Introduction

This volume explores questions not only related to traditional sensory perception, but also to proprioceptive, interoceptive, multisensory, and event perception, expanding traditional notions of the influence that conscious non-visual experience has on human behavior and rationality. Some essays investigate the role that emotions play in decision-making and agential perception and what this means for justifications of belief and knowledge; analyze the notion that some sensory experiences, such as touch, have epistemic privilege over others, as well as the relationship between perception and introspection, and the relationship between action perception and belief; and engage with topics in aesthetics and the philosophy of art, exploring the role that artworks can play in providing us with perceptional knowledge of emotions.

The Emotional Dimension to Sensory Perception

This chapter considers how we might understand the effect that emotions have on the justification of our perceptual beliefs about the world, beliefs that we acquire from a variety of sensory modalities—audition, gustation, olfaction, and so on. The chapter takes the problem to be associated with one of two forms of perceptual influence: penetration or multisensory integration. In any given perceptual moment there are multiple sensory modalities and mental states at play, each affecting the overall experience. Whether we understand the influence of emotion on perception as a form of non-perceptual penetration or a form of non-visual sensory perception of the inner body—interoception—the potential epistemological difficulties remain: How can we be said to acquire justified beliefs and knowledge on the basis of such influenced perceptual experience? As has been the norm, only the five exteroceptive senses of vision, audition, olfaction, taste, and touch are typically discussed in the context of sensory perception. However, as this chapter argues, there is strong reason to accept the claim that emotional experience is a form of interoception, and that interoception ought to be considered when discussing sensory perception. In this way, then, the chapter proposes that clarifying the role played by interoception in sense perception across modalities is necessary if we are to make progress on the epistemological problems at hand.

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.

How Reliably Misrepresenting Olfactory Experiences Justify True Beliefs

This chapter argues that olfactory experiences represent either everyday objects or ad hoc olfactory objects as having primitive olfactory properties, which happen to be uninstantiated. On this picture, olfactory experiences reliably misrepresent: they falsely represent everyday objects or ad hoc objects as having properties they do not have, and they misrepresent in the same way on multiple occasions. One might worry that this view is incompatible with the plausible claim that olfactory experiences at least sometimes justify true beliefs about the world. This chapter argues that there is no such incompatibility. Since olfactory experiences reliably misrepresent, they can lead to true and justified beliefs about putatively smelly objects.

The Perception of Virtue

It is not uncommon for people to like what they take as morally good. And often these feelings of esteem for virtue come prior to conscious cognitive appraisals about character. This chapter outlines a framework for understanding some emotional responses of esteem to perceived good character as representing the character traits as valuable, and hence, as virtues. It is proposed that these esteeming experiences are analogous to perceptual representations in other modalities in their epistemic role as causing, providing content for, and in justifying beliefs regarding the value of the traits they represent. The role of the perceiver’s own character in their ability to recognize and respond appropriately to virtue in others is also discussed. It is shown that moral virtues can also be epistemic virtues when it comes to facilitating knowledge about the character of people we encounter.

Hearing As

Nearly everything ever written by philosophers on aspect perception has been about vision. This chapter catalogs some views and lessons regarding “seeing as,” and argues that not all of them carry over to aspect perception in hearing. In particular, the attention theory, very attractive for the case of vision, is not plausible for hearing. Hearing-as plays at least two central roles in human life. The chapter continues by illustrating them. One is in the appreciation of music: tonality, the ambiguity exploited in harmonic modulation, and the expressing of emotion. The other is in understanding speech: hearing sounds as speech at all, disambiguating utterances, and assigning illocutionary force.

Tasting Flavors

Perceptual experience enables us to know features of objects in our environment. But what does the experience of tasting enable us to know? By tasting we discover the tastes of foods or liquids; but what are tastes? An objectivist sees tastes as properties of foods and drinks, which are there anyway, independent of how we experience them. On this view, tasting provides us with perceptual knowledge of real features of foods and liquids. By contrast, a subjectivist sees tastes as just features of our own experience: sensations on the tongue answerable to nothing other than themselves. Tastes, on this view, are not in the foods; rather foods give rise to tastes in us. A metaphysics of tastes that sees them not as properties of foods but as parts of our experience makes the epistemology of tasting an aspect of self-knowledge. Knowing how something tastes is being immediately aware of a certain sort of experience that occurs when we are eating or drinking. On this view, we can know all about tastes so long as we know all about our experience. However, this simple subjectivist story fails to do justice to the epistemology of tasting. The experiences generated when tasting are not unisensory but multisensory, though unified. They are perceptions of flavor and due to touch, taste, and smell. A satisfactory metaphysics and epistemology of flavor leaves room for flavors as configurations of sapid, odorous, and tactile properties of the food and liquids we consume.

Experiencing Emotions

This chapter provides an account of the basic emotions and their expression. Emotions are experiences that have the function of indicating how we are faring in our environment. Emotions are also objects of experience: our perceptual systems are sensitive to the expression of emotion in our environment by features that have the function of indicating emotions. Thus, we come to have to knowledge of emotions by perceptually representing properties that function to indicate them. The chapter applies this account to expression in art. What does it mean to say that an artwork expresses sadness? Is perceiving joy in an artwork the same kind of experience as perceiving joy in a friend’s face? How may artworks express emotions without having emotions? The chapter offers a representationalist account of the basic emotions on which exteroceptive and interoceptive systems combine to constitute a system whose states—emotions—indicate how we are faring. Building on the work of Dominic Lopes (2005) and Mitchell Green (2007), the chapter offers a teleosemantic account of emotional expression in art that is impersonal and continuous with a representationalist account of the basic emotions. Features in the environment express emotions even in conditions in which there is no person to whom the emotion is attributable. We experience emotions in two ways: we may have emotions, and we experience emotions as represented properties of the environment. In both cases, experiencing emotions is a matter of experiencing how things are in the world and thus provides perceptual knowledge.

Is Tactual Knowledge of Space Grounded in Tactual Sensation?

This chapter argues that while vision has only an objective aspect (e.g., we see the objects out there), touch has both subjective and an objective aspects. For example, one can feel a prickling sensation, that is, the subjective aspect of touch, and a pointed object out there, that is, an object aspect of touch. In light of this distinction, how can the claim that experience gives knowledge of our surroundings be understood in the case of touch experience? Unlike vision, one can hardly deny that there are tactile sensations, such as the bodily sensation one gets when a needle is injected in one’s arm. The question then is whether tactile sensations play an essential role in grounding our knowledge of the world. This chapter argues that even if we were to accept that the subjective aspect of touch is intrinsically spatial, we can still ask whether the knowledge we have from the objective aspect of touch is grounded in the knowledge that we have from its subjective aspect. Knowledge of our tactual sensations is grounded in our knowledge of our external environment, and consequently, the characteristics of our tactual sensations are grounded in our knowledge of our external environment. Whether consciousness is essential to our tactual knowledge of our surroundings is a separate matter. We can keep them separate by acknowledging that perceptual consciousness should not be analyzed in terms of sensation.

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.