Experience as Discrete
Josefa Toribio Mateas  1, *@  
1 : Institució Catalana de Recerca i Estudis Avançats [Barcelona]  (ICREA)  -  Site web
Passeig Lluís Companys, 23 08010 Barcelona - Espanya -  Espagne
* : Auteur correspondant

The question of whether perception is continuous with cognition is in the limelight again. Although the answer to this question is empirical, there are important philosophical issues at stake: is observation theory-neutral? Do our beliefs, expectations, fears and emotions influence our perceptual experiences? And if they do, is this a threat to the general epistemological role of perception?

In this talk I approach the topic of the continuity of perception and cognition by focussing on a conditional argument involving the continuity thesis and the so-called “rich view” about the content of visual experience. According to the rich view, we can visually represent high-level properties such as being a pine tree, being breakable or being sad. The conditional claim I discuss is the following: if the content of visual experience is rich, then visual experience is continuous with cognition, i.e., visual experience is cognitively penetrable.

In the talk, I remain neutral on the empirical issue of whether or not visual experience or early vision processing is indeed cognitively penetrable. I argue, however, that the very same set of criteria that helps establishing the genuine sensory nature of our visual representations of (some) high-level properties makes the transition from the rich view to the continuity thesis problematic.


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