Abstract
I argue that discussions of cognitive penetration have been insufficiently clear about (i) what distinguishes perception and cognition, and (ii) what kind of relationship between the two is supposed to be at stake in the debate. A strong reading, which is compatible with many characterizations of penetration, posits a highly specific and directed influence on perception. According to this view, which I call the “internal effect view” (IEV) a cognitive state penetrates a perceptual process if the presence of the cognitive state causes a change to the computation performed by the process, with the result being a distinct output. I produce a novel argument that this strong reading is false. On one well-motivated way of drawing the distinction between perceptual states and cognitive states, cognitive representations cannot play the computational role posited for them by IEV, vis-à-vis perception. This does not mean, however, that there are not important causal relationships between cognitive and perceptual states. I introduce an alternative view of these relationships, the “external effect view” (EEV). EEV posits that each cognitive state is associated with a broad range of possible perceptual outcomes, and biases perception towards any of those perceptual outcomes without determining specific perceptual contents. I argue that EEV captures the kinds of cases philosophers have thought to be evidence for IEV, and a wide range of other cases as well.
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04 October 2018
On page 3653, there is a mistake in the explanation of the Cornsweet illusion. In fact, the explanation is that the panel perceived as darker is facing towards the light source?in the case of this figure the light is coming from the right.
04 October 2018
On page 3653, there is a mistake in the explanation of the Cornsweet illusion. In fact, the explanation is that the panel perceived as darker is facing towards the light source���in the case of this figure the light is coming from the right.
Notes
Even though philosophers generally claim to be interested in the relationship between cognition and perceptual experiences, all arguments surrounding cognitive penetration involve characterizing and attempting to establish (or deny) particular causal relationships between the two. As such, a typology of possible causal relationships is highly pertinent.
This is a slight oversimplification, since Dretske argues that, even in a digital representation, information can be logically nested—for instance, the information that s is a square nests the information that it is a rectangle. I will ignore this complication here.
I will often discuss lexical concepts hereafter, but it should be noted that I don’t take these as predominant over or exclusive of atomic representations.
For a full discussion of these topics; see (Burnston, in submission).
Stokes (2012) definition of cognitive penetration does not explicitly include either the semantic or computation conditions, but he has a weaker view than many in this respect. Wu (2013), in some places the most explicit proponent of the computation condition, also occasionally describes cognitive influence on perception in terms of “structuring causes,” which could potentially be interpretable as a weaker relationship. I offer such a weaker characterization in the next section.
Thanks to Matt Fulkerson for encouraging me to stress extractability here.
Why not suggest that a single cognitive concept can convey multiple distinct commands to distinct perceptual processes? All that this would require would be that the cognitive content was interpreted differently by distinct perceptual processes to which it was connected (e.g., perceptual processes in distinct modalities would interpret the same signal as a command to modify their mappings of arguments in their distinct domains), and this would support distinct internal effects coming from the same process. While this argument, appropriately supplemented, might show how distinct processes could be modified, it doesn’t account for evidence-sensitivity or graded effects. So long as the appropriate amount of modification depends on the evidence for the category, simply conveying a different command to each perceptual process won’t solve the problem. Thanks to an anonymous reviewer for raising this objection.
Similarly, it won’t work to propose that the translation mechanism doesn’t represent anything at all, but is a pure format converter, similar to a digital-to-analog converter. Without going too far into it, digital-to-analog converters work by mapping each digital signal, via a filtering or interpolation function, to one specific analog waveform or value. So, positing a format converter is simply a sophisticated version of the command objection.
To acknowledge some debts: EEV is inspired partially by Barsalou et al. ’s (2008) theory of language-perception interaction, which treats linguistic representations as a kind of indexing system for perceptual representations, and by Millikan ’s (2000) underappreciated theory of atomic “substance” concepts. However, EEV neither shares all of the assumptions, nor recapitulates all of the claims of these views, and supplies a more detailed view of the interface than either. Like these other views, EEV presupposes some learning theory that explains how particular lexical or atomic concepts get hooked up to particular processes. I won’t speculate as to that here; see Millikan (2000) for one proposal.
There are a number of remaining questions about this kind of view, for instance how viewpoint-dependent these representations are, whether categories consist in abstract prototypes or a range of exemplars, etc. I won’t go into these here (but see the end of Sect. 6). Also, I should note some different potential readings of these claims—Goldstone and Hendrickson (2010) suggest that these categories reflect “permeability” between cognition and perception, since they take the reading that categorical effects must be cognitive. I think this is a mistake, for the reasons given in Sect. 2 (cf. Burnston, in submission). Raftopoulos (2009, p. 70) takes the fact that categorical representations like these are representations in memory, and must be matched to incoming stimuli, to show that they are cognitive. Others have focused on the fact that they are learned to make a similar point (Stokes 2014). But given that it is possible to store representations with perceptual form in long term memory (Barsalou 1999), these inferences don’t follow. I can’t argue for this convincingly here; I say much more on these topics in (Burnston, in submission).
For simplicity’s I will talk about a uniform biasing of any process associated with the concept, but EEV is not in principle committed to this. Some processes, in virtue of being more typical of the category, could be more heavily biased than others.
Thanks to an anonymous reviewer for encouraging me to get clearer about the role that the visual world studies are playing in the argument here.
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Acknowledgments
I would like to thank William Bechtel, Jonathan Cohen, Matthew Fulkerson, Shannon Spaulding, Sarah Robins, and Wayne Wu for exceedingly helpful comments on earlier drafts. An early version of this paper was presented at the 2014 Central APA Meeting in Chicago; thank you to the audience for a very helpful discussion, and to Wayne Wu for thoughtful commentary.
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Burnston, D.C. Cognitive penetration and the cognition–perception interface. Synthese 194, 3645–3668 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-016-1116-y
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-016-1116-y