Summary |
Consider
an infant's visual experience of a piano: it sees the piano, but it doesn't see
it as a piano. To put it another way, the infant doesn't see that it is a piano. The
distinction between these two ways of seeing an object expresses the purported
difference between epistemic and non-epistemic perception. Most philosophers accept the idea
that some perceptual experiences (or aspects of them) are non-epistemic, to the
extent that we perceive objects without noticing or recognizing certain of
their properties. Defenders of the distinction between epistemic and
non-epistemic perception emphasize the idea that epistemic perception involves
perceiving an object as having certain properties, such that one's experience
can provide the basis for beliefs and knowledge of the object. For those
who hold that perception is only epistemically relevant to the extent that in
involves entertaining propositions, a commitment to epistemic perception
entails that perceptual experience is a propositional attitude. Others who believe that
perceptual experience of an object does not require entertaining any propositions (either
because experience is non-conceptual, or perhaps entirely non-representational),
need not reject the idea of epistemic perception, however. What is needed on
such views is an account of which properties of a perceived object are
presented in a perceiver’s experience, which might be articulated in terms of which
properties are attended to or available for reasoning and short-term memory. |