Response: Circularity and Basing

Perceptual seemings are importantly different from beliefs, and the differences between the two have been a source of several objections to Siegel's arguments. One such difference, discussed in the previous section, is the ability of beliefs, and inability of perceptual seemings to be irrational. A second important (and related) difference is the ability of beliefs to be based. It is argued in this section that quasi-perceptions, are not only rationally criticisable, but are also capable of being based.

Jack Lyons (2011) argues that the problem with cognitive penetrability cannot be that it allows for viciously circular beliefs to be justified104_{. The reason for this is that circularity is a matter of}

improper basing. That is, epistemic circularity occurs when an agent's only evidence for a belief B1

is either a prior belief in B1, or is epistemically dependent on the agent's prior belief in B1.

However, as Lyons points out, perceptual seemings to not not appear to be the sort of things which

104 _{Lyons does not claim that the agents in Siegel's cases are justified, rather he claims that they are unjustified because}

their beliefs are unreliably formed. He takes Siegel's cases to motivate a reliablist view of justification. I do not wish to commit to a reliablist view of justification. Thus I wish to avoid accounting for the lack of justification in these cases in terms of reliability. Moreover, as noted in section two, I think it is plausible that many reliablist theories of our right to trust our understanding will also make the wrong predictions about these cases.

are 'based'. You cannot receive evidence for or against a perceptual seeming, they are not responsive to reasons. It does not make sense to ask someone why they see a banana as yellow for example. The answer will simply be 'because it is yellow', or 'it just looks yellow'. The existence of cognitive penetration appears to show that perceptual seemings can be causally based on prior beliefs. But this is not sufficient for circularity, circularity requires epistemic evidence responsiveness.

Indeed, one of the guiding thoughts in Siegel's (2013) development of her argument is that beliefs based on checkered experiences may not be based on the checkering process. She points out that if a belief B1 is based on another belief B2 then a change in B2 will usually trigger a change in B1.

However, we rarely adjust beliefs based on a checkered experiences in response to changes in the checkering state. For example, if one were petrified of guns, and this fear caused one to see something in one's fridge as a gun, then one would not lose one's belief that there was a gun in the fridge upon losing one's fear of guns. You would still think that you saw a gun. Siegel's (2013) formulation of the problem moves away from the circularity claim and avoids any suggestion that the problematiic beliefs are based on the checkering process. Instead she considers ways in which checkered experiences differ from beliefs, and argues that none of these differences explain why beliefs, but not perceptual seemings, are able to transmit ill-foundedness.

It might be thought that these worries extend to the testimonial version of the problem. That is, it might appear that quasi-perceptions are not the kind of things which can be based either. After all, the phenomenology of quasi-perception is similar to that of normal perception. When we explicitly reason regarding the meaning of someone's utterance it might be thought that the resultant state of understanding is not really a quasi-perception (after all, one of the distinguishing features of quasi- perceptions was their phenomenology, and the resultant state here may have a markedly different phenomenology).

Before responding to this worry it is worth putting to one side a bad reason to think that quasi perceptions can be based: Some theorists maintain that states of linguistic understanding are simply states of belief (or knowledge). For example, some cognitivist accounts of linguistic understanding hold that such understanding consists in, or requires, belief or knowledge of a compositional semantic and syntactic theory105_{. Thus, it might be thought that states of linguistic understanding,}

being beliefs, can obviously be based. This line of argument is unconvincing. Even if the cognitivist

105 _{Pettit (2002) argues, on epistemic grounds, that linguistic understanding does not require knowledge or belief}

open question whether they are genuinely evidence responsive like normal beliefs. Moreover, the perception-like phenomenology of quasi-perceptions gives us good reason to distinguish them from beliefs. However, beliefs are not the only things which are susceptible to basing. For example, fears or suspicions can be justified or unjustified, and based on prior beliefs and attitudes. So the mere fact that quasi-perceptions are not beliefs does not give us reason to conclude that they cannot be based. Moreover, there are important differences between perceptual seemings and quasi- perceptions which lend credence to the hypothesis that quasi-perceptions can be based.

Siegel's main reason for avoiding the claim that checkered beliefs are based on the checkering process is that a change in the penetrating state will not usually trigger a change in the checkered belief. This claim has less plausibility in the case of checkered testimonial belief. We experience miscommunication often, and we are accustomed to adjusting our beliefs about what we have been told when we adjust our conception of the speaker (and their character, goals, and knowledge etc.). Sometimes these reassessments are explicit, other times they merely affect the way that we recall a situation. For example, suppose that racist Jack has an epiphany and realises that his racist views were wrong all along. This is likely to cause him to see many of his past interactions with black people in a new light. His quasi-perception of Tom as saying that Alice was vulnerable2 was

penetrated by an picture he had built up of Tom as a predatory scheming criminal. Once this conception is reversed Jack is likely to see Tom's utterance in a new light, and revise his belief. This revisability in response to altered conceptions of the social situation or speaker is a feature which testimonial beliefs do not seem to share with perceptual beliefs. These considerations seem to suggest that in the case of testimony the resultant beliefs may be partly based on the checkering process.

Additionally, it seems that quasi-perceptions, unlike perceptual seemings, can sometimes be retrospectively rationalised and justified. For example, if someone points to an apple and says 'that is red' you will have a quasi-perception of their utterance as meaning that the particular apple they are pointing at is red. If asked why you understood the speaker as saying that the apple was red you would be able to quickly respond 'because I saw her pointing at the apple'. This suggests that your quasi-perception was evidence responsive. That is, it was partially based on your perceptual experience of the speaker pointing to a particular apple. This apparent basing seems to be

accessible to consciousness, even though the phenomenology is non-inferential106_{. Indeed, this}

ability of quasi-perceptions to be retrospectively rationalised not only supports the hypothesis that they can be based, but also that they are capable of being rational or irrational. Moreover, the rational flaw in the cases of seemingly irrational quasi-perception (where the speaker clearly points to a particular object, yet a different referent is assigned) seems to be that the quasi-perception is not properly evidence responsive (and thus badly based). Thus, the cases discussed at the end of the previous section also seem to support the hypothesis that quasi-perceptions can be based. As a result, Lyons's argument against the circularity formulation of Siegel's argument does not carry over to the testimonial variant of the argument.