Thought and Perception: Distinctions, Similarities, and Relations
Dustin Stokes · 2021
The strategy is to see how much we learn about perception and thought, and how they are distinguished, by considering our more ordinary concepts, as well as some more sophisticated practices of theorizing about them. The chapter offers some initial characterization of the importance of possible relations between cognition and perception and of the putative distinction between the phenomena. Additional distinctions might be made here to further categorize these non-doxastic states. Those outstanding questions (and others) to one side, this initial analysis provides some sense of which mental states and processes are typically categorized as perceptual and which cognitive. There are five (at least) possible marks of distinction: subject activity, sensory organ activity, presence of appropriate stimuli, conceptual requirements, and phenomenology. Higher-level information about what kind of thing an object is, or about causal relations between objects, or moral or aesthetic features of objects is mentally represented, but post-perceptually, at the level of judgment or belief.