WIPS - Ben Henke, Washington University in St. Louis

Title: "A Defense of the Continuum Hypothesis"

Abstract: Interest has recently surged in developing a principled account of the perception/cognition distinction. Such a distinction would do crucial work in philosophy of mind—where it is required for an account of cognitive penetration, perceptual learning, higher-level content, etc.—and in epistemology—where it has implications for the nature of perceptual justification. In this talk (the first draft of a chapter from my dissertation), I argue that extant accounts fail either because they’re extensionally inadequate or fail to mark the binary, sharp distinction they aim to elucidate. I then suggest for an important lesson: the perception/cognition simply isn’t binary or sharp. Rather, the distinction exists on a continuum with (1) intermediate states, (2) inclusive categories, (3) graded categories, and (4) a vague boundary.