Abstract
Morphological content is information that is implicitly embodied in the standing structure of a cognitive system and is automatically accommodated during cognitive processing without first becoming explicit in consciousness. We maintain that much belief-formation in human cognition is essentially morphological: i.e., it draws heavily on large amounts of morphological content, and must do so in order to tractably accommodate the holistic evidential relevance of background information possessed by the cognitive agent. We also advocate a form of experiential evidentialism concerning epistemic justification—roughly, the view that the justification-status of an agent’s beliefs is fully determined by the character of the agent’s conscious experience. We have previously defended both the thesis that much belief-formation is essentially morphological, and also a version of evidentialism. Here we explain how experiential evidentialism can be smoothly and plausibly combined with the thesis that much of the cognitive processing that generates justified beliefs is essentially morphological. The leading idea is this: even though epistemically relevant morphological content does not become explicit in consciousness during the process of belief-generation, nevertheless such content does affect the overall character of conscious experience in an epistemically significant way: it is implicit in conscious experience, and is implicitly appreciated by the experiencing agent.
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Notes
Does the morphological embodiment of an evidentially pertinent item of information I constitute a belief with content I? Often enough, we would maintain, the answer is yes. This means that the traditional dichotomy between occurrent beliefs and dispositional beliefs is not exhaustive (where a dispositional belief that p is construed, roughly, as a disposition to occurrently believe p in suitable elicitation circumstances). There are also morphological beliefs, which play a role in cognition by being automatically accommodated without becoming occurrent along the way (needless to say, one and the same belief type could get tokened, at different times in a creature’s life, in any or all of the three ways—sometimes occurrently, sometimes dispositionally, and sometimes morphologically).
The notion of epistemic justification sometimes can be appropriately deployed for deontic normative appraisal that is diachronic rather than synchronic, and sometimes can be deployed from a perspective that does not directly involve responsible epistemic agency. We take up these matters in Sect. 5 below.
It is conceivable that all pertinent background information is explicitly present in consciousness, in such a way that most of it simply is not noticed or attended to. But the burden of proof is on those who would seek to defend that alternative hypothesis.
The kind of intentional content (both explicit and implicit) that is supervenient on experience is narrow content. For a conception of narrow content that we ourselves would favor, see for instance Horgan et al. (2004).
What about the above-mentioned case of a partial-brain, envatted and only momentarily conscious, that lacks not only a body but also those parts of the brain that are the categorical basis for the relevant behavioral and cognitive dispositions? What seems right to say about this creature, at least roughly, is this: if it were a being of the kind its experience overtly represents it to be, embodied and en-worlded in the way its experience overly represents it to be, then it would have some kind of cognitive-architectural scaffolding that subserves some kind of suitable understanding-manifesting dispositions.
We again emphasize that the kind of implicit content we are talking about is narrow; cf. note 5.
Some or all implicitly present content presumably is subject to justificational appraisal itself, especially insofar as it qualifies as implicit belief. The coherentistic story extends to that too. Likewise, there can be epistemically unjustified implicit content too.
What we are calling a “beliefish” item of morphological content is something that we ourselves would consider a morphological belief; cf. note 2. But for present purposes it doesn’t matter whether or not it counts as a full-fledged belief, which is why we are using the alternative locution.
For further related discussion of Marr’s theory, including aspects of content that he ascribes to the visual system that could very well be embodied morphologically, see Henderson and Horgan (2000, forthcoming).
Our thanks to participants at the 2009 Bled conference on epistemology for helpful comments and feedback, especially David Henderson, Declan Smythies and Ernest Sosa—and also to Mark Timmons.
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Horgan, T., Potrč, M. The Epistemic Relevance of Morphological Content. Acta Anal 25, 155–173 (2010). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12136-010-0091-z
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12136-010-0091-z