Recognition is an Interface Between Perception and Cognition

My dissertation investigates a neglected topic within the philosophy of mind: our capacity to recognize people, places, and objects. Some examples of the phenomenon are vivid and infrequent, such as recognizing a tiger in the forest; other examples are mundane and pervasive, such as recognizing a colleague in the hallway. I defend the view that recognition is an interface between perception and cognition, serving as a point of interaction between the two domains. Without a capacity to recognize types of things, such as dogs or faces, our sense impressions would not be subsumed into our knowledge of general categories. We would not comprehend people, places, and objects as such on the basis of perception alone. Without a capacity to recognize instances of types, such as a neighbor’s dog or friend’s face, we would fail to integrate our sense impressions with our knowledge of particulars. Our situation would be like that of a Capgras patient, who knows they are in a relationship, appreciates that the person next to them perfectly resembles their partner, but does not register that the person is their partner. Chapter 1 focuses on the question: Is recognition more like seeing, tasting, and smelling (perception) or judging, reasoning, and knowing (cognition)? On my view, it constitutively involves elements of both. It is partly perceptual because it exhibits a paradigmatically perceptual sensitivity to perspective, evidenced by our ability to discern subtle changes in viewpoint in object recognition tasks. It is partly cognitive because of its dependence on stimulus-independent representations housed in long-term memory—a claim I establish by examining empirical models of face recognition. I also introduce a framework for understanding the relation between familiarity, recollection, and the recognition of types and instances of types. Chapter 2 inquires whether affect plays a constitutive role in recognition. According to Constitutivists, part of what it is to recognize a person, place, or thing is to enjoy a certain affective response. In contrast, Causalists hold that affect is only causally implicated in recognition. I discuss Capgras syndrome as a case study for exploring the disagreement between Causalists and Constitutivists. I suggest three ways of resolving the disagreement and show why none are particularly satisfying. Chapter 3 considers an explanation of recognition in terms of a process of matching present and past impressions. This explanation mirrors subpersonal models of recognition I discuss in Chapter 1 but extends them to the personal level. I reject this explanation on the grounds that it is an instance of the broader mistake of trying to explain recognition in terms of a subject’s more basic mental capacities. While recognition constitutively involves both perception and cognition, it is nonetheless an irreducible mental capacity, in the sense that there are no mental capacities X such that the recognitional capacity fully depends on X. I show how we can establish this claim of irreducibility by treating it as a live empirical hypothesis. While this hypothesis is, strictly speaking, unverifiable, it is nevertheless supported by a large body of existing neuropsychological, ethological, and developmental evidence. Chapter 4 applies my view to a failure of the recognitional capacity with significant practical consequences: the cross-race effect, traditionally characterized as our difficulty in recognizing individuals of other races. I argue that two distinct factors in fact comprise the effect: a difficulty in recognizing individuals of other races (Factor 1) and a corresponding lack of metacognitive awareness of this difficulty (Factor 2). Contemporary theories take Factor 1 as their sole explanandum. The existence of Factor 2—evidenced by our overconfidence in our ability to recognize individuals of other races—leaves these theories incomplete. I hypothesize that Factor 2 is a product of our tacit yet mistaken assumption that we recognize individuals of all races equally well. This hypothesis offers more accurate predictions than an alternative hypothesis which appeals to our tendency towards overconfidence as task performance worsens.

Advisor: Campbell, John
Noë, Alva