Thinking and Perceiving

Dustin Stokes

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9781138729384
• eBook ISBN: 9781351747462
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Epistemology in Philosophy

Human beings are in contact with the world through their minds. One can make sensory perceptual contact with the world: One sees the tree and hears its leaves flutter. And one makes cognitive contact with the world: One forms beliefs about the tree, memories of how it was in the past, and expectations of how it will be in the future. Can the first, perception, be influenced in important ways by the second, cognition? Do cognitive states such as memories, beliefs, and expectations affect what one perceives through the senses? And what is the importance of these possible relations to how we theorize and understand the human mind?

Possible cognitive influence on perception (sometimes called "cognitive penetration of perception") has been long debated in philosophy of mind and cognitive science: Some argue that such influence occurs, while others argue that it does not or cannot. In this excellent introduction and overview of the problem, Dustin Stokes examines the following:

• The philosophical and scientific background to cognition and perception
• Contemporary ways of distinguishing cognition and perception
• Questions about the representational content of perception versus cognition
• Distinct theories of mental architecture: modularity versus malleability
• Consequences for epistemology, philosophy of science, and aesthetics
• Philosophical and scientific research on perceptual attention
• Perceptual skill, learning, and expertise
• Perceptual content, objectivity, and cultural bias.

Additional features, such as chapter summaries, suggestions for further reading, and a glossary, make Thinking and Perceiving an ideal resource for students of philosophy of mind and psychology, cognitive psychology, and cognitive science.

1
THOUGHT AND PERCEPTION: DISTINCTIONS, SIMILARITIES, AND RELATIONS

1. 1.1 "Defining" by ostension
2. 1.2 The importance of cognitive influence on perception: an initial gloss
3. 1.3 Reductive and revisionary theories
4. 1.4 Perception and thought: grounds for distinction
5. 1.5 Mental content and its importance
6. 1.6 Summary

There are different ways of making contact with the world. Perhaps most obviously, one can perform actions on the objects and features of one’s surroundings: One can kick the football, grab the coffee cup, pat the dog on the head, and so on. One can also relate to, be in touch with, make contact with the world via one’s mind. When one sees or hears or smells parts of the world, this is sensory contact with the world. And one can maintain contact with the world cognitively by making judgments about it, or forming beliefs about it, or imagining a pleasant event of the past. Both sensory contact and cognitive contact involve mental states that are about the world. They both involve being in contact through, or by carrying, information. When one sees the apple tree or when one believes that there is an apple tree on the other side of the house, one carries information about the world.

This chapter proceeds as follows. First by appeal to ordinary and theoretical practices, Section 1.1 provides a preliminary list of mental phenomena that are typically categorized as perception and those that are typically categorized as cognition. Not all of the complications that come with this task will be decisively addressed here, and so the chapter then moves on to analyze ways that paradigmatic cognitive states and paradigmatic perceptual states might relate as a conceptual or empirical matter. Section 1.2 offers some initial characterization of the importance of possible relations between cognition and perception and of the putative distinction between the phenomena. Section 1.3 considers the philosophical view that perception just is, in some sense, a kind of belief and the psychological view that there is no clear distinction between perception and cognition. Section 1.4 considers five possible, non-exclusive modes for distinguishing thought from perception. The reader should hereby acquire a handful of useful concepts for thinking about the remainder of the big questions of the book, centrally, how thought may importantly affect perception, how cognitive contact may influence sensory contact. Finally, Section 1.5 focuses on an important related set of issues: how both cognitive states and perceptual states are representational states with content and how the natures of such content may be the same or different. Here, too, the philosophical problems and technical concepts employed to discuss them will prove useful for navigating the problems and analyses, and their importance, that follow in the rest of the book.

1.1 "Defining" by ostension

The strategy of this section is to see how much we can learn about perception and thought, and how they are distinguished, by considering our more ordinary concepts, as well as some more sophisticated practices of theorizing about them.

Begin by considering how we ordinarily think and talk about the relevant mental concepts, beginning with perception. A common way to think about perception is as a person’s understanding of or stance on things. We say things like “That speech changed my whole perception of things”; “The East’s perception of the West has shifted”; “They perceived their imminent doom.” Likewise for terms specific to particular sensory modalities, we say things like, “I see what you mean” or “I hear what you’re saying.” We might call this notion perception-as-outlook. But if we derived our notion of perception from these linguistic practices, it either won’t deliver an unequivocal verdict (which should not be expected from an ordinary language analysis) or will not deliver a meaning that accords with more theoretical uses of the term(s). But there is another set of uses that points to the standard understanding of perception in philosophy and psychology.

We also use perceptual terms in ways reserved for sensory experiences and at the exclusion of non-sensory mental states. For example, suppose you are disputing with a friend whether another friend was at the party. You might say something like “I think she was there.” And your friend, still unconvinced, might reply “Ok, but did you see her there.” Here, the use of the perceptual term “see” is used to exclusively denote visual experience. The only kind of evidence that will do is visual evidence. What you judge, or believe, or think simply isn’t relevant to this use of the perceptual term. Similarly for other sensory modality terms. Attempting to persuade your partner that you are getting a raise, he might reply “Did you actually hear your boss say ‘raise’?” And if that auditory experience wasn’t had, then you simply lack the requested perceptual evidence.

The linguistic practice, then, is one where if we want to denote perception in a sense more restricted than perception-as-outlook, we often employ terms specific to distinctive sensory modalities, to olfaction, audition, vision, and so on. Practice in psychological science follows this pattern in important ways. In descriptions of research projects, research labs, and relevant research literature, psychologists often describe the target phenomenon in terms more specific than “perception”: they speak of “vision”, or “audition”, or “touch”. This is partly for a simple reason: Those phenomena are their research specializations! But whether intentional or not, the practice also serves to disambiguate the language in a way that mirrors ordinary practices. Psychologists, and to a lesser degree ordinary language practices, similarly use general sensory terms when they mean the more restricted sense of perception, they refer to “sensory perception” or “sense perception”.

Following these practices, perception is sensory perception. Although even here there are complications, perceiving includes, in the paradigmatic instances, experiences had via the Aristotelian senses: seeing, hearing, touching, smelling, and tasting. It plausibly also includes proprioceptive experiences, and perhaps further some type of “inner” awareness of one’s bodily activity.¹ To start, we can take “perception” to denote any of the mental types on this list. It is a capacity for sensory representation by, as it is sometimes put, an individual. It “is a referential and attributive ability to represent basic mind-independent features of the environment. It is a capacity for objective representation” (Copenhaver 2013: 1065). As Tyler Burge has argued, this representational role – which is objective in the sense that it involves attributing features to particular objects in the perceiver’s environment – is the function of perceptual systems (2010).² This leaves space for the possibility of unconscious perception and sub-personal perceptual processes. That said, the form of perception of central interest in this book is conscious perception. Perceptual experience is conscious sensory representation.³ Such mental states are conscious, at least, in the sense that they have a phenomenology; there is something that it’s like, for the perceiver, to be in them. The notion of objective sensory representation and sensory phenomenology come together in an important way. As Fred Dretske once put it:

the way things phenomenally seem to be (when, for instance, one sees or hallucinates an orange pumpkin), are – all of them – properties the experience represents things as having. Since the qualities objects are represented as having are qualities they sometimes – in fact (given a modicum of realism) qualities they usually – possess, the features that define what it is like to have an experience are properties the objects we experience (not our experience of them) have.

(Dretske 2003: 67)

Perceptual experience is thus transparent, where the sensory appearances of objects and events involve attribution of features to those objects and events (Harman 1990). You perceive the pumpkin, not your perception of it, as orange. Your conscious awareness is of the mind-independent object – the pumpkin – not of your experience. Phenomenality is thus subjective in the sense that there is something that it is like for the perceiver; but it is objective in the sense that “it” (the object perceived, not the experience itself) is perceived to be that way.

Now consider cognition or thought. First, a note on why it will be assumed that both of these terms refer, more or less, to the same broad category of mental phenomena. This assumption bumps up against our ordinary uses of the terms, since they do not obviously align. This is partly for the trivial reason that “thought” is a familiar term to just about anyone, while “cognition” is a more theoretical term, even if it is entering more into the fold of popular usage. What kinds of mental activities do we refer to when using “thought” and its cognates? Sometimes we clearly use it to describe cases where we are mentally jogging through various ideas or possibilities, when we are reasoning, and when we are pondering over a decision. We say things like “Let’s think about where we should take a summer holiday”; “I thought the correct answer was 1626”; or most simply, “I’m thinking about it” to denote that a decision may be forthcoming but one hasn’t arrived there yet. We also sometimes use the terms in a more restrictive, or at least somewhat different, way, to denote that we have some commitment to the truth of some state of affairs but perhaps without complete certainty. For example, I might say “I think the game is on Sunday morning, not Saturday” or, with less commitment and probably indicating an admission of error, “I really thought the game was on Sunday morning.” Here again ordinary language analysis is inconclusive. But we can note a few things. First, at least these uses all seem distinct from the restrictive use of perceptual terms and what they denote: None of the concepts of thought at work here appear to be sensory in any way. Second, the kinds of activities described here match up fairly well with those that philosophers and cognitive scientists denote with “cognition” and its cognates.

Cognitive science today is broad in its scope of inquiry. But more traditionally (at least going back to the middle and later 20th century, when the discipline was just being formed), the emphasis was certainly on thought, as described earlier. The central point of debate in the discipline then, and in some quarters now, is whether genuine artificial intelligence was achievable. Can a machine think? Can it enjoy intelligence of the kind that humans clearly do and that arguably no other non-human animal does? Accordingly, empirical studies of cognition in the discipline centred around attempts to build artificial systems capable of reason, of language use, of problem-solving, of decision-making. Note that this comports well with how thought was described earlier. The debates about the possibility of genuinely intelligent computers or machines do not concern sensory capacities – engineers and computer scientists have been quite successful in developing systems that respond to the environment through sensory proxies. The debates concern the capacity for thought or cognition. Following this theoretical practice, and the fact that what the cognitive scientist calls “cognition” and what the folk call “thought” seem largely to be the same thing, we will use these terms interchangeably.

So what is thought or cognition? A relatively restrictive way to characterize thought is just as those mental events or processes that relate to or somehow contribute to knowledge. Belief is the paradigmatic example. Although there are distinct theories of belief, just about any theory will understand belief as a state or attitude towards some proposition, P, where one possesses a conviction that P is true. If I believe that Sweden won the match, I am likely to report this proposition when relevant, form further beliefs about further stages of the tournament, and so on. Furthermore, most take beliefs to be dispositional states, in the sense that a belief will manifest in behaviour (for example, asserting that P is true) only in relevant circumstances. This allows for a subject to have many beliefs, but only a few are operative or occurrent at any one time. Beliefs are thus the central example of what philosophers call doxastic states. Other fairly standard candidates for doxastic states, insofar as they also involve some commitment to the truth of the proposition mentally represented, are judgments, opinions, expectations, and memories.

A less restrictive way to characterize thought is to tie it to reasoning and action. Thus, doxastic states like those noted earlier would be included, since they contribute to our decision-making and reasoning and, often enough, to how we act. But doxastic states do not exhaust those that contribute to decision-making and action planning. We decide and act on the basis of non-doxastic states like desires, goals, wishes, and intentions. A belief that the restaurant is on 4th Avenue does not, by itself, cause me to walk to 4th Avenue. To perform this action, I need, at least, some motivational state – say a desire to have dinner at the restaurant. This is why, in traditional action theory, my behaviour would be explained both by the belief and the desire about the restaurant. And perhaps less obviously, we use imagination to consider possibilities and often factor those possibilities into a decision. In renovating my home, I imagine various construction and decoration projects and, only after contemplating those imagined circumstances, I begin some of those projects. Additional distinctions might be made here to further categorize these non-doxastic states. Suffice it to say that for our purposes, on a more liberal construal, these non-doxastic states are also properly understood as thought or cognition.

The reader will note that these mental processes and types do not exhaust the full variety of human mental activity. For example, we can form mental imagery, and this seems to have features of both perception (for example, visual imagery is subjectively similar to visual perception) and of cognition (for example, we use imagery to reason about, and act on, the world). Emotional states, too, are difficult to categorize. They have traditionally been treated as non-cognitive (from Socrates to, at least, Descartes), while they enjoy rich phenomenology without always being bound to sensory perception.

Those outstanding questions (and others) to one side, this initial analysis provides some sense of which mental states and processes are typically categorized as perceptual and which cognitive. The first list will include at least vision, audition, touch, taste, olfaction, and p...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• List of figures
• Introduction
• 1 Thought and perception: distinctions, similarities, and relations
• 2 Mental architecture: the case for modularity
• 3 Top-down effects on perception: the initial case for malleability
• 4 Towards a consequentialist understanding of cognitive penetration
• 5 Attention and cognitive influence on perception
• 6 Perceptual expertise I: mental architecture
• 7 Perceptual expertise II: epistemology
• 8 Consequences of perceptual malleability
• Conclusion
• Epilogue: the arguments from understanding
• Glossary
• Bibliography
• Index