10/5/03 To appear in Epistemology: New Essays, Quentin Smith (ed), Oxford University Press Vision, Knowledge, and the Mystery Link John L. Pollock 1 Iris Oved 2 Department of Philosophy Department of Philosophy University of Arizona Rutgers University pollock@arizona.edu irisoved@eden.rutgers.edu http://www.u.arizona.edu/~pollock 1. Perceptual Knowledge Imagine yourself sitting on your front porch, sipping your morning coffee and admiring the scene before you. You see trees, houses, people, automobiles; you see a cat running across the road, and a bee buzzing among the flowers. You see that the flowers are yellow, and blowing in the wind. You see that the people are moving about, many of them on bicycles. You see that the houses are painted different colors, mostly earth tones, and most are one story but a few are two story. It is a beautiful morning. Thus the world interfaces with your mind through your senses. There is a strong intuition that we are not disconnected from the world. We and the other things we see around us are part of a continuous whole, and we have direct access to them through vision, touch, etc. However, the philosophical tradition tries to drive a wedge between us and the world by insisting that the information we get from perception is the result of inference from indirect evidence that is about how things look and feel to us. The philosophical problem of perception is then to explain what justifies these inferences. light retina visual processing image P Q R S perceptual beliefs epistemic cognition other beliefs ? Figure 1. Knowledge, perception, and the mystery link We will focus primarily on visual perception. Figure one presents a crude diagram of the 1 1 Supported by NSF grant no. IRI-IIS-0080888. 2 Supported by a grant from Rutgers University. cognitive system of an agent capable of forming beliefs on the basis of visual perception. Cognition