Phenomenal Explanationism’s Global Ambitions

This chapter further elucidates PE by explaining how it applies to multiple domains. Though the preceding chapter already touches upon some of these, here it is cashed out how PE can account for perceptual justification, memorial justification, testimonial justification, introspective justification, and a priori justification. Exploring the contours of PE in this way reveals just how powerful and unified the theory is. Along the way, it is argued that Declan Smithies’ forceful objections to PC fail to impugn PE. Additionally, it is shown that PE has the resources to respond to each of the challenges that Smithies claims are faced by any internalist theory with “global ambitions”––any theory that purports to be a comprehensive account of epistemic justification. (These challenges for instance include the problem of forgotten evidence and the problem of stored beliefs.) The discussion in this chapter makes it clear that PE is a comprehensive account of epistemic justification that achieves its global ambitions.

Perceptual justification in the Bayesian brain: a foundherentist account

In this paper, I use the predictive processing (PP) theory of perception to tackle the question of how perceptual states can be rationally involved in cognition by justifying other mental states. I put forward two claims regarding the epistemological implications of PP. First, perceptual states can confer justification on other mental states because the perceptual states are themselves rationally acquired. Second, despite being inferentially justified rather than epistemically basic, perceptual states can still be epistemically responsive to the mind-independent world. My main goal is to elucidate the epistemology of perception already implicit in PP. But I also hope to show how it is possible to peacefully combine central tenets of foundationalist and coherentist accounts of the rational powers of perception while avoiding the well-recognized pitfalls of either.

Reasons First?

Chapter 12 summarizes and brings together the key lessons of the book. It contrasts the accounts developed in Parts II, III, and IV of the structure perceptual justification, the role of evidence, and the nature of knowledge with some of their prominent competitors. The chief morals of Part IV are combined with the chief morals of each of Parts II and III, and it is shown that the resulting combinations have strengths that go beyond the strengths of each package considered separately. And finally, morals are drawn for the ultimate prospects of the idea that reasons come first.

Multimodal Mental Imagery and Perceptual Justification

There has been a lot of discussion about how the cognitive penetrability of perception may or may not have important implications for understanding perceptual justification. The aim of this chapter is to argue that a different set of findings in perceptual psychology poses an even more serious challenge to the very idea of perceptual justification. These findings are about the importance of perceptual processing that is not driven by corresponding sensory stimulation in the relevant sense modality (such as amodal completion and multimodal completion). These findings show that everyday perception is in fact a mixture of sensory-stimulation-driven perceptual processing and perceptual processing that is not driven by corresponding sensory stimulation in the relevant sense modality and that we have strong reasons to doubt the epistemic pedigree of the latter process. The implication of this is not that we should become skeptics or deny the possibility of perceptual justification. It is, rather, that the only way in which we can understand when and whether a perceptual state justifies beliefs is by paying close attention to empirical facts about the reliability of perceptual processing that is not driven by corresponding sensory stimulation in the relevant sense modality. In this sense (a very narrow sense) epistemology needs to be naturalized.

Sensory Interactions and the Epistemology of Haptic Touch

This chapter addresses the issue of perceptual justification from the perspective of haptic touch. Touch raises a number of difficulties for traditional accounts of perceptual epistemology, since it involves a heterogenous collection of distinct sensory subsystems that must coordinate their activities and it essentially involves forms of emotional and bodily awareness that only derivatively provide information about features of the external world. These features suggest an epistemically interesting layer of sensory interaction that should be included in any plausible account of the justifying role of perceptual experience. The chapter argues that this layer of interaction, while perhaps more readily apparent in touch than in vision, is in fact ubiquitous in perception generally, and should be taken seriously by everyone working on the epistemology of perception.

Entitlement, Epistemic Risk, and Scepticism

Crispin Wright maintains that the architecture of perceptual justification is such that we can acquire justification for our perceptual beliefs only if we have antecedent justification for ruling out any sceptical alternative. Wright contends that this principle doesn't elicit scepticism, for we are non-evidentially entitled to accept the negation of any sceptical alternative. Sebastiano Moruzzi has challenged Wright's contention by arguing that since our non-evidential entitlements don't remove the epistemic risk of our perceptual beliefs, they don't actually enable us to acquire justification for these beliefs. In this paper I show that Wright's responses to Moruzzi are ineffective and that Moruzzi's argument is validated by probabilistic reasoning. I also suggest that Wright couldn't answer Moruzzi's challenge without weakening the support available for his conception of the architecture of perceptual justification.

Plenty of room left for the Dogmatist

Barnett (2019) provides an interesting new challenge for Dogmatist accounts of perceptual justification. The challenge is that such accounts, by accepting that a perceptual experience can provide a distinctive kind of boost to one’s credences, would lead to a form of diachronic irrationality in cases where one has already learnt in advance that one will have such an experience. I show that this challenge rests on a misleading feature of using the 0–1 interval to express probabilities and show that if we switch to using Odds or (better) Log-Odds, the misleading appearance that there is only ‘a little room’ for one’s credences to increase evaporates. Moreover, there are familiar, independent reasons for taking the Log-Odds scale to provide a clearer picture of the confirmatory effect of evidence. Thus the Dogmatist can after all escape the charge of diachronic irrationality.