An overview of the epistemology of perception, covering the nature of justification, immediate justification, the relationship between the metaphysics of perceptual experience and its rational role, the rational role of attention, and cognitive penetrability. The published version will contain a smaller bibliography, due to space constraints in the volume.

This is a much shorter version of our entry on the Epistemology of Perception, which will be published in the Oxford Handbook for the Philosophy of Perception in 2013. The longer version has far more references in it, whereas this version is pared down to the essentials.

The present work is a translation of The Perception Chapter of Jewel of Reflection on the Truth, a foundational text by the great fourteenth-century Indian logician Gangesa Upadhyaya. The authors' introduction and running commentary to the translation provide essential theoretical and historical background, contextualization, analysis, and comparison of Nyaya and Western traditions. Includes a detailed glossary and index. Published by American Institute of Buddhist Studies (AIBS).

We ordinarily take it as obvious that we acquire knowledge of our world on the basis of sensory perception, and that such knowledge plays a central cognitive and practical role in our lives. Upon reflection, however, it is far from obvious what perception involves and how exactly it contributes to our knowledge. Indeed, skeptical arguments have led some to question whether we have any knowledge, or even rational or justified belief, regarding the world outside our minds. -/- Investigating (...) the nature and scope of our perceptual knowledge and perceptually justified belief, A Critical Introduction to the Epistemology of Perception provides an accessible and engaging introduction to a flourishing area of philosophy. Before introducing and evaluating the main theories in the epistemology of perception, Ali Hasan sets the stage with a discussion of skepticism, realism, and idealism in early modern philosophy, theories of perceptual experience (sense-datum theory, adverbialism, intentionalism, and metaphysical disjunctivism), and central controversies in general epistemology. Hasan then surveys the main theories in the contemporary debate, including coherentism, abductivism, phenomenal conservatism or dogmatism, reliabilism, and epistemological disjunctivism, presenting the motivations and primary objections to each. Hasan also shows how to avoid confusing metaphysical issues with epistemological ones, and identifies interesting connections between the epistemology and metaphysics of perception. -/- For students in epistemology or the philosophy of perception looking to better understand the central questions, concepts, and debates shaping contemporary epistemology, A Critical Introduction to the Epistemology of Perception is essential reading. (shrink)

If our experiences are cognitively penetrable, they can be influenced by our antecedent expectations, beliefs, or other cognitive states. Theorists such as Churchland, Fodor, Macpherson, and Siegel have debated whether and how our cognitive states might influence our perceptual experiences, as well as how any such influences might affect the ability of our experiences to justify our beliefs about the external world. This article surveys views about the nature of cognitive penetration, the epistemological consequences of denying cognitive penetration, and the (...) epistemological consequences of affirming cognitive penetration. (shrink)

This is a collection of papers on the epistemology of perception, very broadly conceived. It contains cutting-edge work by some of the most important contributors in the field.

The article reviews the book " Epistemology of Perception : Gaṅgeśa's Tattvacintāmaṇi, Jewel of Reflection on the Truth : The Perception Chapter Transliterated Text, Translation, and Philosophical Commentary," by Stephen H. Phillips and N. S. Ramanuja Tatacharya.

Hintikka has criticized psychologists for "hasty epistemologizing," which he takes to be an unwarranted transfer of ideas from psychology (a discipline dealing with questions of fact) into epistemology (a discipline dealing with questions of method and theory). Hamlyn argues, following Hintikka, that Gibson's theory of perception is an example of such an inappropriate transfer, especially insofar as Hamlyn feels Gibson does not answer several important questions. However, Gibson's theory does answer the relevant questions, albeit in a new and (...) radical way, which suggests that the alleged distinction between psychology and epistemology is suspect. In fact, contrary to Hintikka and Hamlyn's claims, Gibson's theory of perception appears to be a valuable source of epistemological as well as psychological ideas. (shrink)

This is an anthology of new papers by top researchers in epistemology and philosophy of mind focused on the epistemology of non-visual perception. The focus of the volume is to highlight the many different domains in which non-visual sensory experience, broadly construed to include multimodal experience associated with emotional and agential perception, plays a rational role, for instance, as an immediate justifier of belief. -/- .

Ordinary language treats reports of perceptual episodes as canonical justifications of beliefs. The challenge for empirically oriented epistemologists is to explain one's right to give credence to one's perceptual judgments. Traditionally, many empiricists have assumed that an epistemic subject is entitled only to some primitive judgments, so that judgments about kinds, modal properties, and dispositions are parasitic upon and less certain than those about the particulars given in perception. This paper contributes to an understanding of C.S. Peirce's alternative perceptual (...) epistemology. According to Peirce's model, perceptual experience must be conceived as including previously encountered content and... (shrink)

Plantinga famously argues against evidentialism that belief in God can be properly basic. But the epistemology of cognitive faculties such as perception and memory which produce psychologically non-inferential beliefs shows that various inferentially justified theoretical beliefs are epistemically prior to our memory and perceptual beliefs, preventing the latter from being epistemically basic. Plantinga's analogy between the sensus divinitatis and these cognitive faculties suggests that the deliverances of the sensus divinitatis cannot be properly basic either. Objections by and on (...) behalf of Plantinga to this argument are considered. (shrink)

An introductory overview of the main issues in the epistemology of perception.

The present paper introduces a simple framework for modeling the relationship between environmental states, perceptual states, and action. The framework represents situations where an agent’s perceptual state forms the basis for choosing an action, and what action the agent performs determines the agent’s payoff, as a function of the environmental conditions in which the action is performed. The framework is used as the basis for a simulation study of the sorts of correspondence between perceptual and environmental states that are important (...) for successful navigation of the world. Some of the results are surprising and conflict with long held views about the kind of perception-to-environment correspondence that is important for knowledge of the world. The results also raise doubts concerning the view that our perceptual states provide a basis for knowledge of the real structure of the external world. (shrink)

This paper begins with a Davidsonian puzzle in the epistemology of perception and introduces two solutions to that puzzle: the Truth-Maker View (TMV) and the Content Model. The paper goes on to elaborate (TMV), elements of which can be found in the work of Kalderon (2011) and Brewer (2011). The central tenant of (TMV) is the claim that one's reason for one's perceptual belief should, in all cases, be identified with some item one perceives which makes the proposition (...) believed true. I defend an argument against (TMV) which appeals to (a) the claim that the reason for which one believes should always to be identified with the explanans of the rationalising explanation to which one's belief is subject and (b) the claim that the explanantia of rationalising explanations must be identified with truths. I finish by replying to two objections to the argument. (shrink)

This is a translation of the chapter on perception of Kumarilabhatta's magnum opus, the Slokavarttika, one of the central texts of the Hindu response to the criticism of the logical-epistemological school of Buddhist thought. In an extensive commentary, the author explains the course of the argument from verse to verse and alludes to other theories of classical Indian philosophy and other technical matters. Notes to the translation and commentary go further into the historical and philosophical background of Kumarila's ideas. (...) The book provides an introduction to the history and the development of Indian epistemology, a synopsis of Kumarila's work and an analysis of its argument. (shrink)

Some argue that Candrakīrti is committed to rejecting all theories of perception in virtue of the rejection of the foundationalisms of the Nyāya and the Pramāṇika. Others argue that Candrakīrti endorses the Nyāya theory of perception. In this paper, I will propose an alternative non-foundationalist theory of perception for Candrakīriti. I will show that Candrakrti’s works provide us sufficient evidence to defend a typical Prāsagika’s account of perception that, I argue, complements his core non-foundationalist ontology.

The historically most central epistemological issue concerning perception, to which this article will be almost entirely devoted, is whether and how beliefs about physical objects and about the physical world generally can be justified or warranted on the basis of sensory or perceptual experience—where it is internalist justification, roughly having a reason to think that the belief in question is true, that is mainly in question (see the entry justification, epistemic: internalist vs. externalist conceptions of). This issue, commonly referred (...) to as “the problem of the external world,” divides into two closely related sub-issues, which correspond to the first two main sections below. The first of these issues has to do with the nature of sensory experience and its relation to the physical world; it is typically (though as we shall see not altogether perspicuously) formulated as the question of what are the immediate objects of awareness in sensory experience or, in a variant but essentially equivalent terminology, of what is given in such experience. Perhaps the most historically standard, though not currently the most popular answer to this question has been that it is sense-data (private, non-physical entities that actually have the immediately experienced sensory qualities) that are the immediate objects of awareness or that are given. The second issue has to do with the way in which beliefs about the physical world are justified on the basis of such sensory experience. If it is concluded that physical objects are not themselves given, the two main answers to this question are representationalism or indirect realism (the view that the immediate objects of experience represent or depict physical objects in a way that allows one to infer justifiably from such experience to the existence of the corresponding “external” objects) and phenomenalism (the view.. (shrink)

Perception is our key to the world. It plays at least three different roles in our lives. It justifies beliefs and provides us with knowledge of our environment. It brings about conscious mental states. It converts informational input, such as light and sound waves, into representations of invariant features in our environment. Corresponding to these three roles, there are at least three fundamental questions that have motivated the study of perception. How does perception justify beliefs and yield (...) knowledge of our environment? How does perception bring about conscious mental states? How does a perceptual system accomplish the feat of converting varying informational input into mental representations of invariant features in our environment? -/- This book presents a unified account of the phenomenological and epistemological role of perception that is informed by empirical research. So it develops an account of perception that provides an answer to the first two questions, while being sensitive to scientific accounts that address the third question. The key idea is that perception is constituted by employing perceptual capacities - for example the capacity to discriminate instances of red from instances of blue. Perceptual content, consciousness, and evidence are each analyzed in terms of this basic property of perception. Employing perceptual capacities constitutes phenomenal character as well as perceptual content. The primacy of employing perceptual capacities in perception over their derivative employment in hallucination and illusion grounds the epistemic force of perceptual experience. In this way, the book provides a unified account of perceptual content, consciousness, and evidence. (shrink)

Metaphysical and epistemological commitments seem to determine the course of research in the field of logic as well as its theoretical interpretation. What we take the objects of logical investigation to be determines our views on how they are to be known, and our view of the possible types of knowledge in turn places restrictions on what kinds of things those objects could be. Perhaps it is true that logical studies can be pursued to great lengths without indulging in general (...) declarations about the nature of reality or of human knowledge. But to say this is very far from admitting the possibility of “logic without ontology.” The thoughtful beginning student in logic quickly wants to know what it is he or she is really studying and what, precisely, it has to do with the real worlds. The slightest philosophical stimulation will lead him or her, further, to ask about the evidence supporting the various sorts of claims made as the course progresses, and about the methodology of logic from a scientific point of view. Rarely is any answer given to such questions, much less a reasonable and well elaborated one. Questions of this type are usually discouraged and avoided by text books and instructors, and there may even be some suggestion that to ask them evidences confusion and stupidity. But when they are pressed it turns out that logic as a field of knowledge and inquiry remains in chaos at its philosophical foundations. I mean by this that the leading investigators cannot agree—indeed, they disagree in dimensions categorial—concerning what the subject of logical knowledge is, and concerning the modes of logical knowledge. (shrink)

This is a translation of the chapter on perception by Kumarilabhatta's magnum opus, the Slokavarttika , which is one of the central texts of the Hindu response to the criticism of the logical-epistemological school of Buddhist thought. It is crucial for understanding the debates between Hindus and Buddhists about metaphysical, epistemological and linguistic questions during the classical period. In an extensive commentary, the author explains the course of the argument from verse to verse and alludes to other theories of (...) classical Indian philosophy and numerous other technical matters. Notes to the translation and commentary go further into the historical and philosophical background of Kumarila's ideas. The book provides an introduction to the history and the development of Indian epistemology, a synopsis of Kumarila's work and an analysis of its argument. It is a valuable contribution to the field of Indian philosophical studies. (shrink)

Does perception provide us with direct and unmediated access to the world around us? The so-called 'argument from illusion ' has traditionally been supposed to show otherwise: from the subject's point of view, perceptual illusions are often indistinguishable from veridical perceptions; hence, perceptual experience, as such, cannot provide us with knowledge of the world, but only with knowledge of how things appear to us. Disjunctive accounts of perceptual experience, first proposed by John McDowell and Paul Snowdon in the early (...) 1980s and at the centre of current debates in the philosophy of perception, have been proposed to block this argument. According to the traditional view, a case of perception and a subjectively indistinguishable illusion or hallucination can exemplify what is fundamentally the same kind of mental state even though they differ in how they relate to the non-mental environment. In contrast, according to the disjunctive account, the concept of perceptual experience should be seen as essentially disjunctive, encompassing two distinct kinds of mental states, namely genuinely world-involving perceptions and mere appearances. This book presents seven recent essays on disjunctivism first published in two special issues of Philosophical Explorations: An International Journal for the Philosophy of Mind and Action. (shrink)

In this dissertation, I provide an interpretation and defense of Merleau-Ponty's thesis of the primacy of perception, namely, the thesis that all knowledge is founded in perceptual experience. I take as an interpretative and argumentative key Merleau-Ponty's phenomenological conception of motivation. Whereas epistemology has traditionally accepted a dichotomy between reason and natural causality, I show that this dichotomy is not exhaustive of the forms of epistemic grounding. There is a third type of grounding, the one characteristic of the (...) grounding relations found in perception: motivation. I argue that introducing motivation as a form of epistemic grounding allows us to see how Merleau-Ponty's thesis of the primacy of perception avoids both rationalism and empiricism. Whereas empiricism has argued that all the content of our knowledge is grounded in causal interactions between the world and our senses, and rationalism has held that experience does not suffice as a reason for knowledge, thinking of the relation between experience and knowledge in terms of motivation accommodates the best insights of rationalism and empiricism. Motivation allows us to see how knowledge can be grounded in experience without the content of knowledge being reducible to that of experience. (shrink)

This chapter considers how Liberal Naturalism interacts with the main problems and theories in the philosophy of perception. After briefly summarising the traditional philosophical problems of perception and outlining the standard philosophical theories of perceptual experience, it discusses whether a Liberal Naturalist outlook should incline one towards or away from any of these standard theories. Particular attention is paid to the work of John McDowell and Hilary Putnam, two of the most prominent Liberal Naturalists, whose work was also (...) very influential in the philosophy of perception. There is also a section focusing on colour, an especially important topic not only for debates about perceptual experience but also for debates concerning how our ‘manifest image’ of the natural world relates to our best theories in the physical sciences. (shrink)

Suppose our visual experiences immediately justify some of our beliefs about the external world — that is, justify them in a way that does not rely on our having independent reason to hold any background belief. A key question now arises: Which of our beliefs about the external world can be immediately justified by experiences? I address this question in epistemology by doing some philosophy of mind. In particular, I evaluate the following proposal: if your experience e immediately justifies (...) you in believing that p , then (i) e has the content that p , and (ii) e ’s having the content that p is fixed by what it is like to have e . I start by clarifying this proposal and surveying the case in its favour. I then argue against the proposal and develop an alternative. The discussion shows what role visual consciousness plays and does not play in the justification of perceptual beliefs. (shrink)

In 1958 I set down some thoughts that arose from an attempt to consider epistemological problems on the assumptions that The biology of the human nervous system is relevant to epistemology and The human nervous system, like every other object of biological investigation, is a product of evolution by natural selection. These thoughts lay more or less neglected until they were brought stunningly to mind by Professor George Gaylord Simpson's [1] recent paper on “Biology and the Nature of Science”. (...) In that paper Professor Simpson writes: “Still another consideration seems to me the most interesting of all, and yet I have never seen it clearly expressed elsewhere. It is, in a sense a validation of the ‘animal faith’ given by Russell … as sole basis for assuming that we really can obtain knowledge of the outer world. The fact is that man originated by a slow process of evolution guided by natural selection. At every stage in this long progression our ancestors necessarily had adaptive reactions to the world around them. As behavior and sense organs became more complex, perception of sensations from those organs obviously maintained a realistic relationship to the environment. To put it crudely but graphically, the monkey who did not have a realistic perception of the tree branch he jumped for was soon a dead monkey-and therefore did not become one of our ancestors. Our perceptions do give true, even though not complete, representations of the outer world because that was and is a biological necessity.”. (shrink)

So-called basic self-knowledge (ordinary knowledge of one's present states of mind) can be seen as both 'baseless' and privileged. The spontaneous self-beliefs we have when we avow our states of mind do not appear to be formed on any particular epistemic basis (whether intro-or extro-spective). Nonetheless, on some views, these self-beliefs constitute instances of (privileged) knowledge. We are here interested in views on which true mental self-beliefs have internalist epistemic warrant that false ones lack. Such views are committed to a (...) form of disjunctivism about basic self-knowledge. We begin by presenting an influential disjunctivist view about perceptual knowledge (Pritchard 2008, 2012, and elsewhere) and articulate a problem for it. We then consider two versions of disjunctivism about basic self-knowledge – one 'constitutivist', the other 'neo-expressivist' – and argue that both can avoid an analogue of this problem for self-knowledge. However, we give reasons for preferring the disjunctivism yielded by neo-expressivism. We conclude by considering briefly whether an acceptable disjunctivism about mental self-beliefs can point the way toward a sensible disjunctivism about perceptual beliefs. (shrink)

This book explores the epistemic side of oppression, focusing on racial and sexual oppression and their interconnections. It elucidates how social insensitivities and imposed silences prevent members of different groups from interacting epistemically in fruitful ways--from listening to each other, learning from each other, and mutually enriching each other's perspectives. Medina's epistemology of resistance offers a contextualist theory of our complicity with epistemic injustices and a social connection model of shared responsibility for improving epistemic conditions of participation in social (...) practices. Through the articulation of a new interactionism and polyphonic contextualism, the book develops a sustained argument about the role of the imagination in mediating social perceptions and interactions. It concludes that only through the cultivation of practices of resistance can we develop a social imagination that can help us become sensitive to the suffering of excluded and stigmatized subjects. Drawing on Feminist Standpoint Theory and Critical Race Theory, this book makes contributions to social epistemology and to recent discussions of testimonial and hermeneutical injustice, epistemic responsibility, counter-performativity, and solidarity in the fight against racism and sexism. (shrink)

This paper deals with Ludwik Fleck’s theory of thought styles and Michael Polanyi’s theory of tacit knowledge. Though both concepts have been very influential for science studies in general, and both have been subject to numerous interpretations, their accounts have, somewhat surprisingly, hardly been comparatively analyzed. Both Fleck and Polanyi relied on the physiology and psychology of the senses in order to show that scientific knowledge follows less the path of logical principles than the path of accepting or rejecting specific (...) conventions, where these may be psychologically or sociologically grounded. It is my aim to show that similarities and differences between Fleck and Polanyi are to be seen in the specific historical and political context in which they worked. Both authors, I shall argue, emphasized the relevance of perception in close connection to their respective understanding of science, freedom, and democracy. (shrink)

In this paper I argue for a theory of perception distinct both from classical sense-datum theories and from intentionalist theories, that is theories according to which one perceives external objects by dint of a relation with a propositional content. The alternative I propose completely rejects any representational element in perception. When one sees that an object has a property, the situation or state of affairs of its having that property is one's perception, so that the object and (...) property are literally part of one's mind. The most obvious objection to this view is that it embodies a rampant form of idealism. It is argued to the contrary, via consideration of the metaphysics of situations, that the theory is entirely consistent with a robustly realist view of the world. (shrink)

This article responds to two arguments against ‘Epistemic Perceptualism’, the view that emotional experiences, as involving a perception of value, can constitute reasons for evaluative belief. It first provides a basic account of emotional experience, and then introduces concepts relevant to the epistemology of emotional experience, such as the nature of a reason for belief, non-inferentiality, and prima facie vs. conclusive reasons, which allow for the clarification of Epistemic Perceptualism in terms of the Perceptual Justificatory View. It then (...) challenges two arguments which purport to show that emotional experience is not a source of reasons for evaluative belief. The first argument claims that because normative why-questions are always appropriate in the case of emotions, then emotions can never be conclusive reasons for corresponding evaluative beliefs. The second purports to show that appeal to emotional experience as a source of reasons for evaluative beliefs renders emotions problematically self-justifying, and since emotions cannot be self-justifying, they cannot provide any sort of reason for corresponding evaluative beliefs. This article responds to these arguments, and in doing so shows there is still much to be learned about the epistemology of emotional experience by drawing analogies with perceptual experience. (shrink)

This work argues for a Direct Realist view of the perception of public objects. It argues against the need for special intermediary sensory objects, or sense impressions, requiring only stages in a physical process beginning with events at the surface of a physical object, the resultant stimulation of one's sense organs, and finally the excitation of the sensory portions of one's brain.

In this paper I argue for a version of the Total Evidence view according to which the rational response to disagreement depends upon one's total evidence. I argue that perceptual evidence of a certain kind is significantly weightier than many other types of evidence, including testimonial. Furthermore, what is generally called "The Uniqueness Thesis" is actually a conflation of two distinct principles that I dub "Evidential Uniqueness" and "Rationality Uniqueness." The former principle is likely true but the latter almost certainly (...) false. Seeing why the Rationality Uniqueness fails opens the door to seeing how mutual reasonable disagreement is possible even among those who share the same evidence. (shrink)

An essential part of particularism as a systematic option in philosophical ethics is the structure of perception. In this paper, we defend perception as a central feature against the meta-ethical and meta-epistemological prejudices of rationalism.The insurmountable border between perception and justification, which is central to rationalist ethics, rests on three premises that are rejected by particularism: ethical knowledge is not exclusively inferential or discursive, ethical reflection is not solely deductive reasoning, and the bases of justified actions do (...) not have to be universal laws.Against rationalist ethics, we defend perception as a central and primary source of ethical knowledge, as a way of non-discursive reflection and as a genuine form of ethical justification. Ethical experience is not only reason but the complex responsiveness of persons that develops biographically as a result of situations in social and culturally contingent contexts. (shrink)

The following article discovers current trends of contemporary epistemology, related to epistemic agent and his/her activities. A number of issues raised here describe internal experience of the agent, such as (in)voluntary nature of belief formation, trust in one’s faculties of perception, correspondence of formed beliefs to evidence, demarcation between purely epistemic and pragmatic rationality. Another part of the issues is related to external experiences of the agent. The most crucial among them are: blameworthiness of the agent’s belief system, (...) limited intake of testimonial knowledge as a result of social bias; epistemic disagreement and “epistemic peers” as the sources of knowledge or additional pressure from the environment. The author considers virtue epistemology as a new way of performing normativity. (shrink)

This edited volume on the philosophy of perception is based on the papers presented at the Wittgenstein Symposium 2017 (Kirchberg, Austria). It covers a wide range of recent topics in the philosophy of perception, from realism and objectivity in perception, intentionality and content, the distinction between perception and cognition, the cognitive penetrability of perception to the epistemology of perception. The volume contains papers by Tyler Burge, Howard Robinson, Olivier Massin, Michael Schmitz, Michael Tye, (...) Marcello Fiocco, Guillaume Frechette, Sofia Miguens, Uriah Kriegel, Pierre Jacob, Mark Kalderon, Berit Brogaard, Athanassios Raftopoulos, Ophelia Deroy, Charles Travis, Johannes Roessler, Philipp Berghofer, Harald Wiltsche, Frederique de Vignemont, Romana Schuler, Ulrich Arnswald, David Stern and Hans Sluga. (shrink)