Abstract

The thesis investigates several different ways of understanding the indispensability of perception for the possibility of thought and belief. I argue that we must be perceivers in order to have beliefs about the empirical world; but this is neither because our primitive concepts must be formed from experience, nor because experience allows our beliefs to be "answerable" to the facts they purportedly represent. Instead, perception is indispensable in virtue of its links with other capacities that are themselves essential for having thoughts and beliefs. I argue for this view by attempting to imagine a subject who perceives nothing, but who is nevertheless caused to have many true beliefs through some non-perceptual mechanism. I show that we are no longer able to think of this subject as having any beliefs at all. Without perception, she would be incapable of identifying anyone in the world as herself, so she could not have any "egocentric" beliefs about where things are in relation to her body. But with no egocentric beliefs, she could not be understood as performing intentional actions, and so could not be understood as having beliefs that help explain anything she does. I conclude that without perception, a subject's mental states would at best be reliable indicators of the events that typically cause them; but they would be unrecognizable as beliefs about those events