The epistemic significance of perceptual learning

Abstract

First impressions suggest the following contrast between perception and memory: perception generates new beliefs and reasons, justification, or evidence for those beliefs; memory preserves old beliefs and reasons, justification, or evidence for those beliefs. In this paper, I argue that reflection on perceptual learning gives us reason to adopt an alternative picture on which perception plays both generative and preservative epistemic roles.

Keywords:

• Perceptual justification
• perceptual learning
• perceptual content
• immediate justification
• inference
• memory

Notes

¹ It is more common to talk about low and high level properties than low and high level propositions. Here I am using ‘low level proposition’ to mean proposition that just attributes low-level properties and ‘high level proposition’ to mean proposition that attributes high level properties. I am assuming that properties are presented in, or attributed by, an experience in virtue of figuring in a propositional content of that experience. I expect that the main points I am arguing in this paper can be detached from this assumption, but I will not take up that project here.

² That we can observe this in some cases does not imply that for any case in which we form a belief in response to an experience we can tell by self observation, i.e. introspection, whether we are doing so just by taking the experience at face value. If this were so then debates about the contents of experience would be easier than they in fact are.

³ Silins has personally communicated that in his considered judgment the assumption is false, and has pointed out other papers (Silins 2008, 2011) in which he adopts positions incompatible with it.

⁴ One might wonder whether what changes is how subjects attend to stimulus variables rather than which perceptual contents are cued by stimulus variables (cf. Connolly 2014). I do not have space to discuss fully this issue here. Briefly, however, I’d say there might be both changes and the changes in how subjects attend to stimulus variable might be part of the explanation of why there are changes in which perceptual contents are cued by stimulus variables. This is compatible with Connolly’s specific criticisms of phenomenal contrast arguments.

⁵ This is an empirical conjecture on my part. An experiment testing it is easy enough to design, and I’d be very interested in the results.

⁶ For a forceful set of relevant arguments targeting preservative views of memory, one of which is analogous to the argument from cases considered below, see Frise 2016.