Abstract
The phenomenon of cognitive penetration has received a lot of attention in recent epistemology, as it seems to make perceptual justification too easy to come by for experientialist theories of justification. Some have tried to respond to this challenge by arguing that cognitive penetration downgrades the epistemic status of perceptual experience, thereby diminishing its justificatory power. I discuss two examples of this strategy, and argue that they fail on several grounds. Most importantly, they fail to realize that cognitive penetration is just an instance of a larger problem for experientialist theories of perceptual justification. The challenge does not lie in explaining how cognitive penetration is able to downgrade the epistemic status of perceptual experience, the challenge lies in explaining why perceptual experience would have a special epistemic status to begin with. To answer this challenge, experientialists have to solve the distinctiveness problem: they have to explain what is so distinctive about perceptual experience that enables it to provide evidential justification without being in need of justification itself. Unfortunately, an internalist answer to this problem does not appear to be forthcoming, even though it would certainly help with explaining the problem of cognitive penetration.
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Notes
Thus, evidentialists like Conee and Feldman (2004) are also in need of a response to this problem.
See (Ghijsen 2015) for more on the distinction between perceptual experience and perceptual seeming, here I will use the terms interchangeably.
This is important to mention, given that the dogmatist’s thesis is usually phrased in terms of propositional rather than doxastic justification. A perceptual experience could provide propositional justification for a subject’s belief that P even if the subject’s actual belief that P is doxastically unjustified because it was not based on the perceptual experience but on some other bad ground (e.g., one’s horoscope).
This also means that perceptual dogmatism is, pace (Tucker 2014), worse off than, say, reliabilists accounts of perceptual justification, as these accounts would at worst only allow for prima facie justification in cases of cognitive penetration if the belief-forming process is (conditionally) reliable.
This point is also made in different terms by (Siegel 2012, pp. 219–221).
See (Lyons 2013) for more on the notion of conditional justification, and the role this notion could also play in accounting for the New Evil Demon case.
Such cases of good cognitive penetration have also been raised as problems for Siegel’s account by Lyons (2011).
Note that the example in parentheses is not one that Siegel herself provides.
Siegel could retort that these latter cases are ones in which the content is not endorsed only because of the ill-founded states in the etiology. But this seems to be true for almost any plausible case of cognitive penetration; surely the environment always has some impact on the experience. The question is exactly when the impact of the environment becomes too small, and the intuitive answer to this question would appeal to a subject’s remaining sensitive enough to changes in the environment —again, though, this answer is not open to internalists.
Although one might try to solve this problem by allowing for quasi-inferences between subpersonal states, this only leads to other difficulties. Subpersonal mechanisms are always “jumping to conclusions” on the basis of cues that underdetermine the actual facts, in which case no seemings would count as receptive.
Let’s bracket the earlier mentioned issue of coming to have higher-level seemings about what someone is saying on the basis of lower-level seemings about sounds.
The same worry about not accommodating low-level cognitive penetration also applies to Chudnoff’s (2013) solution to the problem.
This last remark is needed because Siegel wants to leave open whether experiences with a-rational etiologies can be epistemically downgraded for different reasons (Siegel 2013a, p. 700).
This is the line taken by Lyons (2011).
See (Lyons 2009) for more on the distinction between evidential and non-evidential justification.
This suggestion and some of its problems were provided by an anonymous referee.
Note also that, as Siegel (2013, p. 756) recognizes, an appeal to phenomenology is unlikely to help, given that badly cognitively penetrated experiences have the same phenomenology as good perceptual experiences. See (Ghijsen 2014) for more worries about a phenomenalist answer to the distinctiveness problem.
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Acknowledgments
Thanks to all members of the Leuven Epistemology Group (LEG), and especially to Chris Kelp and Mona Simion for their helpful comments and suggestions. Also thanks to an anonymous referee for some valuable suggestions to improve the paper.
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This research was supported by a KU Leuven BOF-PDMK scholarship.
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Ghijsen, H. The real epistemic problem of cognitive penetration. Philos Stud 173, 1457–1475 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-015-0558-2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-015-0558-2