Perception, Skill, and Cognitive Penetrabilty

Ellen Fridlandellenfridland@philosophie.hu-berlin.de

Berlin School of Mind and BrainHumboldt Universität zu Berlin

What would the relation between perception and skill have to be, if it were to constitute a legitimate instance of cognitive penetration?

If a skill is learned through practice and is related to perception in an explanatorily relevant way, then such a relationship constitutes a genuine case of cognitive penetration.

What is the relationship between perception and cognition?

Is perception more like playing the violin or digestion?

The issue is NOT whether perception is accompanied by cognition.

The issue IS whether the qualitative core of a perceptual event is influenced, impacted, structured, or constituted by cognition.

These lines are identical in length.

Perception: Expectation, Belief, & Knowledge

Cognitive Penetrability: “If a system is cognitively penetrable

then the function it computes is sensitive, in a semantically coherent way, to the organism‘s goals and beliefs, that is it can be altered in a way that bears some logical relation to what a person knows.”

-Zenon Pylyshyn, “Is vision continuous with cognition?,” p. 343.

TWO ISSUES:

1) Are all cognitive states propositional states like goals, beliefs, thoughts, and knowledge?

2) If NO, then how can we make sense of a “a logical relation to” or “semantic coherence with” nonproposition-al but cognitive states?

Why think there are nonpropositional, cognitive states?

Knowing-how v. knowing-that

Ryle’s Regress

“The consideration of propositions is itself an operation the execution of which can be more or less intelligent, less or more stupid. But if, for any operation to be intelligently executed, a prior theoretical operation had first to be performed and performed intelligently, it would be a logical impossibility for anyone ever to break into the circle.”

-Gilbert Ryle, The Concept of Mind, p.30

Propositional rules can never provide the specificity required to govern acting en situ.

Particular rules are not rules at all.

How can perceptual processing bear a semantically coherent or logical relation to a cognitive state?

Dretske: Minimal rationality

Learning and cognitive content “The reason learning is so central to

intelligent behavior, to the behavior of people, is that learning is the process in which internal indicators are harnessed to output and thus become relevant—as representations, as reasons—to the explanation of the behavior of which they are part. It is in the learning process that information-carrying elements get a job to do because of the information they carry and hence acquire, by means of their content, a role in the explanation of behavior.”

-Dretske, Explaining Behavior, p. 104.

Learning through Practice

What is learned through practice?

Attention and control: that which is responsible for the manner or style in which a skill is instantiated.

Learning and not sensitization

Cognitive Penetrability of Perception by Skill

If that part of skill which is developed through practice (i.e., that aspect of skill that is responsible for the manner or style in which a skill is performed) is related to early perceptual processing in an explanatorily relevant way, then we have a legitimate case of the cognitive penetrability of perception by skill.

THANK YOU!