Oslo Mind, Language and Epistemology Network Seminar: Anders Nes, The Roots of Perceptual Privilege

By 'Perceptual Privilege’ (PP) I here intend a certain epistemic privilege perception seems to enjoy over extra-perceptual cognitive capacities, including memory, reasoning, and comprehension of testimony, when it comes to settling questions about nearby objects and events. Roughly, other things equal, perception offers better, more authoritative epistemic support for forming belief about such matters than the noted cognitive capacities do. Other things equal, perceiving a blue dot on a wall gives better warrant for thinking there is blue dot there than remembering, or inferring, or being told there is one there (or, as the case may be, that there isn’t). When perception and extra-perceptual cognition conflict on such matters, other things equal, cognition gives way. If perception indeed has such a privilege, it presumably does so in virtue of a psychological difference from cognition. This is an opportune time to ask what this difference might be, for exploration of the nature of the perception/cognition-distinction has lately flourished, after long neglect. This paper considers a variety of proposed contrasts between cognition and perception, asking how apt they are to ground PP. I find the best contender to be certain proposed phenomenological contrasts, notably a distinctive ’scene-immediacy’ of perceptual phenomenology.