Susanna Siegel, “The Rationality of Perception” (Oxford UP, 2017)
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What is the central problem of “hijacked experience” introduced at the start of the episode?
Hello and welcome to New Books and Philosophy, a podcast channel with the New Books Network. I'm Carrie Figdoor, Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of Iowa. I'm co host of the channel along with Robert Talise, professor of philosophy at Vanderbilt University. Today's interview is with Susanna Siegel, Professor of Philosophy at Harvard University. Her new book, The Rationality of Perception, is just out from Oxford University Press. You open your eyes, you see the sunlight entering the window, and you form the belief that it is well past dawn. It's reasonable for you to believe that it is well passed on on the basis of your perception. And quite generally, seeing is often a good reason for believing when things go well.
But suppose we have a case like this. Jill believes that Jack is angry, although she has no good grounds for this belief. Nevertheless, when she sees him, she sees his face as angry even though it is neutral. So is it reasonable for Jill to believe that he is angry on the basis of what she sees?
How does the Jill‑and‑Jack example illustrate the limits of perceptual justification?
No, Siegel argues, her perception has been hijacked by her prior unfounded belief, and so it cannot turn around and justify that belief, even if Jill thinks it does from her perspective. And while this is a simple and artificial example, similar sorts of problems arguably arise in real world cases. For example, when an interviewer with sexist beliefs perceives a woman job candidate as being less competent than she in fact is, and then believes even more strongly on the basis of this perception that women are in fact less competent. In her new book, Siegel articulates a framework for understanding how to assess the capacity of perceptions to justify. On a traditional view, perceptions do not themselves have epistemic status.
They just provide evidence to other states, like beliefs, that do have this status. Siegel argues in contrast that perceptions like beliefs can be appraised epistemically as rational or irrational, and that perceptions can be inferred from beliefs. This view of perception in turn is used to analyze when and how the influence of a prior outlook on a perception's ability to justify that outlook can be downgraded or even upgraded. The rationality of perception provides an illuminating new approach to the relation between perceiving and believing That will spark vigorous debate in years to come. Let's turn to the interview. Uh, Susanna Siegel. Hi, welcome to New Books and Philosophy. I'm happy to be talking to you about your new book, Rationality of Perception.
Before we get into the details of the book, uh maybe you can give us a little bit of a background about yourself as a philosopher and then, you know, how you came to the topic of the book and to the writing of the book.
Well, I've always been interested in philosophical questions, though for many years I g I didn't know that those questions were the ones that counted as philosophical. But an example is that I recently remembered um nights lying awake in elementary school trying to remember everything that had happened to me during that day and wondering why it didn't take very long to remember a whole day's worth of activity.
What is Susanna Siegel’s “rationality of perception” framework and how does it differ from the traditional view?
It seemed like it should take as long to remember it as it took to live through it. And if it didn't take that long I must be missing something. So I remember puzzling over that, um, but never realizing that until much later that it was a philosophical question about about representation. And how the features of a representation might not be the features of what's represented. Um, but I was always drawn to philosophy and I came to the questions in this book um from thinking about a story that at the time I found very amusing and I thought it was just sort of a uh a joke, as everybody who hears it does. And the the story is about people who were unsure how mammalian reproduction worked. Um and this was at the time this was at the time when microscopes were were just invented.
And there were these seventeenth century preformationists who believed that um
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Chapters
8 chapters
1
What is the central problem of “hijacked experience” introduced at the start of the episode?
0:07–1:13
2
How does the Jill‑and‑Jack example illustrate the limits of perceptual justification?
1:13–3:24
3
What is Susanna Siegel’s “rationality of perception” framework and how does it differ from the traditional view?
3:24–6:38
4
How does the notion of “epistemic charge” explain when a perception is upgraded or downgraded?
6:38–9:24
5
In what way does Siegel relate hijacked experience to the broader debates on cognitive penetration and theory‑laden observation?
9:24–12:33
6
What is the contrast between phenomenal conservatism and Siegel’s inferentialist account of perception?
12:33–15:46
7
How does the rationality of perception framework apply to real‑world cases such as bias in policing and self‑defense law?
15:46–19:06
8
What future projects and open questions does Siegel identify for the study of perception and epistemic justification?
19:06–1:08:53
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