The Puzzle of Perceptual Justification

This book provides an accessible and up-to-date discussion of contemporary theories of perceptual justification that each highlight different factors related to perception, i.e., conscious experience, higher-order beliefs, and reliable processes. The book's discussion starts from the viewpoint that perception is not only one of our fundamental sources of knowledge and justification, but also plays this role for many less sophisticated animals. It proposes a scientifically informed reliabilist theory which can accommodate this fact without denying that some of our epistemic abilities as human perceivers are special. This allows it to combine many of our intuitions about the importance of conscious experience and higher-order belief with the controversial thesis that perceptual justification is fundamentally non-evidential in character.

Harmen Ghijsen is a postdoctoral researcher at the Institute of Philosophy at KU Leuven and a member of the Leuven Epistemology Group. His area of research is located at the intersection of philosophy of mind and epistemology and focuses on integrating epistemological theories with our actual cognitive architecture. He has published numerous articles related to this research, with perceptual justification as one of his favorite topics.