My research focuses on three core systems of the mind—perception, cognition, and action—and how each is related to the other. The core thesis of my in-progress dissertation, The Belief-Independence of Perception, is that a key property of perceptual systems is their being belief-independent. This account develops and deepens recent writing on the idea that the mind has a particular kind of architecture and that perception and cognition are defined, in part, by their respective places in this architecture.

Chapter I characterizes what it means to say that the mind has an architecture and the conditions under which systems of the mind counts as being architecturally distinct from one another. After laying out the conditions for architectural distinctness, I argue that perception satisfies the conditions of architectural distinctness from cognition in virtue of its being belief-independent. A psychological process or system is belief-independent when states such as beliefs, desires, and thoughts are dispensable to the explanation of that process or system’s functioning. Chapter II goes on to explain how a certain class of effects of cognition on perception—what I call inferential effects of cognition on perception—would threaten perception’s putative belief-independence and therefore its architectural distinctness. It is subsequently argued that there fail to be inferential effects of cognition on perception, in virtue of the fact that there fail to be relations of I call semantic tracing between perceptual and cognitive contents. I then examine three commonly discussed effects of cognition on perception: memory color effects, cognitive hijacking and cognitive enrichment effects, and effects of feature-based attention. I argue that the content of the perceptual outputs in such case fail to be semantically traceable to the contents of cognitive states. In consequence, such effects of cognition upon perception fail to be inferential and so fail to threaten the claim that perception is belief-independent.

Chapters III and IV of my dissertation concern two different, but complementary, answers to the question of why perception ought to be belief-independent, and therefore why it ought to be architecturally distinct from cognition. The claim that perception ought to be belief-independent amounts to saying that perception’s being such helps carry out its core functions. In particular, it helps perception carry out the function of imparting information about things external to the organism.

In Chapter III, I claim that one way in which belief-independence enables perception to carry out this function is by rendering perceptual processing computationally tractable. A core problem of perception science is explaining how perceptual systems manage to recover a unique distal scene from noisy and underdetermined proximal input. We need an explanation, inter alia, of how perception manages to solve this underdetermination (and other computational problems) efficiently. It is argued that perception’s being belief-independent helps explain how perception manages to solve the underdetermination problems that beset it. In the course of arguing for this claim, I defend the idea that perception’s being belief-independent helps render perception tractable by improving the speed of perceptual processing, an idea that has recently been criticized. Not content with playing defense, I also advance a novel argument for the importance of belief-independence to perceptual tractability. Specifically, I argue that perception’s being belief-independent helps it meet another important tractability benchmark in addition to speed: namely, accuracy.

Chapter IV clarifies a second way in which perception’s being belief-independent assists it in carrying out its characteristic function of imparting information about things external to the organism. This second way is by providing an anchor to the external world, such that there is a semantic connection between the organism’s internal states—its representations—and the world. Specifically, it is argued that perception must be belief-independent if it is to provide information about the world, rather than some ersatz intermediary thereof. In the course of this chapter, I claim that perception fixes the aboutness conditions of a core class of representations, namely singular representations. In consequence, perception also fixes aboutness conditions for a core class of thoughts, namely, singular thoughts. Perception fixes the aboutness of singular representations by establishing an acquaintance relation between the organism and things external to it. This acquaintance relation explains how thoughts manage to be about the world, rather than about organism’s representations of the world. The chapter closes by arguing that perception’s semantically anchoring organisms to the world also epistemically anchors organisms to the world, in the sense that semantic anchoring allows organisms to acquire knowledge of the external world.

The dissertation concludes by exploring, in miniature, various ways in which my account of perception’s belief-independence may helpfully inform various debates in the contemporary philosophy of mind and epistemology, such as: the functions of perception qua psychological system, the status of perceptual states as unjustified justifiers, the contents of perception, etc. Downstream, I also hope that my work on perception helps to indirectly characterize some unique and important features of cognition as well, though expounding upon those is another project, one that is beyond the ken of the dissertation.

Outside of my dissertation, I am also deeply interested in thinking about: self-knowledge, intentional action, animal cognition, the nature of representation, computation and artificial intelligence, induction and inference to the best explanation, synchronic and diachronic norms of rationality, reference, and the relation between theories of mental content and theories of linguistic meaning.