Wednesday, 01 November 2017
04:00 pm – at Senate House – Room 234
Abstract: This paper is a defence of the epistemic significance of cognitively penetrated perceptions of high-level properties. While some are motivated by epistemic considerations to accept the existence of cognitively penetrated perceptions of high-level properties, it has been recently argued that such perceptions cannot play a significant epistemic role. This is because such perceptions are ill-suited to provide foundational justification. They are ill-suited because it is plausible that their epistemic standing is held hostage to the background cognitive states that do the penetrating. I argue that such perceptions are epistemically significant even if they don’t provide foundational justification. I do this by showing that the sort of non-foundational direct access such perceptions afford is crucial to the epistemology of aesthetics.