58吃瓜

Knowing from Prosthetic Perception

Jack Lyons

University of Glasgow

Prosthetic perception is perception that is enabled or facilitated by a mechanism designed to generate a type or quality of perception that wouldn鈥檛 otherwise be attainable. I mean for the category to include the use of 聽telescopes, hearing aids, sensory substitution devices, and also fuel and other gauges,聽perhaps even psychedelic drugs and virtual or augmented reality. I presume that prosthetic perception can give us knowledge and justified belief鈥攊ndeed, this is part of what distinguishes them from 鈥渟ensory engineering鈥� more generally. Here I want to explore questions of how this knowledge is like or unlike the knowledge associated with ordinary perception. In particular, I鈥檓 interested in two questions about the directness of prosthetic perception: (a) does it provide new knowledge/justification by allowing us to perceive (literally see/hear/etc.) things (objects/properties/events/etc.) that we couldn鈥檛 otherwise? And (b) is prosthetic perception inferential in a way that ordinary perception is not? I will also be asking whether and how these two questions are related, as the answer to the second might well be constrained by the answer to the first. My discussion will be framed in terms of Dretske鈥檚 seminal (1969) discussion of nonepistemic, primary epistemic, and secondary epistemic seeing, but also in terms of inferentialism and presumptivism from the recent testimony debate.