Abstract
On a traditional view of perceptual justification, perceptual experiences always provide prima facie justification for beliefs based on them. Against this view, Matthew McGrath and Susanna Siegel argue that if an experience is formed in an epistemically pernicious way then it is epistemically downgraded. They argue that "wishful seeing"—when a subject sees something because he wants to see it—is psychologically and normatively analogous to wishful thinking. They conclude that perception can lose its traditional justificatory power, and that our epistemic norms should govern how experiences are formed. To make this case, the downgrader must first isolate a feature of wishful thinking that makes it epistemically defective, then show that this feature is present in wishful seeing. I present a dilemma for the downgrader. There are two features of wishful thinking that could plausibly explain why it is irrational: the fact that a desire causes you to form a belief not supported by adequate evidence, or the mere influence that desire holds over belief formation. Each option presents formidable difficulties. Although the first “bad evidence” explanation, which McGrath employs, explains the irrationality of wishful thinking, it does not transfer to wishful seeing, since experiences are not formed in response to evidence. The second “influence of desire” explanation, which Siegel employs, fails to isolate an epistemically defective feature of wishful thinking, and also does not transfer to wishful seeing. I conclude that the downgrader’s argument from wishful seeing fails.
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Notes
This paper assumes throughout that experiences have contents that can be shared with beliefs. This assumption is not universally shared of course, but see Siegel (2013a, p.7) for a similar move, and an assurance that the debate can be recast in similar terms even if you do not hold the shared content view.
A compelling statement of this view comes from Sosa, although he goes on to reject the view: “Experiences are able to provide justification that is foundational because they lie beyond justification and unjustification. Since they are passively received, they cannot manifest obedience to anything, including rational norms, whether epistemic or otherwise” (2007, 46).
On the effect of desire, see Stokes (2012).
For this and other race-related effects, see Levin and Banaji (2006).
See Stefanucci and Proffitt (2009), among others by these authors.
It's often controversial whether an effect is caused by a cognitive state, and whether the effect is on the contents of perception (as opposed to, judgments about perception, or on pre-perceptual attention mechanisms). See Firestone and Scholl (2016) and responses for the definitive discussion of alleged findings of top-down effects.
Siegel and McGrath consider cases in which experiences are shaped not by desires, but by unjustified beliefs. This paper does not examine these cases.
Henceforth, I will only discuss beliefs that are being formed, though analogous points will hold for beliefs are being maintained inappropriately.
In Siegel's example it's a banana that is seen as a gun, and it is a fear, not a desire, that penetrates the experience.
As Huemer notes, a “normal” reader will be unable to simulate Sam’s experience in this respect, since (absent cognitive penetration) they would not see things with these low-level contents as mustard.
Note that such beliefs are also unjustified. See McGrath (2013a; 237). But Siegel and McGrath are not committing to the idea that experiences can, like beliefs, be unjustified. They restrict their case to the feature of ill-foundedness: being less able to help justify beliefs, due to an epistemic defect in formation. It is this feature, they argue, that experiences can share with beliefs.
In Siegel's The Rationality of Perception (2017), she gives an argument that experiences can in fact be the result of an inference in the very same way that beliefs can.
Wishful seeing is Siegel's term, not McGrath's. But the Wishful Willy case he considers (originally in Markie 2005; 356–7) would meet Siegel's and my criteria for wishful seeing.
McGrath: "[S]uppose I transition from a seeming that P to a seeming that Q, through quasi-inference, solely basing the seeming that Q on the seeming that P)…. When all goes well, the output seeming can justify, but as with inference, only derivatively, not foundationally" (238).
However, once she's made this quasi-inference, it may be rationally consistent for her to form this belief See McGrath (2013a pp 229–232).
McGrath continues, "In the case of transitions between seemings, the property is justifying the subject in believing its content". This property, as we have seen, is what Siegel and I call "ill-foundedness."
As noted, McGrath considers similar cases, but not the fridge case. Different high-level contents invoked by McGrath include “embryo”, “gun”, and “angry” (2013b; 729).
See, among many others, Siegel and Byrne (forthcoming) for a representative debate between a rich content theorist (Siegel) and a thin content theorist (Byrne).
For simplicity’s sake, I will speak of “thin” content views in what follows, though the same criticisms could be leveled by those who posit high-level contents but not the ones McGrath invokes.
The putative effects on color perception in the empirical literature (e.g. Hansen et al. 2006) are about the influence of beliefs or expectations, not about wishes.
Thank you to a reviewer for significantly correcting an earlier version of the paper in which I took this to be the primary account of McGrath, and pressed objections about seemings transfers between seemings with the same level of content. Similar worries are mentioned by Lu Teng (ms).
On how to analyze non-conceptual-experience-to-seeming transitions, McGrath writes: “I am not sure how to answer this question.”.
If the process is not “inferential”, then the wishful mustard seeming will be receptive, and so a McGrath-esque account will agree with the traditionalist that it enjoys full justificatory power.
The putative analog would be inference from a belief with non-conceptual content to a belief with conceptual content. I am not aware of discussions of such inferences in the literature.
One intriguing proposal: the transition from a state with non-conceputal content, to a state with conceptual content, is very similar to the deployment of a concept. Perhaps we could see some cases of wishful seeing as involving an epistemically defective misapplication of a concept.
In this paper, I use "response to" and "relationship to" the evidence in closely related ways. A subject having a bad response to the evidence, and a subject’s belief having a bad relationship to the evidence, describe the same situation.
Siegel defines the Simple Evidentialist (SE) as holding the following normative principle: "a belief is well-founded or ill-founded, to the extent that its response to evidence is epistemically appropriate or inappropriate" (9).
Broadly speaking, a subject's propositional evidence for p is all of the evidence that she has that supports proposition p, whether or not the subject bases a belief that p on that evidence. For many evidentialists, a belief that p is doxastically justified if and only if it's based properly on good propositional evidence for p.
In Frankfurt cases, Black is often held to be irrelevant to how much we hold Jones responsible for a bad act. But in the Wishful S case, the question is whether we award Wishful S less of a good thing, justification. That being said, in Frankfurt cases in which someone does a good act, we still have the intuition that Black is irrelevant.
This is also a disanalogy between Lewis's censor case, which involves an external censor, and Siegel's case.
Or: differences in how his mental life is arranged, or differences in the functional arrangement of his mind. The precise story about Wishful's disposition may vary, but the upshot is the same—it is instantiated in different facts about him.
Thanks to Cameron Kirk-Giannini and Zoe Jenkin for pressing this point.
Again, you might suspect that Wishful S's appreciation of, or response to, the evidence must somehow be distorted by his wishful disposition, but both of these factors are stipulated to be identical between Wishful S and Perfect S. (They must be, in order to solve the "confound" problem).
You might also object that "control" even in the case of belief seems externalist: it describes the subject's tendency to track truth across a range of evidence. But this is not so. We can cash out "control" in the case of belief as the subject's tendency to respond properly to a set of evidence.
Siegel considers that perhaps it is resistance to distal stimuli and pre-experiential states (16). But given the aforementioned problems about positing these pre-experiential states, I’ll consider a potential route which spells out the resistance only via resistance to distal stimuli.
For an overview, see Tucker (2014).
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Acknowledgements
For written comments, thank you to Michael Huemer, Zoe Jenkin, Cameron Kirk-Giannini, and Matthew McGrath. Thanks to audiences at the Brandeis Student Speaker Series and the NYU-Columbia graduate conference. For many comments and much encouragement, thanks to Jessi Addison, Brett Chance, Alyssa Colby, Jenny Judge, Rachel Katler, Max Lewis, Phil Shannon, and Aarthy Vaidyanathan. For a team assist with copy-editing, many thanks to Carolina Flores, Zoë Johnson-King, and Elise Woodard. (Any typos are their fault.) For extensive conversation, thank you to Jeremy Fantl, EJ Green, Eli Hirsch, Eric Mandelbaum, Jerry Samet, Miriam Schoenfield, and Susanna Siegel.
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Long, R. How wishful seeing is not like wishful thinking. Philos Stud 175, 1401–1421 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-017-0917-2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-017-0917-2