Siegel, Epistemic Charge and the Problem Of
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Siegel/Epistemic Charge and the problem of hijacked experience Epistemic charge and the problem of hijacked experience Susanna Siegel Note to Pittsburgh Perception Conference participants: this paper is made mostly of excerpts from the first three chapters of my book The Rationality of Perception, which will be published in 2017. 1. The problem of hijacked experience Vivek is a vain performer. To him, the faces in the audience range in their expression from neutral to pleased. Remarkably, no one ever looks disapproving. In the past, Vivek was under-confident. In those days, to him, the faces in the audience ranged in their expression from neutral to displeased. But remarkably, no one ever looked approving. Vivek’s vanity or diffidence influenced the character of his perception. Depending on his self-conception, how a scene looked to him differed, even when all other conditions stayed the same. Vanity of Vivek’s sort is just one among many potential examples of irrational perception. Influences on perception could come from beliefs, hypotheses, knowledge, desires, traits, and moods.1 They could also come from evaluative states that psychologists call ‘attitudes’. Attitudes encode attributions of value or disvalue to situations, objects, companies, individual people, or groups. 2 Attitudes and the other mental states just listed all belong to a subject’s outlook on the world. When someone’s outlook influences what she perceives on a given occasion, her perception is shaped by the outlook she had prior to perceiving on that occasion. Let’s look more closely at what kind of perceptual state can bear the marks of a prior outlook. We can distinguish between perceptual judgment and perceptual experience. Perceptual judgment is a form of belief in which perceivers respond to the way things appear. For instance, Vivek might form the belief that the audience is pleased, by jumping to conclusions: the facial expressions in one of his audiences are neutral, and they look neutral to Vivek, but he comes away thinking they’re pleased. 1 R. W. Emerson (1944) makes vivid an extreme idea: that all life experiences, and so all perceptual experiences, are colored by mood: “Life is a train of moods like a string of beads, and as we pass through them they prove to be many colored lenses, which paint the world their own hue, and each shows us only what lies in its own focus.” 2 In contrast to the use of “attitude” prevalent in Psychology, analytic philosophers typically use “attitudes” to denote the mental states that they take to consist in relations to propositions, and the paradigms of these mental states are beliefs and desires. 1 Siegel/Epistemic Charge and the problem of hijacked experience Alternatively, Vivek’s vanity might reach all the way to the appearances themselves. Vivek’s perceptual experience is the conscious part of perception that Vivek is responding to, when he forms his judgment. If his vanity influences his perceptual experience, then there’s no need for him to jump to conclusions from the visual appearances. If he just believes his eyes, he’ll end up believing that the people are pleased. That’s how their faces look to him. If you saw the faces, in contrast, you’d most likely think they were just neutral. Unless you admire Vivek as much as he admires himself, you’re not motivated to see the faces as approving. The distinction between perceptual experience and judgment gives us at least two broad kinds of potential effects on perception. Whether the effects are actual is a question for Psychology. First, vanity might leave perceptual experience untouched, and influence only the interface between experience and subsequent judgment or behavior. A variant of this kind of effect leaves both experience and judgment untouched, but neutralizes their role in guiding behavior: one behaves in ways congruent with vanity, and not with one’s experience or judgment. In the second broad kind of effect, vanity influences the perceptual experiences in response to which those judgments are made. Whether it affects perception at the level of experience or not, an outlook can sustain itself through creating the appearances that the world is the way the outlook suggests it is. From the subject’s point of view, her fear or suspicion is confirmed, or her desire satisfied, but this is a self-generated illusion. It’s a frightening illusion for someone fear-ridden, and a happy illusion for Vivek. But it’s an illusion all the same. In some cases, the illusion takes on political dimensions: what’s perpetuated is an illusion of inequality between people who share a society – illusions that could easily make a perceiver internally conflicted, morally obtuse, or both. A self-generated illusion of this kind is an epistemic problem. In theatrical terms, the problem is that perception becomes a farce, and the joke is on the perceiver. Perception seems to open the perceiver’s mind to the things around us, but for some important things, it doesn’t. It purports to tell perceiver what the world is like, but in crucial cases, it won’t. Perceivers seem to be able to use perception to check our prior beliefs, fears, and suspicions against reality, but for some of the purposes that matter most, we can’t. We seem to use perception to guide our actions – but in the task at hand, we don’t. And the reason for these limitations comes not from the tricks of light, sleights of hand, or an inbuilt structural mismatch between our minds and reality, but from our own individual prior outlooks. Just as in a theater showing a farcical comedy, spectators can see the sorry situation from the outside and grasp the perversity that eludes the characters in the play, a philosophical analysis can illuminate the epistemic situations of subjects like Vivek, whose perception and outlooks are, unwittingly, mutually sustaining. 2 Siegel/Epistemic Charge and the problem of hijacked experience When perceptual judgments or perceptual experiences arise from processes that give prior outlooks too much weight and fail to give proper weight to perceptual inputs (if there are any such inputs), we can say that the outlook hijacks the perceptual state. In whatever mode it may occur, the notion of hijacked perception rests on two background assumptions. It assumes that there’s such a thing as distinctively perceptual input to the mind. And it assumes that a principled distinction can be drawn between giving perceptual inputs proper weight, and not giving them proper weight in behavior, in belief, and in perceptual experience itself. What if one or both of these background assumptions is false? Then no principled distinction between hijacked and un-hijacked perception can be drawn, and the problem of hijacked experiences dissolves, as does the motivation to solve it. For now, I’ll take these background assumptions as deserving their status as common sense. Perceptual hijacking can be seen as steering gone awry. It is a bad version of something that can be okay. Perception goes well, either as experience or judgment, when perceptual inputs are given proper weight. And perception goes badly, when perceptual judgment or experience is hijacked by one’s prior outlook. It is also possible for a prior outlook to properly steer the processing that leads to perceptual experience or judgment. It is properly steered when the prior outlook and perceptual inputs are both given their proper weight. For instance, constructivism about visual processing is the theory that information stored by the visual system is used to interpret retinal data and in producing visual experiences. Constructivism does not entail that all visual perception is hijacked perception. Clear examples of perceptual hijacking can be found in wishful, fearful, and prejudiced thinking. Before seeing Jack, Jill fears that Jack is angry at her. When she sees him, her fear causes her to perceive Jack as angry, and this perception strengthens her fear. If Jill’s fear affects only her perception only at the level of perceptual belief, leaving her perceptual experience untouched, there is little temptation to say that the resulting judgment is formed epistemically well. Fearful thinking, like wishful thinking or prejudiced thinking, are paradigms of irrational routes to belief. But if Jill’s fear makes her perceptual experience congruent with the fear, then the situation is epistemically more complicated. When we look more closely at hijacked perception that reaches all the way to a visual experience, we find a distinctive philosophical problem. I’m going to call this problem the problem of hijacked experience. Like many philosophical problems, the problem of hijacked experience consists in a pair of opposing pressures: the pressure to say that it is rational for Jill or Vivek to believe their eyes, and the pressure to say that it isn’t. 3 Siegel/Epistemic Charge and the problem of hijacked experience On the one hand, if Jack really does look angry to Jill when she sees him, and she has no indication that the experience is misleading, then what else could Jill reasonably believe about his emotional state, other than that he is angry? Isn’t Jill just doing the best with the evidence about Jack that perception gives her? How could we fault her for that? On the other hand, if perceptual experiences retain their usual epistemic powers in those cases, then they would rationally support the fearful suspicion that leads to Jill’s hijacked perception. On the face of it, this result seems wrong. Suppose Jill takes her experience to confirm her suspicion that Jack is angry with her (“just look at his face!”, she tells herself.) She seems to have moved illicitly from her starting suspicion to a strengthening of it, via her experience.