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Baltic International Yearbook of Cognition, Logic and Communication

Journal

Cognitive penetration

Articles 1 - 2 of 2

Full-Text Articles in Philosophy

Linguistic Intuitions And Cognitive Penetrability, Michael Devitt Dec 2014

Linguistic Intuitions And Cognitive Penetrability, Michael Devitt

Baltic International Yearbook of Cognition, Logic and Communication

Metalinguistic intuitions play a very large evidential role in both linguistics and philosophy. Linguists think that these intuitions are products of underlying linguistic competence. I call this view “the voice of competence” (“VoC”). Although many philosophers seem to think that metalinguistic intuitions are a priori many may implicitly hold the more scientifically respectable VoC. According to VoC, I argue, these intuitions can be cognitively penetrated by the central processor. But, I have argued elsewhere, VoC is false. Instead, we should hold “the modest explanation” (“ME”) according to which these intuitions are fairly unreflective empirical theory-laden central-processor responses to phenomena. On …


Is Low-Level Visual Experience Cognitively Penetrable?, Dávid Bitter Dec 2014

Is Low-Level Visual Experience Cognitively Penetrable?, Dávid Bitter

Baltic International Yearbook of Cognition, Logic and Communication

Philosophers and psychologists alike have argued recently that relatively abstract beliefs or cognitive categories like those regarding race can influence the perceptual experience of relatively low-level visual features like color or lightness. Some of the proposed best empirical evidence for this claim comes from a series of experiments in which White faces were consistently judged as lighter than equiluminant Black faces, even for racially ambiguous faces that were labeled ‘White’ as opposed to ‘Black’ (Levin and Banaji 2006). The latter result is considered especially indicative of cognitive penetration, based on the reasoning that the relevant distortions were a function of …