Abstract
In this essay I survey some recent empirical findings in vision science and show how they matter for philosophical issues in the epistemology of perception. First, I draw on some data which suggest that our visual system is a bull-shitter. Typically we call someone a bull-shitter when they don't care about whether what they say is true or false, they just care about some other goal – such as winning the argument. The bull-shitter will say some true things and some false things as long as they satisfy a truth-irrelevant end. Similarly, some empirical work suggests that the visual system, for truth-irrelevant evolutionary purposes, presents us with mostly illusory experiences which, while accurately conveying to us that an object is present, inaccurately attribute some properties to an object. Like the bull-shitter, the visual system presents us with partially accurate and partially inaccurate experiences for truth-irrelevant reasons. I then discuss what we would be justified in believing on the basis of our perceptual experiences, if our visual system is a bull-shitter.
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