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Summary Which properties are we presented with in perception? In vision, do we consciously see just color, shape, illumination, and motion, or can we visually experience more complex properties such as kinds, causation, and personal identity? The main issue concerns how rich or impoverished perceptual contents are. This issue bears on the role of contents of perception in providing rational support for beliefs. If perceptual experiences suggest a range of propositions that are candidates for being justified by those experiences, then the  propositions in this range will be influenced by the contents perception can have. Some skeptical challenges may rely on the relative impoverishment of contents. If contents can be more complex, then we can ask how perceptual experience come to have such contents, and whether other mental states besides input systems traditionally categorized as part of perception can influence perceptual contents.  The issue also bears on the role perceptual experience in guiding action. Which actions an experience is poised to guide will depend on which properties that experience presents. It also raises the possibility that experiences could have imperative contents, rather than just indicative contents - a possibility explored in the philosophical literature on the pain.
Key works Peacocke 1992 introduced in passing some examples of complex contents. Siegel 2006 invigorated contemporary discussion issue by defending the view that contents of visual experience can be complex enough to include kind properties.Siegel 2010 makes the case that visual experiences can represent kinds, causal properties, certain perceptual relations, and personal identity, defends a method for deciding the question, and presents a framework for addressing the issue in terms of accuracy conditions.  Prinz 2002 and Prinz 2013 each make a case against the thesis that experiences can present high-level contents. Butterfill 2009 discusses the cases of visually experiencing causation.Church 2010 and McDowell 1985 discuss perception of moral properties.Bayne 2009 relates the issue to the experience of agency and to cognitive phenomenology. Logue 2013 questions whether the issue can be decided either way.
Introductions Siegel 2006; Millar 2000; Bayne 2009.
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  1. Perception and High-Level Properties.Berit Brogaard (ed.) - forthcoming - Philosophical Studies.
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  2. (Non-)Conceptual Representation of Meaning in Utterance Comprehension.Anders Nes - forthcoming - Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy.
    Many views of utterance comprehension agree that understanding an utterance involves knowing, believing, perceiving, or, anyhow, mentally representing the utterance to mean such-and-such. They include cognitivist as well as many perceptualist views; I give them the generic label ‘representationalist’. Representationalist views have been criticized for placing an undue metasemantic demand on utterance comprehension, viz. that speakers be able to represent meaning as meaning. Critics have adverted to young speakers, say about the age of three, who do comprehend many utterances but (...)
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  3. The Rational Roles of Experiences of Utterance Meanings.Berit Brogaard - 2024 - Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy 4.
    The perennial question of the nature of natural-language understanding has received renewed attention in recent years. Two kinds of natural-language understanding, in particular, have captivated the interest of philosophers: linguistic understanding and utterance understanding. While the literature is rife with discussions of linguistic understanding and utterance understanding, the question of how the two types of understanding explanatorily depend on each other has received relatively scant attention. Exceptions include the linguistic ability/know-how views of linguistic understanding proposed by Dean Pettit and Brendan (...)
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  4. Representation, Attention, and Perceptual Learning.Madeleine Ransom - 2024 - In Robert French & Berit Brogaard (eds.), The Roles of Representations in Visual Perception. Springer.
    What sorts of properties we perceive matters for understanding the nature of perception and the scope of perceptual justification. One way of arguing for the view that we can represent ‘high-level’ properties such as natural and artificial kinds is to appeal to Susanna Siegel’s method of phenomenal contrast, which contrasts the phenomenology of experts and novices. This argument can be strengthened by appealing to empirical work on perceptual learning and expertise that suggests the world really does look different to experts (...)
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  5. Bias in Perceptual Learning.Madeleine Ransom & Robert L. Goldstone - 2024 - WIREs Cognitive Science (online first):e1683.
    Perceptual learning is commonly understood as conferring some benefit to the learner, such as allowing for the extraction of more information from the environment. However, perceptual learning can be biased in several different ways, some of which do not appear to provide such a benefit. Here we outline a systematic framework for thinking about bias in perceptual learning and discuss how several cases fit into this framework. We argue these biases are compatible with an understanding in which perceptual learning is (...)
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  6. Does Property-Perception Entail the Content View?Keith A. Wilson - 2024 - Erkenntnis 89:841–860.
    Visual perception is widely taken to present properties such as redness, roundness, and so on. This in turn might be thought to give rise to accuracy conditions for experience, and so content, regardless of which metaphysical view of perception one endorses. An influential version of this argument—Susanna Siegel’s ’Argument from Appearing’—aims to establish the existence of content as common ground between representational and relational views of perception. This goes against proponents of ‘austere’ relationalism who deny that content plays a substantive (...)
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  7. On the Epistemic Significance of Perceptual Structure.Dominic Alford-Duguid - 2023 - Philosophical Quarterly 74 (1):1-23.
    Our awareness of the boundedness of the spatial sensory field—a paradigmatic structural feature of visual experience—possesses a distinctive epistemic role. Properly understood, this result undermines a widely assumed picture of how visual experience permits us to learn about the world. This paper defends an alternative picture in which visual experience provides at least two kinds of non-inferential justification for beliefs about the external world. Accommodating this justification in turn requires recognising a new way for visual experience to encode information about (...)
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  8. Compositionality in visual perception.Alon Hafri, E. J. Green & Chaz Firestone - 2023 - Behavioral and Brain Sciences 46:e277.
    Quilty-Dunn et al.'s wide-ranging defense of the Language of Thought Hypothesis (LoTH) argues that vision traffics in abstract, structured representational formats. We agree: Vision, like language, is compositional – just as words compose into phrases, many visual representations contain discrete constituents that combine in systematic ways. Here, we amass evidence extending this proposal, and explore its implications for how vision interfaces with the rest of the mind.
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  9. The role of imagination and recollection in the method of phenomenal contrast.Hamid Nourbakhshi - 2023 - Theoria 89 (5):710-733.
    The method of phenomenal contrast (in perception) invokes the phenomenal character of perceptual experience as a means to discover its contents. The method implicitly takes for granted that ‘what it is like’ to have a perceptual experience e is the same as ‘what it is like’ to imagine or recall it; accordingly, in its various proposed implementations, the method treats imaginations and/or recollections as interchangeable with real experiences. The method thus always contrasts a pair of experiences, at least one of (...)
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  10. Taking non‐conceptualism back to Dharmakīrti.Amit Chaturvedi - 2022 - European Journal of Philosophy 31 (1):3-29.
    Some recent surveys of the modern philosophical debate over the existence of non-conceptual perceptual content have concluded that the distinction between conceptual and non-conceptual representations is largely terminological. To remedy this terminological impasse, Robert Hanna and Monima Chadha claim that non-conceptualists must defend an essentialist view of non-conceptual content, according to which perceptual states have representational content whose structure and psychological function are necessarily distinct from that of conceptual states. Hanna and Chadha additionally suggest that non-conceptualists should go “back to (...)
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  11. (4 other versions)Beauty.Jennifer Anne McMahon - 2022 - In The Oxford Encyclopedia of Literary Theory. UK: Oxford University Press. pp. 86-101.
    Literary beauty was once understood as intertwining sensations and ideas, and thus as providing subjective and objective reasons for literary appreciation. However, as theory and philosophy developed, the inevitable claims and counterclaims led to the view that subjective experience was not a reliable guide to literary merit. Literary theory then replaced aesthetics as did philosophy’s focus on literary truth. Along with the demise of the relevance of sensations, literary form also took a back seat. This suggested to some that either (...)
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  12. Aesthetic perception and the puzzle of training.Madeleine Ransom - 2022 - Synthese 200 (2):1-25.
    While the view that we perceive aesthetic properties may seem intuitive, it has received little in the way of explicit defence. It also gives rise to a puzzle. The first strand of this puzzle is that we often cannot perceive aesthetic properties of artworks without training, yet much aesthetic training involves the acquisition of knowledge, such as when an artwork was made, and by whom. How, if at all, can this knowledge affect our perception of an artwork’s aesthetic properties? The (...)
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  13. Religiöse Erfahrung: Inhalt, epistemische Signifikanz und Expertise.Eva Schmidt - 2022 - In Martin Breul & Klaus Viertbauer (eds.), Der Glaube und seine Gründe: Beiträge zur Religiösen Epistemologie. pp. 11-30.
    This article investigates whether religious experience can be conceived in such a way that the perceiver's religious expertise (via cognitive penetration or perceptual learning) contributes to the justificatory power of the experience. It also considers what kind of content religious experience would have to have to be able to justify standard types of religious beliefs. It argues that, against first impressions, religious expertise cannot supplement perceptual justification. At the same time, to the extent that religious experience has singular contents or (...)
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  14. High-Level Perception and Multimodal Perception.Dan Cavedon-Taylor - 2021 - In Heather Logue & Louise Richardson (eds.), Purpose and Procedure in Philosophy of Perception. New York: Oxford University Press.
    What is the correct procedure for determining the contents of perception? Philosophers tackling this question increasingly rely on empirically-oriented procedures in order to reach an answer. I argue that this constitutes an improvement over the armchair methodology constitutive of phenomenal contrast cases, but that there is a crucial respect in which current empirical procedures remain limited: they are unimodal in nature, wrongly treating the senses as isolatable faculties. I thus have two aims: first, to motivate a reorientation of the admissible (...)
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  15. The Most Dangerous Error: Malebranche on the Experience of Causation.Colin Chamberlain - 2021 - Philosophers' Imprint 21 (10).
    Do the senses represent causation? Many commentators read Nicolas Malebranche as anticipating David Hume’s negative answer to this question. I disagree with this assessment. When a yellow billiard ball strikes a red billiard ball, Malebranche holds that we see the yellow ball as causing the red ball to move. Given Malebranche’s occasionalism, he insists that the visual experience of causal interaction is illusory. Nevertheless, Malebranche holds that the senses represent finite things as causally efficacious. This experience of creaturely causality explains (...)
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  16. Illusions of Affection: A Hyper-Illusory Account of Normative Valence.Mihailis Diamantis - 2021 - Journal of Consciousness Studies 28 (5-6):6-29.
    This article challenges the orthodox position that some smells are pleasantly fragrant and some tactile sensations are painful. It proposes that the affective components of our experiences are a kind of illusion. Under this alternative picture, experiences that seem to have positive or negative affect never actually do. Rather, the affective component is hyper-illusory, a second-order misrepresentation of the way things actually seem to us. While perceptual hyperillusions have elicited scepticism in other contexts, affective hyperillusions can withstand common critiques. Focusing (...)
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  17. Specialized Visual Experiences.Casey Landers - 2021 - Philosophical Quarterly 71 (1):74-98.
    Through extensive training, experts acquire specialized knowledge and abilities. In this paper, I argue that experts also acquire specialized visual experiences. Specifically, I articulate and defend the account that experts enjoy visual experiences that represent gestalt properties through perceptual learning. I survey an array of empirical studies on face perception and perceptual expertise that support this account. I also look at studies on perceptual adaptation that some might argue present a problem for my account. I show how the data are (...)
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  18. On experiencing moral properties.Indrek Reiland - 2021 - Synthese 198 (1):315-325.
    Do we perceptually experience moral properties like rightness and wrongness? For example, as in Gilbert Harman’s classic case, when we see a group of young hoodlums pour gasoline on a cat and ignite it, can we, in the same robust sense, see the action’s wrongness?. Many philosophers have recently discussed this question, argued for a positive answer and/or discussed its epistemological implications. This paper presents a new case for a negative answer by, first, getting much clearer on how such experience (...)
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  19. Material perception for philosophers.J. Brendan Ritchie, Vivian C. Paulun, Katherine R. Storrs & Roland W. Fleming - 2021 - Philosophy Compass 16 (10):e12777.
    Common everyday materials such as textiles, foodstuffs, soil or skin can have complex, mutable and varied appearances. Under typical viewing conditions, most observers can visually recognize materials effortlessly, and determine many of their properties without touching them. Visual material perception raises many fascinating questions for vision researchers, neuroscientists and philosophers, yet has received little attention compared to the perception of color or shape. Here we discuss some of the challenges that material perception raises and argue that further philosophical thought should (...)
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  20. The perception/cognition distinction.Sebastian Watzl, Kristoffer Sundberg & Anders Nes - 2021 - Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy 66 (2):165-195.
    ABSTRACT The difference between perception and cognition seems introspectively obvious in many cases. Perceiving and thinking have also been assigned quite different roles, in epistemology, in theories of reference and of mental content, in philosophy of psychology, and elsewhere. Yet what is the nature of the distinction? In what way, or ways, do perception and cognition differ? The paper reviews recent work on these questions. Four main respects in which perception and cognition have been held to differ are discussed. First, (...)
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  21. Molyneux’s Question and the Semantics of Seeing.Berit Brogaard, Bartek Chomanski & Dimitria E. Gatzia - 2020 - In Brian Glenney & Gabriele Ferretti (eds.), Molyneux’s Question and the History of Philosophy. New York, USA: Routledge. pp. 195-215.
    The aim of this chapter is to shed new light on the question of what newly sighted subjects are capable of seeing on the basis of previous experience with mind- independent, external objects and their properties through touch alone. This question is also known as "Molyneux’s question." Much of the empirically driven debate surrounding this question has been centered on the nature of the representational content of the subjects' visual experiences. It has generally been assumed that the meaning of "seeing" (...)
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  22. Consciousness and Knowledge.Berit Brogaard & Elijah Chudnoff - 2020 - In Uriah Kriegel (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of the Philosophy of Consciousness. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
    This chapter focuses on the relationship between consciousness and knowledge, and in particular on the role perceptual consciousness might play in justifying beliefs about the external world. We outline a version of phenomenal dogmatism according to which perceptual experiences immediately, prima facie justify certain select parts of their content, and do so in virtue of their having a distinctive phenomenology with respect to those contents. Along the way we take up various issues in connection with this core theme, including the (...)
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  23. The Perception of Virtue.Jennifer J. Matey - 2020 - In Dimitria Gatzia & Berit Brogaard (eds.), The Epistemology of Non-visual Perception. Oxford, U.K.: Oxford University Press.
    In this paper, I put forward an argument for the view that emotional responses of esteem to perceived demonstrations of good character represent the perceived character traits as valuable, and hence, as virtues. These esteeming experiences are analogous to perceptual representations in other modalities in their epistemic role as causing, providing content for and justifying beliefs regarding the value of the traits they represent. I also discuss the role that the perceiver’s own character plays in their ability to recognize and (...)
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  24. Another Look at Mode Intentionalism.Jonathan Mitchell - 2020 - Erkenntnis 87 (6):2519-2546.
    A central claim in contemporary philosophy of mind is that the phenomenal character of experience is entirely determined by its content. This paper considers an alternative called Mode Intentionalism. According to this view, phenomenal character outruns content because the intentional mode contributes to the phenomenal character of the experience. I assess a phenomenal contrast argument in support of this view, arguing that the cases appealed to allow for interpretations which do not require positing intentional modes as phenomenologically manifest aspects of (...)
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  25. Attentional Weighting in Perceptual Learning.Madeleine Ransom - 2020 - Journal of Consciousness Studies 27 (7-8):236-248.
    Perceptual learning is an enduring change in the perceptual system – and our resulting perceptions – due to practice or repeated exposure to a perceptual stimulus. It is involved in the acquisition of perceptual expertise: the ability to make rapid and reliable high-level categorizations of objects unavailable to novices. Attentional weighting is one process by which perceptual learning occurs. Advancing our understanding of this process is of particular importance for understanding what is learned in perceptual learning. Attentional weighting seems to (...)
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  26. Waltonian Perceptualism.Madeleine Ransom - 2020 - The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 78 (1):66-70.
    Kendall Walton’s project in ‘Categories of Art’ (1970) is to answer two questions. First, does the history of an artwork’s production determine its aesthetic properties? Second, how – if at all – should knowledge of the history of a work’s production influence our aesthetic judgments of its properties? While his answer to the first has been clearly understood, his answer to the second less so. Contrary to how many have interpreted Walton, such knowledge is not necessary for making aesthetic judgments; (...)
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  27. Expert Knowledge by Perception.Madeleine Ransom - 2020 - Philosophy 95 (3):309-335.
    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 (...)
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  28. Does empirical evidence support perceptual mindreading?Joulia Smortchkova - 2020 - Thought: A Journal of Philosophy 9 (4):298-306.
    According to perceptual accounts of mindreading, we can see, rather than cognize, other people's mental states. On one version of this approach, certain mental properties figure in the contents of our perceptual experiences. In a recent paper, Varga has appealed to empirical research to argue that intentions and emotions can indeed be seen, rather than cognized. In this paper, I argue that none of the evidence adduced to support the perceptual account of mindreading shows that we see mental properties, as (...)
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  29. Visual experience.Pär Sundström - 2020 - In Uriah Kriegel (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of the Philosophy of Consciousness. Oxford: Oxford University Press. pp. 39-65.
    A visual experience, as understood here, is a sensory event that is conscious, or like something to undergo. This chapter focuses on three issues concerning such experiences. The first issue is the so-called ‘transparency’ of experiences. The chapter distinguishes a number of different interpretations of the suggestion that visual experiences are ‘transparent’. It then discusses in what sense, if any, visual experiences are ‘transparent’, and what further conclusions one can draw from that. The second issue is which properties we are (...)
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  30. Which Moral Properties Are Eligible for Perceptual Awareness?Preston J. Werner - 2020 - Journal of Moral Philosophy 17 (3):290-319.
    Moral perception has made something of a comeback in recent work on moral epistemology. Many traditional objections to the view have been argued to fail upon closer inspection. But it remains an open question just how far moral perception might extend. In this paper, I provide the beginnings of an answer to this question by assessing the relationship between the metaphysical structure of different normative properties and a plausible constraint on which properties are eligible for perceptual awareness which I call (...)
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  31. Ensemble representation and the contents of visual experience.Tim Bayne & Tom McClelland - 2019 - Philosophical Studies 176 (3):733-753.
    The on-going debate over the ‘admissible contents of perceptual experience’ concerns the range of properties that human beings are directly acquainted with in perceptual experience. Regarding vision, it is relatively uncontroversial that the following properties can figure in the contents of visual experience: colour, shape, illumination, spatial relations, motion, and texture. The controversy begins when we ask whether any properties besides these figure in visual experience. We argue that ‘ensemble properties’ should be added to the list of visually admissible properties. (...)
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  32. Seeing and Hearing Meanings. A Non-Inferential Approach to Utterance Comprehension.Berit Brogaard - 2019 - In Anders Nes & Timothy Hoo Wai Chan (eds.), Inference and Consciousness. London: Routledge. pp. 99-124.
    In this paper I provide empirical and theoretical considerations in favor of a non-inferential view of speech comprehension. On the view defended, we typically comprehend speech by perceiving or grasping apparently conveyed meanings directly rather than by inferring them from, say, linguistic principles and perceived phonemes. “Speech” is here used in the broad sense to refer not only to verbal expression, but also written messages, including Braille, and conventional signs and symbols, like emojis, a stop sign or a swastika. Along (...)
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  33. Experience and Epistemic Structure: Can Cognitive Penetration Result in Epistemic Downgrade?Elijah Chudnoff - 2019 - In Anders Nes & Timothy Hoo Wai Chan (eds.), Inference and Consciousness. London: Routledge.
    Reflection on the possibility of cases in which experience is cognitively penetrated has suggested to many that an experience's etiology can reduce its capacity to provide prima facie justification for believing its content below a baseline. This is epistemic downgrade due to etiology, and its possibility is incompatible with phenomenal conservatism. I develop a view that explains the epistemic deficiency in certain possible cases of cognitive penetration but on which there is no epistemic downgrading below a baseline and on which (...)
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  34. Phenomenal contrast arguments: What they achieve.Marta Jorba & Agustín Vicente - 2019 - Mind and Language 35 (3):350-367.
    Phenomenal contrast arguments (PCAs) are normally employed as arguments showing that a certain mental feature contributes to (the phenomenal character of) experience, that certain contents are represented in experience and that kinds of sui generis phenomenologies such as cognitive phenomenology exist. In this paper we examine a neglected aspect of such arguments, i.e., the kind of mental episodes involved in them, and argue that this happens to be a crucial feature of the arguments. We use linguistic tools to determine the (...)
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  35. Visual and bodily sensational perception: an epistemic asymmetry.Daniel Munro - 2019 - Synthese 198 (4):3651-3674.
    This paper argues that, assuming some widely held views about how vision justifies beliefs, there is an important epistemic asymmetry between visual perception and the perception of bodily sensations. This asymmetry arises when we consider the epistemic significance of the distinction between low-level and high-level properties in perceptual experience. I argue that a distinction exists between low-level and high-level properties of bodily sensations which parallels that distinction in the objects of visual experience. I then survey evidence revealing systematic unreliability in (...)
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  36. Perceiving deviance.Eli Shupe - 2019 - Synthese 198 (8):6955-6967.
    I defend the claim that we have the capacity to perceptually represent objects and events in experience as deviating from an expectation, or, for short, as deviant. The rival hypothesis is that we may ascribe the property of deviance to a stimulus at a cognitive level, but that property is not a representational content of perceptual experience. I provide empirical reasons to think that, contrary to the rival hypothesis, we do perceptually represent deviance.
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  37. A New Method for Establishing high-level Visual Content: The Conflict cross-modal Approach.Daniel Tippens - 2019 - Erkenntnis 84 (1):169-191.
    Restrictivists hold that visual experience only represents low-level properties such as shape, spatial location, motion, color, etc. Expansionists contend that visual experience also represents high-level properties such as being a pine tree. I outline a new approach to support expansionism called the conflict cross-modal argument. What I call the conflict cross-modal effects occur when at least two perceptual systems disagree about some property belonging to a common stimulus, and this disagreement causes a change in the representational and phenomenal content of (...)
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  38. Thought about Properties: Why the Perceptual Case is Basic.Dominic Alford-Duguid - 2018 - Philosophical Quarterly 68 (271):221-242.
    This paper defends a version of the old empiricist claim that to think about unobservable physical properties a subject must be able to think perception-based thoughts about observable properties. The central argument builds upon foundations laid down by G. E. M. Anscombe and P. F. Strawson. It bridges the gap separating these foundations and the target claim by exploiting a neglected connection between thought about properties and our grasp of causation. This way of bridging the gap promises to introduce substantive (...)
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  39. In defense of hearing meanings.Berit Brogaard - 2018 - Synthese 195 (7):2967-2983.
    According to the inferential view of language comprehension, we hear a speaker’s utterance and infer what was said, drawing on our competence in the syntax and semantics of the language together with background information. On the alternative perceptual view, fluent speakers have a non-inferential capacity to perceive the content of speech. On this view, when we hear a speaker’s utterance, the experience confers some degree of justification on our beliefs about what was said in the absence of defeaters. So, in (...)
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  40. The real epistemic significance of perceptual learning.Berit Brogaard & Dimitria Gatzia - 2018 - Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy 61 (5-6):543-558.
    In "The Epistemic Significance of Perceptual Learning," Elijah Chudnoff (this issue) argues that cases from perceptual learning show that perception not only generates reasons for beliefs but also preserves those reasons over time in perceptual learning cases. In this paper, we dispute the idea that perceptual learning enables the preservation of perceptual reasons. We then argue for an alternative view, viz. the view that perceptual learning is epistemically significant insofar as it modifies our perceptual system in such a way as (...)
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  41. Naïve Realism and the Cognitive Penetrability of Perception.Dan Cavedon-Taylor - 2018 - Analytic Philosophy 59 (3):391-412.
    Perceptual experience has representational content. My argument for this claim is an inference to the best explanation. The explanandum is cognitive penetration. In cognitive penetration, perceptual experiences are either causally influenced, or else are partially constituted, by mental states that are representational, including: mental imagery, beliefs, concepts and memories. If perceptual experiences have representational content, then there is a background condition for cognitive penetration that renders the phenomenon prima facie intelligible. Naïve realist or purely relational accounts of perception leave cognitive (...)
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  42. Epistemic Elitism and Other Minds.Elijah Chudnoff - 2018 - Philosophy and Phenomenological Research (2):276-298.
    Experiences justify beliefs about our environment. Sometimes the justification is immediate: seeing a red light immediately justifies believing there is a red light. Other times the justification is mediate: seeing a red light justifies believing one should brake in a way that is mediated by background knowledge of traffic signals. How does this distinction map onto the distinction between what is and what isn't part of the content of experience? Epistemic egalitarians think that experiences immediately justify whatever is part of (...)
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  43. The Affective Experience of Aesthetic Properties.Kris Goffin - 2018 - Pacific Philosophical Quarterly 100 (1):283-300.
    It is widely agreed upon that aesthetic properties, such as grace, balance, and elegance, are perceived. I argue that aesthetic properties are experientially attributed to some non‐perceptible objects. For example, a mathematical proof can be experienced as elegant. In order to give a unified explanation of the experiential attribution of aesthetic properties to both perceptible and non‐perceptible objects, one has to reject the idea that aesthetic properties are perceived. I propose an alternative view: the affective account. I argue that the (...)
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  44. Visually Perceiving the Intentions of Others.Grace Helton - 2018 - Philosophical Quarterly 68 (271):243-264.
    I argue that we sometimes visually perceive the intentions of others. Just as we can see something as blue or as moving to the left, so too can we see someone as intending to evade detection or as aiming to traverse a physical obstacle. I consider the typical subject presented with the Heider and Simmel movie, a widely studied ‘animacy’ stimulus, and I argue that this subject mentally attributes proximal intentions to some of the objects in the movie. I further (...)
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  45. Nietzsche and Murdoch on the Moral Significance of Perceptual Experience.Paul Katsafanas - 2018 - European Journal of Philosophy 26 (1):525-545.
    : This paper examines a claim defended by an unlikely pair: Friedrich Nietzsche and Iris Murdoch. The claim is that perceptual experience itself—as distinct from perceptually based judgments and beliefs—can be morally significant. In particular, Nietzsche and Murdoch hold that two agents in the same circumstances attending to the same objects can have experiences with different contents, depending on the concepts that they possess and employ. Moreover, they maintain that this renders perception an object of moral concern. This paper explicates (...)
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  46. Do gestalt effects show that we perceive high-level aesthetic properties?Raamy Majeed - 2018 - Analysis 78 (3):440-450.
    Whether we perceive high-level properties is presently a source of controversy. A promising test case for whether we do is aesthetic perception. Aesthetic properties are distinct from low-level properties, like shape and colour. Moreover, some of them, e.g. being serene and being handsome, are properties we appear to perceive. Aesthetic perception also shares a similarity with gestalt effects, e.g. seeing-as, in that aesthetic properties, like gestalt phenomena, appear to ‘emerge’ from low-level properties. Gestalts effects, of course, are widely observed, which (...)
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  47. Perceptual Kinds as Supervening Sortals.Błażej Skrzypulec - 2018 - Pacific Philosophical Quarterly 100 (1):174-201.
    It seems intuitive that in situations of perceptual recognition additional properties are represented. While much has been written about the significance of such properties for perceptual phenomenology, it is still unclear (a) what is the relation between recognition-based properties and lower-level perceptual properties, and (b) whether it is justified to classify them as kind-properties. Relying on results in cognitive psychology, I argue that recognition-based properties (I) are irreducible, high-level properties, (II) are kind properties by virtue of being sortal properties, but (...)
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  48. Rich perceptual content and aesthetic properties.Dustin Stokes - 2018 - In Anna Bergqvist & Robert Cowan (eds.), Evaluative Perception. Oxford, United Kingdom: Oxford University Press.
    Both common sense and dominant traditions in art criticism and philosophical aesthetics have it that aesthetic features or properties are perceived. However, there is a cast of reasons to be sceptical of the thesis. This paper defends the thesis—that aesthetic properties are sometimes represented in perceptual experience—against one of those sceptical opponents. That opponent maintains that perception represents only low-level properties, and since all theorists agree that aesthetic properties are not low-level properties, perception does not represent aesthetic properties. I offer (...)
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  49. Doubts about Moral Perception.Pekka Väyrynen - 2018 - In Anna Bergqvist & Robert Cowan (eds.), Evaluative Perception. Oxford, United Kingdom: Oxford University Press. pp. 109-28.
    This paper defends doubts about the existence of genuine moral perception, understood as the claim that at least some moral properties figure in the contents of perceptual experience. Standard examples of moral perception are better explained as transitions in thought whose degree of psychological immediacy varies with how readily non-moral perceptual inputs, jointly with the subject's background moral beliefs, training, and habituation, trigger the kinds of phenomenological responses that moral agents are normally disposed to have when they represent things as (...)
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  50. An epistemic argument for liberalism about perceptual content.Preston Werner - 2018 - Philosophical Psychology 32 (1):143-159.
    This paper concerns the question of which properties figure in the contents of perceptual experience. According to conservatives, only low-level properties figure in the contents of perceptual experience. Liberals, on the other hand, claim that high-level properties, such as natural kind properties, artifacts, and even moral properties, can figure in the contents of perceptual experience. I defend a novel argument in favor of liberalism, the Epistemic Argument, which hinges on two crucial claims. The first is that many perceptual experiences of (...)
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