Cognitive Penetrability and Ethical Perception

Cognitive Penetrability and Ethical Perception Revised Version

Cognitive Penetration: cognitive penetration is possible iff it is possible for two subjects to have experiences which differ in content and/or phenomenal character, where this difference is the result of a causal process that traces more or less directly to states in the subjects’ cognitive system, and where we hold fixed the the perceptual stimuli, the condition of the subjects’ sensory organ...

Editorial: Pre-cueing Effects on Perception and Cognitive Penetrability

Circularity, Reliability, and the Cognitive Penetrability of Perception

Several years ago, Jerry Fodor (1984) argued that the modularity of the perceptual systems was good news for epistemology. In particular, on the assumption that perceptual systems are modular in his (1983) sense of the term, they are informationally encapsulated, which means that their operation is not sensitive to the beliefs, desires, and such of the larger organism. This would allay worries ...

Linguistic Intuitions and Cognitive Penetrability

Metalinguistic intuitions play a very large evidential role in both linguistics and philosophy. Linguists think that these intuitions are products of underlying linguistic competence. I call this view “the voice of competence” (“VoC”). Althoughmany philosophers seem to think that metalinguistic intuitions are a priori many may implicitly hold the more scientifically respectable VoC. According t...

Cognitive Penetrability, Rationality and Restricted Simulation(1)

In a series of recent papers, Jane Heal (1994, 1995a, 1995b, 1996a, 1996b) has developed her own quite distinctive version of simulation theory and offered a detailed critique of the arguments against simulation theory that we and our collaborators presented in earlier papers. Heal's theory is clearly set out and carefully defended, and her critique of our arguments is constructive and well inf...