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Philosophy and Cognitive Science II pp 155–176Cite as

Abductive Inference in Late Vision

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Part of the book series: Studies in Applied Philosophy, Epistemology and Rational Ethics ((SAPERE,volume 20))

Abstract

In earlier work (Raftopoulos 2009), I analyzed early vision, which I claimed is a cognitively impenetrable (CI) stage of visual processing. In contradistinction, late vision is cognitively penetrated (CP) and involves the modulation of processing by cognitively driven attention. Its stages have hybrid contents, partly conceptual contents, and partly iconic analogue contents. In this chapter, I examine the processes of late vision and discuss whether late vision should be construed as a perceptual stage or as a thought-like stage. Using Jackendoff ’s (1989) distinction between visual awareness and visual understanding, I argue that the contents of late vision belong to visual awareness. In late vision an abduction or “inference” to the best explanation allows the construction of a representation that best fits a scene. Given the sparse retinal image that underdetermines both the distal object and the percept, the visual system fills in the missing information to arrive at the best explanation, that is, the percept that best fits the retinal information. I argue that late vision does not consist in propositional structures formed in cognitive areas and participate in discursive reasoning and inferences, and does not implicate discursive abductive inferences from propositionally structured premises to recognitional beliefs.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    The P3 waveform is elicited at 300–600 ms and is generated in frontal/central, central/parietal, parietal/occipital areas, the temporal lobe, the temporal/parietal junction, and neighboring neocortical regions. The generating sites and timing onset show that P3 is associated with semantic processing and with the subjects’ reports. P3 is thought to signify the consolidation of a representation in working memory.

  2. 2.

    The specification ‘in virtue of being in that state’ is needed to exclude cases where viewers form a belief about the content of one of their perceptual states not by being in that state but by drawing inferences from a background theory about perception. Suppose that the viewer is a vision scientist who knows about primal sketches and can form beliefs about her perceptual subdoxastic states whose contents implicate primal sketches. Even though the viewer entertains a belief about the contents of one of her perceptual states, this belief is the result of an inference from a body of theoretical knowledge about vision and not a direct consequence of the fact that the viewer is in a state with this particular content.

  3. 3.

    According to externalism, a belief is justified if the believer has formed that belief on the basis of a reliable belief formation process, which usually is outside the cognitive grasp of the believer. A belief is justified if “it comes from an epistemically, truth-conducively reliable process or faculty or intellectual virtue” (Sosa 2003, p. 109); perception and memory are examples of such intellectual virtues. This means that one can know that \(X\) is the case without having access to the reasons or processes that justify one’s belief that \(X\) is the case; it suffices that this belief be produced in a causal reliable way by some process of belief formation.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Psychology, University of Cyprus, Nicosia, Cyprus

    Athanassios Raftopoulos

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  1. Athanassios Raftopoulos
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Correspondence to Athanassios Raftopoulos .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Philosophy and Computational Philosophy Laboratory, University of Pavia, Pavia, Italy

    Lorenzo Magnani

  2. Department of Philosophy, Sun Yat-sen University, Guangzhou, China

    Ping Li

  3. School of Humanities and Social Sciences, Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology, Daejeon, Korea, Republic of (South Korea)

    Woosuk Park

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Raftopoulos, A. (2015). Abductive Inference in Late Vision. In: Magnani, L., Li, P., Park, W. (eds) Philosophy and Cognitive Science II. Studies in Applied Philosophy, Epistemology and Rational Ethics, vol 20. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-18479-1_9

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