Sofia Berinstein

This article explores the epistemology of a particular dimension of perceptual experience: its affective character. This includes the ‘badness’ of, for example, the smell of garbage or the pain of a stubbed toe and the ‘goodness’ of the taste of chocolate, touch of sunshine, or sound of a musical chord. I take the view that affective character is epistemically significant, disclosing objective axiological relations in which elements (garbage, bodily harm, sunshine, chocolate, and consonance) stand to perceivers. To this end I analyze two representationalist approaches to valenced perception—evaluativism and attitudinalism—which serve as exemplars of, respectively, cognitivism and non-cognitivism. Cognitivists claim that valence supervenes on the empirically significant element of a perception—its content—while non-cognitivists suggest that it supervenes on elements that are not truth-apt and therefore not a direct source of the perception’s empirical significance. Considering principled objections that they each face, I propose a non-representationalist alternative—one that aims to explain not only why perceptual pleasure and pain are epistemically significant, but why they are themselves (non-instrumentally and pro tanto) good and bad for subjects.

Crispin Wright argues that the difference in how internalist and externalist models of perceptual justification handle the new evil demon scenario comes down to a difference in the epistemic values they prioritize. I question whether Wright’s methodology is helpful, suggesting that the new evil demon scenario does not illuminate the connection between perceptual experience and belief.Further, the values of accuracy (doxastic management) and truth (doxastic product) may not be in conflict in non-idealized scenarios. Recognizing their coordination might be the methodological prescription for better understanding empirical rationality.

This paper explores the epistemology of a particular dimension of perceptual experience—its affective character: the ‘badness’ of, for example, the smell of garbage or the pain of a stubbed toe; the ‘goodness’ of the taste of chocolate, touch of sunshine, or sound of a musical chord. I take the view that affective character is epistemically significant, putting the perceiver in touch with axiological relations in which elements (garbage, bodily harm, sunshine, chocolate, and consonance) stand to perceivers. Two representationalist approaches to accommodate the affective character of experience—cognitivist and non-cognitivist—are explained and analyzed. Considering the objections they face, I motivate a non-representationalist alternative for capturing the epistemic significance of affective character. Because affective character is ubiquitous across the senses, the view developed suggests that perception is an inherently evaluative capacity and that some of the empirical judgments based on affectively valenced perceptual appearances are normative judgments.