentary responds to these four assertions. (shrink)