Abstract
The aim of this paper is to argue that there is no unproblematic way of delineating perceptual beliefs from non-perceptual beliefs. The concept of perceptual belief is one of the central concepts not only of philosophy of perception but also of epistemology in a broad foundationalist tradition. Philosophers of perception talk about perceptual belief as the interface between perception and cognition and foundationalist epistemologists understand perceptual justification as a relation between perceptual states and perceptual beliefs. I consider three ways of cashing out the difference between perceptual and non-perceptual beliefs (semantic, justificatory, and etiological) and argue that none of them works. Finally, I explore the possibility of understanding perceptual justification without relying on the concept of perceptual beliefs.
| Original language | English (US) |
|---|---|
| Pages (from-to) | 93-105 |
| Number of pages | 13 |
| Journal | Analytic Philosophy |
| Volume | 64 |
| Issue number | 2 |
| DOIs | |
| State | Published - Jun 2023 |
All Science Journal Classification (ASJC) codes
- Philosophy
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In: Analytic Philosophy, Vol. 64, No. 2, 06.2023, p. 93-105.
Research output: Contribution to journal › Article › peer-review
TY - JOUR
T1 - Against the very idea of a perceptual belief
AU - Helton, Grace
AU - Nanay, Bence
N1 - Funding Information: This work was supported by the ERC Consolidator grant (726251), the FWF‐FWO grant (G0E0218N), and the FWO research grant (G0C7416N), all for Bence Nanay. Special thanks for comments by Jack Lyons, Harmen Gijsen, Peter Graham, Santiago Echeverri, Brandon Ashby, Denis Buehler, Jacob Berger, Gerardo Viera, Nick Wiltsher, Peter Fazekas, Craig French, Lu Teng, Patrick Butlin, Margot Strohminger, Laura Gow, Kevin Wallbridge, Peter Brossel, Francesco Marchi, Filippo Contesi, Brad Saad, Kris Goffin, and Laura Silva. We presented an earlier version of this paper at Central European University and at the University of Nijmegen, and we are grateful for feedback from these audiences. Funding Information: I analyzed the four most widespread ways of characterizing perceptual beliefs and argued that none of them can give us a plausible way of distinguishing perceptual beliefs from other beliefs. How should we revise the explanation of perceptual justification in the light of this? Perceptual states do justify beliefs. The perceptual state I am in right now likely justifies a lot of my beliefs about the laptop in front of me, the weather outside, and so on. But we do not need a distinctive category of perceptual belief in order to make sense of perceptual justification. Theories of perceptual justification have focused too much on perceptual beliefs as the gateway from perception to belief. My aim was to shift the discussion of perceptual justification away from the problematic concept of perceptual belief and towards the more straightforward relation between perceptual states and beliefs (perceptual or non-perceptual). This way of thinking about justification would be consistent with coherentism, but it would also be consistent with the general idea of foundationalism – the idea that beliefs are justified by some epistemically basic mental states: perceptual states. There are two ways in which such a foundationalist explanation of perceptual justification could go. The first one would replace the two-tier explanation (perceptual states ➔ perceptual beliefs; perceptual beliefs ➔ non-perceptual beliefs) with a one-tier explanation (perceptual states ➔ beliefs). No need to postulate any perceptual beliefs here, but this explanatory scheme also somewhat underspecifies how perceptual justification works. I want to end this paper by exploring a more specific explanatory scheme that is foundationalist in spirit but does not rely on any of the distinctions between perceptual and non-perceptual beliefs I argued against in this paper. I argued that there is no unproblematic way of keeping perceptual and non-perceptual beliefs apart, but it does not follow from this argument that we cannot make sense of beliefs being more or less perceptual. And as long as we allow for more or less perceptual beliefs, we can give a foundationalist explanation of perceptual justification. This way of proceeding is structurally similar to a move in the metaphysics of natural properties. David Lewis famously argued that there is “an adequate theory of properties is one that recognizes an objective difference between natural and unnatural properties” (Lewis, 1983, p. 347, see also Lewis, 1984, 1986). Natural properties are “an élite minority of special properties” (Lewis, 1983, p. 346) among the plebs of abundant properties. After decades of debates about various problems with various ways of drawing the distinction between this “an élite minority of special properties” and the rest, it has been argued that we should just give up on them while still allowing that there is an objective distinction between more natural and less natural properties (Hawthorne, 2006, p. 235, n. 24, Dorr & Hawthorne, 2013, but see also Nanay, 2014). Naturalness comes in degrees. Some properties are more natural than others. But there are no maximally natural properties – there is no distinction between “an élite minority of special properties” and the rest. We can apply the very same strategy to the distinction between the “élite minority” of beliefs, namely, perceptual beliefs, and the rest of the beliefs while holding onto an objective distinction between more perceptual and less perceptual beliefs. The arguments I presented in the previous three sections aimed to establish that there is no unproblematic way of identifying the set of beliefs that would count as perceptual beliefs and keep these apart from the rest of the beliefs that would count as non-perceptual. But none of my arguments established that beliefs could not be more or less perceptual. Especially when it comes to the arguments in Section 3 (about justificatory approaches) and Section 4 (about etiological approaches), it was very much an open possibility that the perceptualness of beliefs comes in degrees. But if beliefs can be more or less perceptual, then a broad foundationalist approach to perceptual justification is not restricted to the choice between the two-step model of justification I argued against (perceptual states ➔ perceptual beliefs; perceptual beliefs ➔ non-perceptual beliefs) and the one-tier explanation (perceptual states ➔ beliefs), which is somewhat unspecific. A broadly foundationalist approach to perceptual justification could work with a multi-step model, whereby more perceptual beliefs justify less perceptual beliefs. This way of thinking about perceptual justification would preserve the spirit of the original foundationalist explanatory scheme but without relying on the problematic concept of perceptual belief. In short, if my argument is correct, this is not a reason to reject foundationalism wholesale. But it is a reason to reject any version of foundationalism that takes perceptual beliefs to play a crucial role in understanding perceptual justification.9This work was supported by the ERC Consolidator grant (726251), the FWF-FWO grant (G0E0218N), and the FWO research grant (G0C7416N), all for Bence Nanay. Special thanks for comments by Jack Lyons, Harmen Gijsen, Peter Graham, Santiago Echeverri, Brandon Ashby, Denis Buehler, Jacob Berger, Gerardo Viera, Nick Wiltsher, Peter Fazekas, Craig French, Lu Teng, Patrick Butlin, Margot Strohminger, Laura Gow, Kevin Wallbridge, Peter Brossel, Francesco Marchi, Filippo Contesi, Brad Saad, Kris Goffin, and Laura Silva. We presented an earlier version of this paper at Central European University and at the University of Nijmegen, and we are grateful for feedback from these audiences. This work was supported by the ERC Consolidator grant (726251), the FWF-FWO grant (G0E0218N), and the FWO research grant (G0C7416N), all for Bence Nanay. Special thanks for comments by Jack Lyons, Harmen Gijsen, Peter Graham, Santiago Echeverri, Brandon Ashby, Denis Buehler, Jacob Berger, Gerardo Viera, Nick Wiltsher, Peter Fazekas, Craig French, Lu Teng, Patrick Butlin, Margot Strohminger, Laura Gow, Kevin Wallbridge, Peter Brossel, Francesco Marchi, Filippo Contesi, Brad Saad, Kris Goffin, and Laura Silva. We presented an earlier version of this paper at Central European University and at the University of Nijmegen, and we are grateful for feedback from these audiences. Publisher Copyright: © 2022 The Authors. Analytic Philosophy published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd.
PY - 2023/6
Y1 - 2023/6
N2 - The aim of this paper is to argue that there is no unproblematic way of delineating perceptual beliefs from non-perceptual beliefs. The concept of perceptual belief is one of the central concepts not only of philosophy of perception but also of epistemology in a broad foundationalist tradition. Philosophers of perception talk about perceptual belief as the interface between perception and cognition and foundationalist epistemologists understand perceptual justification as a relation between perceptual states and perceptual beliefs. I consider three ways of cashing out the difference between perceptual and non-perceptual beliefs (semantic, justificatory, and etiological) and argue that none of them works. Finally, I explore the possibility of understanding perceptual justification without relying on the concept of perceptual beliefs.
AB - The aim of this paper is to argue that there is no unproblematic way of delineating perceptual beliefs from non-perceptual beliefs. The concept of perceptual belief is one of the central concepts not only of philosophy of perception but also of epistemology in a broad foundationalist tradition. Philosophers of perception talk about perceptual belief as the interface between perception and cognition and foundationalist epistemologists understand perceptual justification as a relation between perceptual states and perceptual beliefs. I consider three ways of cashing out the difference between perceptual and non-perceptual beliefs (semantic, justificatory, and etiological) and argue that none of them works. Finally, I explore the possibility of understanding perceptual justification without relying on the concept of perceptual beliefs.
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85141368812&partnerID=8YFLogxK
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/citedby.url?scp=85141368812&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1111/phib.12277
DO - 10.1111/phib.12277
M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:85141368812
SN - 2153-9596
VL - 64
SP - 93
EP - 105
JO - Analytic Philosophy
JF - Analytic Philosophy
IS - 2
ER -