Abstract
According to so-called “thin” views about the content of experience, we can only visually experience low-level features such as colour, shape, texture or motion. According to so-called “rich” views, we can also visually experience some high-level properties, such as being a pine tree or being threatening. One of the standard objections against rich views is that high-level properties can only be represented at the level of judgment. In this paper, I first challenge this objection by relying on some recent studies in social vision. Secondly, I tackle a different but related issue, namely, the idea that, if the content of experience is rich, then perception is cognitively penetrable. Against this thesis, I argue that the very same criteria that help us vindicate the truly sensory nature of our rich experiences speak against their being cognitively penetrable.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Similar content being viewed by others
Notes
Visual experiences are part of the overall experiences one is in before and after acquiring the pine tree recognitional capacity. These overall experiences include cognitive states, such as one’s beliefs and desires, emotional states of all sorts and perhaps experiences from other sense modalities. I have used ‘overall experiences’ in place of ‘visual experiences’, which is the expression Siegel originally uses, to make this distinction clearer.
Siegel discusses not just judgments, but also cognitive states such as dwelling on a belief, entertaining a hunch or intuition, and entertaining a proposition without committing to its truth. In addition, she considers and rejects another alternative: that the difference between O1 and O2 is due to some background phenomenology, whose effect on how the world is presented to us in perception is similar to the effect of e.g. moods. In what follows, I focus only on the contrast between experience and (perceptual) judgment.
Perceptual judgments, in particular, are often taken to be a type of hybrid representation, with a perceptual and a cognitive component. Raftopoulos (2011), for instance, characterizes perceptual judgments as hybrid visual/conceptual constructs. See below.
Parker Crutchfield (2012) argues, conversely, that if visual experience is cognitively penetrable, then we can visually represent high-level properties. Although this conditional also strikes me as problematic, for similar reasons to the ones I will mention in Sect. 5, this is a topic for another paper.
These considerations gain greater weight within so-called seemings-internalism with regard to epistemic justification (see e.g. McGrath 2013). Their dialectical import in the present discussion is, however, negligible.
It is important here that the form of the relevant judgment should be “to judge that p”, as opposed to “to judge that it seems to be as if p”.
The work of Milner and Goodale (1995) provides evidence supporting a ‘dual stream’ model of the human visual system. On the one hand, the dorsal stream seems to provide information for the guidance of skilled visuo-motor action. Dorsal processing is also unconscious. Unlike its ventral cousin, however, it is in all probability entirely outside the scope of attention. On the other hand, the ventral stream subserves conscious perceptual judgement. The case of visual agnosics illustrates how the visual system can unconsciously process information exclusively aimed at guiding skilled sensorimotor behaviour without the subject’s recognition of any the objects involved. These subjects do not seem to have conscious visual experience of the shape and orientation of objects at all, yet they can, in forced choice conditions, engage in action-oriented tasks with objects in ways that match control groups of normal-sighted subjects.
It is also not clear that the kind of top-down integration illustrated by these studies could in fact be considered a case of cognitive penetration. Although this is a topic for the final Section, the following seems true: even if the kind of contextual influence Adams and Kveraga discuss has a top-down effect, the timing suggests that it will be due to attentional mechanisms, which exert their influence at roughly the time the authors mention, i.e., after what is typically considered early vision processing time.
A recent study by Firestone and Scholl (2015) questions the classic paper by Levin and Banaji (2006), in which they defend the influence of racial categories on the perception of lightness. Levin and Banaji (2006) report that when looking at faces with exactly the same luminance, Black faces appeared consistently darker than White faces, thus allegedly demonstrating the influence of relatively abstract concepts, such as race, on the perception of lightness. Firestone and Scholl (2015) have designed some experiments in which the images of Black and White faces are blurred to rule out racial recognition. The subjects in these experiments could not perceive the race of the faces and even explicitly judged the faces to be of the same race. Yet, the results about lightness are exactly the same as in Levin and Banaji’s (2006) studies. Firestone and Scholl conclude that the difference in perceived lightness is hence not due to a top-down influence from high-level representations about race, but just the result of subtle bottom-up elements within visual processing (Firestone and Scholl 2015, p. 694).
These results illustrate the complex intricacies involved in assessing the occurrence of cognitive penetration per se, but tell us very little about whether or not the content of our experiences is rich and also about the alleged support that the truth of rich theories lends to the cognitive penetrability thesis, which are my only two concerns in this paper. As I will argue in Sect. 5, the very same reasons that allow us to establish the truly perceptual nature of the representation of some high-level properties speak against the idea that such representations are the result of cognitive penetration.
See http://perception.research.yale.edu/Animacy-Wolfpack/Animacy-Wolfpack-BasicDemo-Pointing.mov for online demonstrations.
I explicitly narrow down the scope of the relevant notion of cognition to that of perceptual judgments further down in this Section.
I thank Professor Raftopoulos for pressing me on this point.
Lower-level properties such as motion trajectories, rotational motion or degrees of correlation between the chasing and target shapes.
For an online demonstration of one of the already performed trials see http://perception.research.yale.edu/Animacy-Wolfpack/Animacy-Wolfpack-Game-Pointing-NoCheating.mov. See also Gao and Scholl 2011.
For online demonstrations of all studies on interrupting chasing see http://www.yale.edu/perception/Brian/demos/animacy-ChasingTemporal.html.
Of course, we would have to put aside alternative explanations in terms of, for instance, attentional or gestalt shifts to plausibly claim that the experience is an experience of pine trees. Siegel does that in arguing for the truth of premises two and three of her phenomenal contrast argument. I remind the reader that I am here taking for granted the truth of these other two premises.
Interestingly, at places, Adams and collaborators seem to be following this route in the way the present their research, as if the visual system’s capacity to represent complex emotional features was just the result of evolution making it more sensitive to them and better wired to other regions of the brain. Although this is highly speculative, I wonder whether their insistence on taking the results of their research in social vision as confirmation of the cognitive penetrability thesis is just a case of conflation between the philosophical thesis, as characterized here, and a visual information processing model, such as predictive coding, where top-down influences are pervasive (see e.g. Hohwy 2013).
References
Adams, R., Kveraga, K. (2015). Social vision: Functional forecasting and the integration of compound social cues. Review of Philosophy and Psychology, doi:10.1007/s13164-015-0256-1.
Bar, M., Kassam, K. S., Ghuman, A. S., Boshyan, J., Schmid, A. M., Dale, A. M., et al. (2006). Top-down facilitation of visual recognition. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 103, 449–454.
Brogaard, B. (2013). Do we perceive natural kind properties? Philosophical Studies, 162(1), 35–42.
Crutchfield, P. (2012). Representing high-Level properties in perceptual experience. Philosophical Psychology, 25(2), 279–294.
Firestone, C., & Scholl, B. (2015). Can you experience ‘top-down’ effects on perception? The case of race categories and perceived lightness. Psychonomic Bulletin and Review, 22(3), 694–700.
Fodor, J. (1983). Modularity of mind. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Gao, T., McCarthy, G., & Scholl, B. J. (2010). The wolfpack effect: Perception of animacy irresistibly influences interactive behavior. Psychological Science, 21, 1845–1853.
Gao, T., Newman, G. E., & Scholl, B. J. (2009). The psychophysics of chasing: A case study in the perception of animacy. Cognitive Psychology, 59, 154–179.
Gao, T., & Scholl, B. J. (2011). Chasing vs. stalking: Interrupting the perception of animacy. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, 37, 669–684.
Gibson, J. J. (1979). The ecological approach to visual perception. Boston: Houghton-Mifflin.
Hess, U., Adams, R. B, Jr, Grammer, K., & Kleck, R. E. (2009). Sex and emotion expression: Are angry women more like men? Journal of Vision, 9, 1–8.
Hohwy, J. (2013). The predictive mind. Oxford: OUP.
Kveraga, K., Boshyan, J., & Bar, M. (2007). Magnocellular projections as the trigger of top-down facilitation in recognition. Journal of Neuroscience, 27, 13232–13240.
Leslie, A. M. (1984). Spatiotemporal continuity and the perception of causality in infants. Perception, 13, 287–305.
Leslie, A. M. (1994). ToMM, ToBy, and agency: core architecture and domain specificity. In L. Hirschfield & S. Gelman (Eds.), Mapping the mind: Domain specificity in cognition and culture (pp. 119–148). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Levin, D. T., & Banaji, M. R. (2006). Distortions in the perceived lightness of faces: The role of race categories. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 135, 501–512.
Lyons, J. (2005). Perceptual belief and nonexperiential looks. Philosophical Perspectives, 19, 237–256.
Machery, E. (2015). Cognitive penetrability: a no-progress report. In Zeimbekis, J., & Raftopoulos, A. (2015). The cognitive penetrability of perception. New philosophical perspectives. New York: OUP.
Macpherson, F. (2012). Cognitive penetration of colour experience: Rethinking the issue in light of an indirect mechanism. Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, 84(1), 24–62.
McGrath, M. (2013). Siegel and the impact for epistemological internalism. Philosophical Studies, 162, 723–732.
Michotte, A. (1963). The perception of causality. Oxford: Basic Books.
Milner, A. D., & Goodale, M. A. (1995). The visual brain in action. Oxford: OUP.
Nanay, B. (2011). Do we see apples as eatable? Pacific Philosophical Quarterly, 93(3), 305–322.
Price, R. (2009). Aspect-switching and visual phenomenal character. The Philosophical Quarterly, 59(236), 508–518.
Pylyshyn, Z. (1984). Computation and cognition: Toward a foundation for cognitive science. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Pylyshyn, Z. (1999). Is vision continuous with cognition? The case for cognitive impenetrability of visual perception. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 22, 341–365.
Raftopoulos, A. (2009). Cognition and perception. How do psychology and neural science inform philosophy?. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Raftopoulos, A. (2011). Late vision: Processes and epistemic status. Frontiers in Psychology, 2, 17–28.
Scholl, B. J., & Tremoulet, P. D. (2000). Perceptual causality and animacy. Trends in Cognitive Science, 4(8), 299–309.
Scholl, B. J., & Gao, T. (2013). Perceiving animacy and intentionality: Visual processing or higher-level judgment? In M. D. Rutherford & V. A. Kuhlmeier (Eds.), Social perception: Detection and interpretation of animacy, agency, and intention (pp. 197–230). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Siegel, S. (2006). Which properties are represented in perception? In T. S. Gendler & J. Hawthorne (Eds.), Perceptual experience (pp. 481–503). New York: OUP.
Siegel, S. (2010). The content of visual experience. New York: OUP.
Siegel, S. (2012). Cognitive penetrability and perceptual justification. Noûs, 46(2), 201–222.
Stokes, D. (2013). Cognitive penetrability of perception. Philosophy Compass, 8(7), 646–663.
Stokes, D. (2015). Towards a consequentialist understanding of cognitive penetration. In J. Zeimbekis & A. Raftopoulos (Eds.), The cognitive penetrability of perception. New philosophical perspectives. New York: OUP.
Tamietto, M., & de Gelder, B. (2008). Emotional contagion for unseen bodily expressions: Evidence from facial EMG. In Proceedings from the 8\(^{th}\) International Conference on Automatic Face and Gesture Recognition (pp. 1–5). Amsterdam: IEEE.
Tye, M. (1995). Ten problems of consciousness. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Weisbuch, M., & Adams, R. B. (2012). The functional forecast model of emotion expression. Social and Personality Psychology Compass, 6(7), 499–514.
Weisbuch, M., & Ambady, A. (2008). Affective divergence: Automatic responses to others’ emotions depend on group membership. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 95, 1063–1079.
Acknowledgments
Different versions of this material were presented at a variety of venues: the Central European University (Second Philosophy of Language and Mind Conference), Harvard University (Workshop on Cognitive Penetration), Helsinki Collegium for Advanced Studies (Dynamics of Active Perception Symposium) and the Swiss Center for the Affective Sciences (THUMOS: Genevan Research Group on Emotions, Values and Norms). I would like to thank the audiences at all these events for their questions and discussion, especially Santiago Echeverri, Fiona Macpherson and Susanna Siegel. I also thank Athanassios Raftopoulos and an anonymous reviewer for helpful comments on a previous version of this paper.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Ethics declarations
Funding
Research for this paper was supported by the MINECO (Ministerio de Economía y Competitividad) via research Grants MCINN FFI2011-26853 and PERSP CSD2009-0056 (CONSOLIDER INGENIO), and by AGAUR (Agència de Gestió d’Ajuts Universitaris i de Recerca) via research Grant 2014-SGR-81.
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Toribio, J. Visual experience: rich but impenetrable. Synthese 195, 3389–3406 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-015-0889-8
Received:
Accepted:
Published:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-015-0889-8