Abstract
Some philosophers claim that perception immediately and prima facie justifies belief in virtue of its phenomenal character (Huemer, Skepticism and the veil of perception. Rowman & Littlefield, Lanham, 2001; Pryor, There is immediate justification. In: Steup M, Sosa E (eds) Contemporary debates in epistemology. Blackwell, London (2014), pp. 181–202, 2005). To explain this special justificatory power, some appeal to perception’s presentational character: the idea that perceptual experience presents its objects as existing here-and-now (Chudnoff, Intuition. Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2013; Berghofer, Husserl Stud 34(2):145–170, 2018). As some philosophers have noted, if perception justifies in virtue of its presentational character alone, the kind of content perception has should not matter for perceptual justification; more precisely, it should not matter whether perceptual content is propositional or not (e.g., Smithies, The epistemic role of consciousness. Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2019; Kriegel, Australas J Philos, 2021. https://doi.org/10.1080/00048402.2021.1978513). However, most philosophers tend to resist this conclusion, holding that perception must be propositional in order to justify, on the ground that all our model of justification are propositional (e.g., Gauker, Philos Perspect 26(1):19–50, 2012). This paper challenges this claim. The paper consists of a negative and a positive part. In the negative part, I discuss and reject the master argument for the propositionality of perception; the conclusion is that propositional content is neither sufficient nor necessary to explain perception’s justificatory power. In the positive part, I take this conclusion seriously and outline an objectual model of perceptual justification. I define objectual attitudes as mental states whose content is not a full proposition, but a sub-propositional representational item, such as the representation of objects, properties, and kinds (Grzankowski and Montague, Non-propositional intentionality. Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2018), and show that it is plausible that some perceptions and some beliefs are attitudes of this kind. I then argue that objectual perceptual experiences have the right kind of phenomenal character and the right kind of structure to serve for immediate prima facie justification. I conclude by defending my objectual model from three objections.
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Notes
The epistemic dispensability of belief for knowledge of things occurs also in Duncan’s (2020) representationalist version, in which knowledge of things is constituted by veridical representational “awareness” states. However, while it is clear how belief can be dispensable in acquaintance-based accounts of perceptual knowledge because direct contact with objects in the world has epistemic priority, it is not clear to me that belief is similarly dispensable in representationalist accounts. In fact, I believe that only an appeal to some doxastic component of perceptual experience (i.e., a belief, belief-component, or assertoric character) can fully explain the distinctive character of perceptual experience and its special epistemic role in our mental economy, as well as the relation between the two (Martin, 2002, p. 387ff.). I discuss this in Sect. 3.
These remarks might remind the reader of Dretske’s distinction between fact- and object-seeing (Drestske, 1979). However, there are important differences between my account in this paper and Husserl’s and Dretske’s proposals. The first lies in the fact that both Husserl’s and Dretske’s simple seeing are thoroughly non-epistemic. Husserl writes that simple seeing cannot be part of a judgment because judging is a complex of naming and predicating; vice versa, no judgment can include a perception, because judgment is essentially non-intuitive (Husserl, 2001; cf. Mulligan, 1995, pp. 171–172). Dretske claims that simple seeing O is compatible with having no beliefs about O (1979, p. 100). Both stances are incompatible with the thesis that I shall defend in this paper, namely that seeing O is compatible only with having no prior beliefs about O; seeing O comes with (posterior) beliefs in O. This will become clearer later in the text. A second important difference is that Dretske’s simple seeing is de re, while my objectual seeing, qua a representational state, is not (see also Mulligan, 1995 for a naïve realistic interpretation of Husserl’s simple seeing).
The exclamation mark is a typographic expedient I use to denote the assertoric character of perception. On the notion of assertoric force, see the next sections.
Notice that Duncan must understand veridicality as equivalent to Crane’s idea of accuracy—or else, the second clause of veridicality (that Q/O is instantiated/present “as it’s represented”) would generate a truth-evaluable context; that is, it must be possible that an awareness state represents things more or less veridically without representing them in a truth evaluable manner.
Following Firth (1978), it is customary to distinguish two senses in which experiences can epistemically justify belief: propositional and doxastic justification. A belief is propositionally justified when subjects have justification to hold the belief, whether or not the subject actually holds it; a belief is doxastically justified when a subject holds a belief in a justified way.
“Only things with sentential structure can be premises of inference” (Brandom, 1997, p. 128). These propositions can also be unstructured, as in Stalnaker’s account (1984); but this view has had historically less fortune in the philosophy of perception compared to the view of propositions as structured entities.
The propositionalist has three possible replies. (i) They can commit to a thesis for which all mental states, including pain, have propositional content; but they must give an independent argument for it (see Echeverri, 2013 for this objection). (ii) They can bite the bullet and argue that, if there are non-propositional mental states, these cannot play any justificatory role; this move narrows the scope of the propositionalist thesis and, most problematically, leaves out states that can plausibly justify, such as pain (ibid.). (iii) They can argue that it is the fact of my being in pain that justifies my belief of being in pain. (iii) Is in my opinion the strongest reply, but it does not work either. It seems wrong to say that what we perceive are facts; we judge that something is a fact; but what is the fact we judge or ‘take in’ when undergoing an illusion or when hallucinating? (Crane, 2006, p. 464).
I than an anonymous reviewer for pushing me on this point. See also Pryor (2005, pp. 194–195).
On the epistemic role of conscious perception vis-à-vis blindsight, see Smithies (2019, p. 76ff.).
I am indebted to Mark Textor for this point.
I will soon expose at length the characteristics of this model. But to give some initial plausibility to the claim, consider that objectual beliefs are not a novelty in the philosophical debate. Szabó (2003) is a classical place to start to find arguments against the reductive propositionalist analysis of belief-in statements.
To be more precise, Brentano talks of “presentation” (Vorstellung), “the fundamental way of being conscious of an object” (Crane, 2006, p. 45). The term has various translations, such as ‘representation’, ‘idea’, ‘presentation’, or ‘content’.
A sense that is customary also among other philosophers such as Frege and Quine.
Recall that because I write the forces of each state in their attitude component, the content of each attitude is simply \(\langle {\text{O}}\rangle\) and does not specify the force nor the kind of attitude. For the opposite view, i.e., that one can read psychological kinds off representational contents, see Montague (2022).
As I understand him, Evans proposes something along these lines in his explanation of how a subject can consciously access their sub-personal informational states. This passage, according to Evans, requires conceptualization. But we should not let this fact “obscure” the general picture: “a subject can gain knowledge of his internal informational states in a very simple way: by re-using precisely those skills of conceptualization that he uses to make judgements about the world” (1982, p. 227). I think we should accept the spirit of Evans’s remark independently of his reliabilist view; in other words, we do not need to postulate special conceptual skills to explain the passage from non-conceptual, non-propositional, to conceptual and propositional content.
It is difficult to say what demonstrative concepts are, not only because the literature about demonstrative concepts is controversial, but also because there is no agreement as to what concepts are. McDowell (1994) famously invokes demonstrative concepts to reply to the non-conceptualist argument that one’s conceptual capacities are by far overcome by one’s discriminatory capacities, and thus must be concept-independent (Evans, 1992). Against McDowell, Kelly (2001) maintains that demonstrative concepts are not genuine concepts as they do not allow the re-identification over time of the same perceptual item; I later quote Speaks (2005), who suggests that this may not be an essential feature of conceptual capacities (see also Camp, 2009). See also Levine (2010) for discussion about the misuse of demonstrative concepts in the case of experiential conceptualism (which I discuss in the next footnote), phenomenal concepts and concept acquisition.
Levine (2010) suggests a theory of mental demonstratives (the mental equivalent of linguistic demonstratives) as directly referential semantic mechanisms, whose semantic values are the objects in the world they refer to or some features of them. Against McDowell’s experiential conceptualism, he maintains that if mental demonstratives are so, then they could not be concepts themselves nor ways of conceptualizing, but simply mental ‘pointers’ directed at some part of an already existing perceptual representation singled out in attention. I am sympathetic to the proposal because if mental demonstrative are not concepts but primitive mental functions that allow the subject to have thoughts about what they perceive, they can be freely ascribed to non-propositional thinking creatures. But while they might not be concepts themselves, I do not see why they could not be thought of ways of conceptualizing, if they serve “to incorporate the content of the perceptual representation into the thought of which it is a constituent” (Levine, 2010, p. 190–191) and if, following Speaks, to say that a creature has a demonstrative concept of F is just to say that it can have thoughts about F.
On loosening up our criteria of concept ascription, see Camp (2009).
Kriegel (2023) has recently developed a similar strategy.
This strategy is already discussed by Brentano: “Similarly, an acceptance of an object given in sensation, which is disapproved of by a higher judgement, could persist. Indeed, it is not at all clear, how the lower activity should be changed in its intrinsic character because of the occurrence of the higher activity; if the lower activity had a relation of acceptance to the outer object before, it will have it later” (Brentano 1903, p. 26. Trans. by Textor in Textor, 2007).
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Acknowledgements
Previous versions of this paper have been presented at the Vienna Language and Mind Workshop, the 2021 London Graduate Philosophy Conference and the 2022 SoPhA Workshop for Young Researchers at the University of Geneva; I thank the audience for their useful insights. I would also like to thank Tim Crane, Kerem Eroglu, Katalin Farkas, and Mark Textor for their help and guidance. Finally, I am grateful to four anonymous reviewers, whose thorough and patient comments have sensibly improved this paper.
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The research supporting this article was partly sponsored by Central European University Foundation of Budapest (CEUBPF). The theses explained herein represent the ideas of the author, and do not necessarily reflect the views of CEUBPF.
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Martinis, V. Perceptual justification and objectual attitudes. Synthese 203, 165 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-024-04597-w
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-024-04597-w