Preceded by a pre-talk for graduate students, 1:30PM Benjamin Library

Please let Justin know if you'd like to come to dinner following the talk.

Proponents of the cognitive penetration thesis – the view that cognitive states influence the contents of perception – take the truth of the thesis to have wide-ranging import, impacting such issues as perceptual justification, theory neutrality, modularity, and even implicit bias. But often no clear view is posited of what distinguishes cognition and perception in the first place, and statements of what relationship between them is supposed to be under debate are vague at best.

In this talk, I “deflate” the debate about cognitive penetration. First, I will argue that given one well-motivated way of drawing the distinction, cognition cannot effect specific changes to the contents of perceptual states, because cognition and perception involve distinct formats of representation. While cognitive and perceptual states can interact, these interactions are diffuse, probabilistic, and associationist, rather than directed, specific, and computational. I then expand the discussion to diachronic perceptual learning. I argue that there are effects of social instruction and feedback on perceptual category learning, but the effects of beliefs in these cases are best explained as causal precursors to a purely perceptual learning process.

Ultimately, I contend, the relationships that we do have strong reason to believe exist between cognition and perception do not motivate the philosophical conclusions that some have posited, and to the extent that these conclusions are true independently, we do not need cognitive penetration to explain them. That is, we should feel free to stop talking about cognitive penetration.