Cognitive Penetrability of 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...

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 ...

Editorial: Pre-cueing Effects on Perception and Cognitive Penetrability

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 of Perception in the Age of Prediction: Predictive Systems are Penetrable Systems

The goal of perceptual systems is to allow organisms to adaptively respond to ecologically relevant stimuli. Because all perceptual inputs are ambiguous, perception needs to rely on prior knowledge accumulated over evolutionary and developmental time to turn sensory energy into information useful for guiding behavior. It remains controversial whether the guidance of perception extends to cognit...