Perceptual Belief and Nonexperiential Looks

How things look (or sound, taste, smell, etc.) plays two important roles in the epistemology of perception. 1 First, our perceptual beliefs are episte-mically justified, at least in part, in virtue of how things look. Second, whether a given belief is a perceptual belief, as opposed to, say, an infer-ential belief, is also at least partly a matter of how things look. Together, these yield an epistemically significant sense of 'looks'. A standard view is that ''how things look'', in this epistemically significant sense, is a matter of one's present perceptual phenomenology, of what nondoxastic experiential state one is in. On this standard view, these experiential states (a) determine which of my beliefs are perceptual beliefs and (b) are centrally involved in justifying these beliefs. As an alternative to this view, I want to argue that there is a nonexper-iential sense of 'look' as well and that this sense of 'look' is at least as epistemically significant a sense as any experiential sense. That is, the connection between what an agent is justified in believing and how things look to her in this nonexperiential sense is more direct than the connection between what she is justified in believing and how things look in any experiential sense. In addition, this same nonexperiential sense of looks can be used to solve the classic problem of distinguishing perception from inference. I won't actually be arguing against the standard view; the goal is mainly to articulate an alternative. If, however, the epistemologically interesting sense of 'looks' is the one that is most directly connected to justified belief and/or to perceptual belief, then the epistemologically interesting sense is not an experiential sense. The existence of nonexperiential 'looks', 'sounds', and the like serves to undercut an important source of motivation for the standard view. So although I won't try to show that the standard view is false, I will show that there is considerably less reason to believe it than is usually assumed.