Symposium 3 Talk 4: Stazicker

Thursday, July 5 2012 14:00-16:00 @ Dome Theatre

Symposium 3: "Perceptual consciousness and cognitive access"
Talk 4: “Indeterminate perceptual consciousness and cognitive access”

James Stazicker (Department of Philosophy, New York University, USA)

SUMMARY

Does perceptual consciousness require cognitive access? Those who think it does often appeal to 'inattentional blindness' experiments to confirm their view. Those who think it doesn't often appeal to partial report experiments to confirm theirs. I'll argue that these experiments seem to provide this sort of evidence about perceptual consciousness and cognitive access, only because of an assumption about the determinacy of perceptual consciousness. To assess this assumption, we have to face up to a more ancient philosophical controversy about the difference between perception and cognition.