Imperfect Cognitions

Today's post is by Lu Teng at NYU Shanghai on her recent paper “ Cognitive Penetration: Inference or Fabrication? ” (2021, Australasian Journal of Philosophy ). Lu Teng The cognitive penetrability of perception brings some new problems to the discussion of perceptual justification in epistemology. In the above case, if the subjects were cognitively penetrated to see an entirely grey banana as yellowish-grey, did this experience give them the same amount of justification for believing that the banana was yellowish-grey as an ordinary, non-penetrated yellowish-grey experience would normally give? Many philosophers maintain that the penetrated experience has less justificatory power, although it remains hotly debated why cognitive penetration makes the experience epistemically downgraded.  In my article “ Cognitive Penetration: Inference or Fabrication? ” I critically examine a prominent approach to the epistemology of cognitive penetration, according to which some cognitively p...

The Early Career Mind Network (ECMN) is a new initiative with the aim to establish a strong network of early career researchers in the philosophy of mind who do not yet have permanent positions in academic philosophy. On 27th to 28th April 2016 the University of Warwick hosted the first ECMN research forum , organised by Alisa Mandrigin. This blog post provides an overview of the research ideas explored by the researchers at the event. Tom McClelland spoke first on the Grand Illusion Hypothesis (GIH). According to the GIH, we overestimate how rich visual experience is outside of focal attention. McClelland described empirical findings showing that our visual systems compensate for the limits of attention by encoding information about the average features of groups or crowds. McClelland outlined precisely how findings relating to this ‘ensemble perception’ should be viewed as important to the GIH. He denied that the findings show that there is no Grand Illusion, but a...