Post-perceptual confidence and supervaluative matching profile

Abstract

ABSTRACT Issues concerning the putative perception/cognition divide are not only age-old, but also resurface in contemporary discussions in various forms. In this paper, I connect a relatively new debate concerning perceptual confidence to the perception/cognition divide. The term ‘perceptual confidence’ is quite common in the empirical literature, but there is an unsettled question about it, namely: are confidence assignments perceptual or post-perceptual? John Morrison in two recent papers puts forward the claim that confidence arises already at the level of perception. In this paper, I first argue that Morrison’s case is unconvincing, and then develop one picture on perceptual precision with the notion of ‘matching profile’ (Peacocke, C. 1986. “The Inaugural Address: Analogue Content.” Aristotelian Society Supplementary 60: 1–18) and ‘supervaluation’ (Van Fraassen, B. 1966. “Singular Terms, Truth-value Gaps, and Free Logic.” The Journal of Philosophy 63 (17): 481–495.), highlighting the fact that this is a vagueness account, which is similar to but importantly different from indeterminacy accounts (e.g. Stazicker, J. 2011. “Attention, Visual Consciousness and Indeterminacy.” Mind and Language 26 (2): 156–184.). With this model in hand, there can be rich resources with which to draw a theoretical line between perception and cognition.