Athanassios Raftopoulos - Cognitive Penetrability and the Epistemic Role of Perception

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In this book, I aim, first, to analyze the concept of cognitive penetrability (CP). To do so, I discuss the epistemic role of perception in grounding perceptual beliefs and the importance of this role for the discussions about CP. I reframe the problem of CP so as to take into account the repercussions of the cognitive effects on perception for the epistemic role of perception. I contend that cognitive effects on perception constitute cases of CP only if (a) they affect perceptual processing in a direct manner, and (b) they affect the epistemic role of perception. I argue that early vision is not CP because it is neither affected directly by cognition, nor do any cognitive effects affect its epistemic role.

Second, I examine in detail the processes of late vision and their role in visual perception. This is important because although it is widely argued that early vision is CI, there is, in addition to early vision, a later perceptual stage of visual processing, namely, late vision. Unlike early vision, late vision is not much discussed in the literature. Questions that arise in that respect concern the processes and role of late vision processes, and the ways these processes interrelate (if at all) with cognition. I argue that late vision is CP because it is affected directly by cognitive states and its epistemic role is affected by cognition as well. If cognition affects late vision, an explanation must be given as to how cognitive states could affect perceptual processes in view of the fact that perceptual states have iconic content, whereas cognitive states have symbolic/conceptual content; given this significant difference in representational format, how could cognition interact with perception?

There are several differences that conjunctively differentiate this book from other accounts about the CP of perception and its epistemic impact. First, in the literature, visual perception is usually treated invariably as a unified process and the discussions pertain to whether visual perception is CP or not, despite Pylyshyns (1999) early warnings that visual perception as a whole should be distinguished from early vision and that the claim about CI concerns early vision and not visual perception as a whole. In this book, I divide visual perception into two parts, namely early vision and late vision. The effects of cognition on perception are analyzed and discussed, thereby, in terms of the ways cognition affects early vision and late vision separately. It turns out that cognition not only affects early vision differently from late vision, but also affects the respective epistemic roles differently. This has important repercussions for the discussions concerning CP that the other books miss because they do not differentiate between early and late vision.

Second, there are various definitions of CP in the literature. Usually, these definition state that a perceptual process is CP if it is directly affected by cognition, where this directly effects is explicated in various ways. Some more recent accounts of CP, however, introduce a new condition with a pragmatic, consequentialist flair, namely that a perceptual process is CP if the cognitive effects have some important or interesting philosophically speaking consequences concerning the epistemic role of perception, namely its role as a justifier of perceptual beliefs. The relations between the two conditions for CP are not discussed and they are usually left to run in parallel. In this book, I examine closely their interrelations and argue that they should be treated as the two faces of the same coin with the one face bootstrapping the other.

Although, third, early vision is discussed sometimes, late vision is not discussed and analyzed at all. There are some researchers, both philosophers and cognitive scientists, who think that late vision, owing to cognitive influences, is not a perceptual stage properly speaking. I argue that despite the cognitive influences, late vision is a perceptual stage.

Finally, among those who espouse the view that cognition affects perception, there are those who think that cognition can affect perception because both have conceptual/symbolic contents. There is a significant part of researchers, however, who think that cognition affects perception even though perceptual states have iconic/analog contents, whereas cognitive states have conceptual/symbolic contents. No explanation has been given as to how analog contents could affect symbolic contents. In fact, some researchers argue that exactly because of the difference in representational format, cognition and perception could not interact in a way that entails the CP of perception. Here, I provide an account of how cognitive states could affect perceptual states in a way that entails that late vision is CP.