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Abstract
Perceptual experiences justify beliefs. A perceptual experience of a dog justifies the belief that there is a dog present. But there is much evidence that perceptual states can occur without being conscious, as in experiments involving masked priming. Do unconscious perceptual states provide justification as well? The answer depends on one’s theory of justification. While most varieties of externalism seem compatible with unconscious perceptual justification, several theories have recently afforded to consciousness a special role in perceptual justification. We argue that such views face a dilemma: either consciousness should be understood in functionalist terms, in which case our best current theories of consciousness do not seem to imbue consciousness with any special epistemic features, or it should not, in which case it is mysterious why only conscious states are justificatory. We conclude that unconscious perceptual justification is quite plausible.
Acknowledgements
We thank Ralph Baergen, Zoe Jenkin, David Pereplyotchik, Lu Teng, and Josh Weisberg for their helpful comments on drafts of this paper.
Notes
* Authors are in alphabetical order – they contributed equally to the paper.
1 Some (e.g. Smithies Citation2011) have the intuition that there is no epistemic justification in cases like this. This is not an intuition we share, but our arguments below don’t hang on it; we mention P.S. to get a concrete case and the table and (hopefully) pump the reader’s intuitions in our favor. Byrne (Citation2016) argues that granting justification in such cases threatens to render conscious experience epistemically inert, but in so doing he seems to assume that unconscious perceptual states are subpersonal rather than type identical to conscious perceptual states. He therefore seems not to make room for genuine personal-level perception that occurs unconsciously (e.g. 2016, 964). As noted in the next paragraph, we assume the opposite.
2 We restrict our attention to the question of unconscious perceptual justification. While it is plausible that there are unconscious beliefs (see, e.g. Strick et al. Citation2011; Mandelbaum Citation2014), we will not investigate here the issue of whether or not unconscious beliefs provide justification.
3 Of course, one might also endorse the view that unconscious perceptual states provide more justification than perceptual experiences, but we set this view (defended by, e.g. Strick et al. Citation2011) aside for the purposes of this paper.
4 Another example is Susanna Siegel (Citation2017), who develops a version of internalism on which unconscious mental states and processes can play a direct role in conferring or downgrading the epistemic status of perception. And though her notion of the ‘epistemic charge’ of perception is typically formulated in terms of perceptual experiences (Citation2017, 41), she also argues that unconscious perceptual states can be epistemically charged (101ff). Her discussion focuses on ‘pre-conscious’ (101) states that cause or become conscious perceptual experiences rather than unconscious outputs of perceptual processing that affect cognition directly (i.e. without causing an intervening conscious perceptual experience). The latter is our primary interest. As we read Siegel, her internalism about perceptual justification is neutral between saying that unconscious perceptual states confer justification directly upon beliefs or whether they only do so by causing conscious perceptual experiences that then justify beliefs. Siegel does argue that unconscious beliefs can transfer epistemic charge (102) and that unconscious perceptual states are ‘plausibly epistemic resources all along’ even when not accessed by the subject (103). These theses seem to suggest that an unconscious perceptual state could in principle directly justify beliefs. In any case, as we shall see, our claim that unconscious perception has epistemic force is meant to argue explicitly that unconscious perception can justify beliefs independently of consciousness. We intend to remain neutral on whether the unconscious processes that deliver personal-level perceptual states are themselves epistemically evaluable (cf. Siegel Citation2017, chapter 3).
5 Some theorists even build consciousness into their characterizations of rationality, thereby begging the question at hand. Benj Hellie, for example, proposes that ‘the core notion of rationality is something like manifest coherence of the stream of consciousness’ (Citation2011, 111). Though we will not offer a full characterization of rationality or justification here, we assume a suitably neutral characterization that would at least open the possibility of unconscious perceptual justification. Indeed, Hellie’s characterization of rationality is questionable; one could argue that rationality requires only manifest coherence in the stream of one’s mental states, not necessarily consciousness (see, e.g. Berger Citation2014b). One could also question whether ‘manifest coherence’ is even necessary for rationality (e.g. Egan Citation2008).
6 As we shall see, though we are skeptical that consciousness plays any role at all in justification, we remain neutral here regarding whether or not it plays some role.
7 The phenomenalist might of course insist that there is some sort of non-causal explanation for the justificatory asymmetry between conscious and unconscious perceptual states, but it is difficult for us to see what sort of explanation that might be – especially in the case of biological phenomena – and we find no such explanation in the in the phenomenalism literature. Thus the burden would be on the phenomenalist to defend such an account (rather than leaving this alleged asymmetry unexplained).
8 As noted above, our primary concern is to argue that unconscious perception provides propositional justification, and some arguments below allow for the possibility that unconscious perception may not suffice for doxastic justification due to contingent features of mental architecture. However, the points just made about P.S. suggest to us that not only does unconscious perception provide propositional justification, it can cause and doxastically justify beliefs as well.
9 Some variants of the HO approach maintain that the relevant awareness is intrinsic to conscious states (e.g. Kriegel Citation2009); we set these accounts aside for the purposes of this paper.
10 Indeed, on standard HO theories, it is far from clear that the HO states in virtue of which perceptual states are conscious represent those first-order states as reasons. On a standard HOT version of the view, HOTs are theorized simply to make one aware of being in those states as perceptual states: they are simple thoughts such as ‘I see red,’ not more complex thoughts such as ‘I have a perceptual reason to believe that there is red.’ It is thus arguable that a creature would need additional abilities, beyond the ability to be in conscious perceptual states, to further represent those states as reasons. On this more demanding view, then, it is arguable that perceptual experiences alone would not provide justification. That is to say, endorsing this strong kind of internalism (coupled with a HO theory of consciousness) may even undermine dogmatism.
11 Another problem with this proposal is that there is a lot of experimental evidence that determinate contents can be unconscious (basically all the findings about unconscious perceptual state are of unconscious determinate perceptual states, see Koch and Tsuchiya Citation2007; Kentridge Citation2011).