Daniel C. Burnston

By far, the standard assumption in philosophy and cognitive science is that if perception is malleable, trainable, and rich, then it must be cognitively permeated. In philosophy of action, the assumption is that, if an action is intentional, then the bodily movement instantiating it must be caused by an intention encoding that action. I think these standard views significantly underestimate the richness of perceptual and motor representation, and significantly overestimate the resources that propositional representations have to influence those representations. By employing a version of the "form" distinction between propositional and sensorimotor representations, I have argued that many complex functions in perception and decision-making are performed by modal systems themselves, with limited influence from "cognition."

In recent work, I have delved more deeply into the phenomenon of perceptual and motor learning. In several recent and in-submission papers, I argue that perceptual learning can result in higher-level perceptual contents, but that this result is not best explained in terms of "diachronic" cognitive penetration. I have also applied this perspective to the ongoing debate surrounding skill and intellectualism. In future work, I plan to mount a more thorough defense of the form distinction, and argue against views that interpret perceptual representations as "iconic" or "map like". I prefer instead what I tentatively call an "extended quality space" view of perceptual representation.