This is the pre-peer reviewed version of the following article: 2019, “The shifting border between perception and cognition,” Nous, 53(2),316-346, which has been published in final form at https://doi.org/10.1111/nous.12218. This article may be used for non-commercial purposes in accordance with Wiley Terms and Conditions for Use of Self-Archived Versions. The Shifting Border Between Perception and Cognition Ben Phillips
[email protected] Abstract. The distinction between perception and cognition has always had a firm footing in both cognitive science and folk psychology. However, there is little agreement as to how the distinction should be drawn. In fact, a number of theorists have recently argued that, given the ubiquity of top-down influences (at all levels of the processing hierarchy), we should jettison the distinction altogether. I reject this approach, and defend a pluralist account of the distinction. At the heart of my account is the claim that each legitimate way of marking a border between perception and cognition deploys a notion I call ‘stimulus-control.’ Thus, rather than being a grab bag of unrelated kinds, the various categories of the perceptual are unified into a superordinate natural kind (mutatis mutandis for the complementary categories of the cognitive). 1 Introduction Is there a viable distinction to be drawn between perception and cognition? There certainly seems to be a difference in kind between hearing a balloon pop and thinking about the square root of -1. But common sense is not the only area in which the distinction is gainfully employed. As Firestone and Scholl (2016, 4) observe, the distinction is “woven so deeply into cognitive science as to structure introductory 1 courses and textbooks, differentiate scholarly journals, and organize academic departments.” Contemporary philosophy of mind is certainly brimming with debates that presuppose a perception/cognition border.