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Cognitive Penetrability and Ethical Perception

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Abstract

In recent years there has been renewed philosophical interest in the thesis that perceptual experience is cognitively penetrable, i.e., roughly, the view that the contents and/or character of a subject’s perceptual experience can be modified by what a subject believes and desires. As has been widely noted, it is plausible that cognitive penetration has implications for perception’s epistemic role. On the one hand, penetration could make agents insensitive to the world in a way which epistemically ‘downgrades’ their experience. On the other hand, cognitive penetration may sometimes be epistemically beneficial by making agents more sensitive to the way the world is, i.e., by enabling them to see things that others cannot. For example, penetration could ground a ‘high-level’ view of perceptual content, according to which agents can have experiences as of ‘complex’ properties, e.g., natural kind and aesthetic properties. Relatedly, it could elucidate the view that agents can gain perceptual expertise by learning. A type of sophisticated perception (and associated ‘perceptual expertise’) which has hitherto received little attention in relation to cognitive penetration is ethical perception. In this paper I examine the significance of cognitive penetration for ‘Perceptualist’ views in ethics which appeal to a notion of ‘ethical perception’. Although cognitive penetration could ground a literalist model of Ethical Perception according to which agents can have perceptual experiences of the instantiation of ethical properties, the results are otherwise somewhat mixed: cognitive penetrability does not support Perceptual Intuitionism, although it may provide some limited support for Virtue Ethics and Cornell Realism. However, as I stress, the significance of cognitive penetration for Perceptualism should not be overstated.

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Notes

  1. Hereafter I speak of ‘experience’ rather than ‘perceptual experience’.

  2. See, e.g., Lyons 2011; Macpherson 2012; Siegel 2012, 2013; Stokes 2012, 2013; Vance 2014.

  3. Suilven is a hill located in the spectacular Sutherland region of northwest Scotland.

  4. Two further clarifications: firstly, the ‘more or less directly’ clause is to allow for cases where a cognitive state might influence perceptual experience indirectly. The sort of cases I have in mind are where a cognitive state causes the formation of some intermediary phenomenal state, or a non-cognitive state, which in turn affect the content and/or character of experience, e.g., my belief that the interview is tomorrow might cause me to have a migraine which in turn causes an experience of red flashing. It is of course a matter of controversy whether these cases count as cognitive penetration. Secondly, and relatedly, one might want to impose a semantic condition on cognitive penetration, such that there has to be some sort of logical or semantic coherence relation between the penetrator and penetrated states. See, e.g., Macpherson 2012; Pylyshyn 1999, and Stokes 2013 for discussion.

  5. See, e.g., Bruner and Goodman 1947, Delk and Fillenbaum 1965, Hansen et al. 2006; Witzel et al. 2011.

  6. See Siegel 2006, 2007 for discussion of the method of phenomenal contrast.

  7. See Siegel 2013 for discussion.

  8. See, e.g., Bayne 2009, Siegel 2006

  9. Another example can be found in Korsgaard’s 1996 view that we cannot help seeing each other as ends.

  10. From Harman 1977, p. 4

  11. e.g., Harman, who presents the Cat example, thinks that ethical observation is simply a psychologically immediate judgment on the basis of the way things look. See his 1977, p. 7.

  12. See Cowan 2013a, 2013b, Cullison 2010; McBrayer 2010b; McGrath 2004; Vayrynen 2008.

  13. I follow recent discussions in assuming a representational view of perception and focusing on visual perceptual experience. For what it’s worth I think that it may be possible to represent ethical properties in audition, e.g., I could hear her demeaning tone.

  14. Although Ethical Perception would seem to be of primary appeal to Ethical Naturalists two things should be kept in mind: (i) there is no consensus on how best to characterise ‘natural’, and (ii) McBrayer (2010a) has plausibly argued that Ethical Perception is compatible with some form of non-naturalism.

  15. From Goldie 2007, p. 1

  16. See, e.g., Goldie 2007; Little 1997, Lovibond 2002, McDowell 1998, Murdoch 2001. Here I focus on Neo-Aristotelian brands of virtue ethics. I discuss Murdoch, who is harder to place, in §3.

  17. Dancy is not a virtue ethicist, but is committed to a particularist epistemology. See Millar 2000 for discussion of non-inferential recognitional abilities.

  18. For the view that emotions are perceptions see Doring 2003 and Prinz 2004. For criticism, see Brady 2013.

  19. Jacobsen 2005, p. 393.

  20. See, e.g., Boyd 1988; Brink 1989, and Sturgeon 2002. They all taught or studied at Cornell University.

  21. 2002, p. 205

  22. Ibid, p. 205

  23. See, e.g., Audi 2013, Prichard 1912, Ross 1930.

  24. See Audi 2004 for a statement of this.

  25. See, e.g., Senor 2007.

  26. Two other possibilities: suppose that ethical experiences were epistemically dependent upon inferentially justified beliefs. For epistemological reasons, it would seem odd to call the resulting view ‘Intuitionist’ (this might be due to its association with Foundationalism - note, however, that the views are, strictly-speaking, distinct). Further, if ethical experience were epistemically dependent upon ethical testimony then this raises worries about a regress of ethical testimony, as well as concerns about subject’s entitlement to ethical beliefs held on the basis of testimony. See Hopkins 2007 for the view that ethical testimony doesn’t confer entitlement to ethical belief.

  27. Macpherson 2012, p. 33. Of course, we need not limit this model to vision.

  28. For doubts about this see Pylyshyn 1999 p. 361

  29. Macpherson 2012, p. 33

  30. See, e.g., Vayrynen 2008 and Cullison 2010. Cullison appears to appeal to cognitive sophistication to deal with the ‘Morally Blind’ objection to Ethical Perception.

  31. See Cecchi, A.S., 2014, for an account of what he calls diachronic cognitive penetration.

  32. See his 2013, Moral Perception.

  33. One could presumably hold a reductionist view whilst still endorsing the Integration model.

  34. Moral Perception, p. 40

  35. Ibid, p. 43

  36. Ibid, p. 46

  37. Ibid. p. 46

  38. As I’m characterising the view, Virtue Ethicists are not committed to a particular thesis about the epistemic status of ‘perceptual’ judgments, e.g., although they are psychologically non-inferential, they could be epistemically inferential.

  39. Silins 2013, p. 26

  40. Although see Lyons 2011 for a contrary view.

  41. A candidate emotional state for some of the cases we are interested in - those involving perception of to-be-doneness - might be what Mandelbaum 1969 referred to as felt-demand.

  42. [1970] 2001, p. 36

  43. Note, however, that a commitment to theory-ladenness is typically understood as a stronger thesis than the Cog-Pen Thesis, since it tends to be associated with the view that perception is continuously and thoroughly penetrated, potentially by arbitrarily much of the subject’s beliefs and commitments. Proponents of the Cog-Pen thesis need not commit themselves to this, e.g., they could claim that experience is only penetrated in cases of expertise. I largely ignore this complication in what follows, but it is worth considering whether the Cog-Pen thesis is relevant to Cornell Realism in light of it.

  44. This moniker comes from Silins, 2013.

  45. See Siegel 2013 and Vance 2014 for discussion.

  46. See Huemer 2007; Pryor 2000, 2004. I am using the Perceptual Dogmatist as a representative opponent.

  47. A similar point can be made about Change of Subject and the perception of ought-to-be-doneness. However, one might think it more plausible that perceptual experiences could have presentational phenomenology with respect to thick ethical properties (those picked out by thick concepts), e.g. cruelty. A similar point could be made about prima facie wrongness in Cat.

  48. Note that my notion of epistemic dependence is narrower than his. Also, I must confess that it is not obvious to me that emotional experiences do have presentational phenomenology, at least in Chudnoff’s sense. Note, however, that Vance may only speaks of the feeling that p is revealed to the subject.

  49. See, e.g., Brady 2007; de Sousa 1987, Döring 2003

  50. See Tappolet 2012 for this view.

  51. I have not shown that the transition from the background theory to ethical perception involves a sort of inference as, e.g., Sturgeon, seems to think.

  52. Appealing to these states could perhaps best explain cases where ethical experience seem to run counter to our ethical beliefs, e.g., cases of ethical conversion. See Orwell’s “A Hanging” for an actual case of this.

  53. One might also include here a conception of how to live, ethical concepts, and imaginative states. In the case of a conception of how to live it is not entirely clear why this can’t be rationally assessed, e.g., for justifiedness, or its capacity to confer justification. The case of ethical concepts and imagination are trickier cases, which unfortunately I don’t have space to consider.

  54. Stokes, p. 13

  55. See Parfit 2012 for discussion.

  56. These alternative models might be appealed to to supplement the cognitive penetration model, i.e., some ethical experiences are facilitated by penetration from beliefs based upon ethical experiences brought about by Intra-Perceptual Learning, diachronic cognitive penetration, or a non-inferential recognitional ability. Note, however, that this would still be to concede that cognitive penetration doesn’t support Perceptual Intuitionism since penetrated experiences are epistemically dependent.

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    Robert Cowan

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Cowan, R. Cognitive Penetrability and Ethical Perception. Rev.Phil.Psych. 6, 665–682 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s13164-014-0185-4

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