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The Cognitive Penetrability of Perception

New Philosophical Perspectives

Athanassios Raftopoulos editor John Zeimbekis editor

Format:Hardback

Publisher:Oxford University Press

Published:2nd Jul '15

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The Cognitive Penetrability of Perception cover

According to the cognitive penetrability hypothesis, our beliefs, desires, and possibly our emotions literally affect how we see the world. This book elucidates the nature of the cognitive penetrability and impenetrability hypotheses, assesses their plausibility, and explores their philosophical consequences. It connects the topic's multiple strands (the psychological findings, computationalist background, epistemological consequences of cognitive architecture, and recent philosophical developments) at a time when the outcome of many philosophical debates depends on knowing whether and how cognitive states can influence perception. All sixteen chapters were written especially for the book. The first chapters provide methodological and conceptual clarification of the topic and give an account of the relations between penetrability, encapsulation, modularity, and cross-modal interactions in perception. Assessments of psychological and neuroscientific evidence for cognitive penetration are given by several chapters. Most of the contributions analyse the impact of cognitive penetrability and impenetrability on specific philosophical topics: high-level perceptual contents, the epistemological consequences of penetration, nonconceptual content, the phenomenology of late perception, metacognitive feelings, and action. The book includes a comprehensive introduction which explains the history of the debate, its key technical concepts (informational encapsulation, early and late vision, the perception-cognition distinction, hard-wired perceptual processing, perceptual learning, theory-ladenness), and the debate's relevance to current topics in the philosophy of mind and perception, epistemology, and philosophy of psychology.

... what this volume displays in spades, is that careful and creative work, both empirical and conceptual, continues to shine further light on and raise fruitful new questions regarding these fascinating topics. Steven Gross, Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews Online

ISBN: 9780198738916

Dimensions: 236mm x 169mm x 32mm

Weight: 832g

464 pages