THE EYE'S MIND: PERCEPTUAL PROCESS AND EPISTEMIC NORMS

Philosophers have tended to formulate theories of perceptual justification independently of psychological investigation into perceptual functioning. Nevertheless, work in perceptual epistemology often conceals an implicit commitment to a normative view of what kinds of processing maximise the epistemic power of a perceptual experience, that is, its capacity to justify belief. This implicit commitment is to a set of “minimalist” norms, which treat sensory stimulation as the ultimate locus of epistemic power, and consequently set value on the purity of sensory signal and passivity of perceptual processing. These norms fit poorly with our best scientific models of perception, which draw out the ways in which it can be understood as akin to a hypothesis. Focusing on visual perception in particular, I argue that appreciating how it plays the role of a hypothesis within the visual system, whilst also constituting a form of evidence at the person level,gives us reason to reject these minimalist norms for perceptual processing