A new way up from empirical foundations

Abstract

Much of what we believe is justified by what we perceive. There are, no doubt, various ways in which a perception may justify a belief, depending on the perception and subsequent belief. This justificatory network is the joint concern of philosophy and cognitive psychology, each borrowing concepts from the other to serve its theoretical needs. (See [9], [10], and [26]). I propose a new philosophical model for perception, framed in the context of a version of direct realism, according to which the justificatory relation between perceptions of objects' sensible attributes and beliefs about their kinds is essentially cognitive. It is predicated on the assumption that inference is not the only justificatory cognitive process suitable for generating beliefs from perceptions. Accordingly, the present theory is an alternative to those of Stich [25] and Harman [12], while in league with the views of Clark [4], [5], [6], and [7] and Gibson [8]. Perception, I argue, can be construed as a kind of reading, and the model of the connection tethering a perception and a belief it justifies is the relation between a text and what the text represents. To defend this thesis it is necessary first to characterize several features of perception, second to construct in detail a model revealing the isomorphisms between perception and reading, and finally to show that the model applies to various philosophically important perceptual phenomena.