Dretske PerceptionvConception

Perception versus Conception: The Goldilocks Test - Oxford Scholarship 10/8/19, 10(39 AM
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The Cognitive Penetrability of Perception: New

Philosophical Perspectives
John Zeimbekis and Athanassios Raftopoulos
Print publication date: 2015

Print ISBN-13: 9780198738916
Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: August 2015
DOI: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198738916.001.0001
Perception versus Conception

The Goldilocks Test
Fred Dretske
DOI:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198738916.003.0007
https://www.oxfordscholarship.com/view/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198738916.001.0001/acprof-9780198738916-chapter-7 Page 1 of 10
Abstract and Keywords
This chapter separates cognition from perception by distinguishing between the percept—the product of pure
perception which is conceptually untainted by cognitive ingredients—and a larger and more inclusive experience
that is conceptually affected. It then criticizes Siegel’s view that higher-level properties are included in the content
of perceptual experience, and the view that cognition affects the percept. The chapter uses a thought experiment,
the ‘Goldilocks test’, to isolate cognitively unspoiled sensory core of perceptual experience. Application of the test
to the perception of kinds yields the result that subjects who possess different concepts (expert and novice viewers)
have the same percept. The chapter also applies the Goldilocks test to other visual cases, such as reversible figures.
Keywords: perception/cognition distinction, sensation; high-level perceptual contents, phenomenal contrast, thought experiments
If one is going to quarrel about whether perception is modular, whether it is influenced by, say, cognitive factors,
one needs to know what counts as perception. Since there are many ‘objects’ of perceptual verbs that are (often
only implicitly) propositional in character, perception of such objects requires possession of the concepts deployed
in that proposition and, hence, whatever knowledge it takes to have those concepts. One cannot see what is on the
table—that it is an iPod, for instance—unless one knows what an iPod is. If one lacks this knowledge, one is ‘blind’
to what is on the table. One cannot see what it is. If seeing what is on the table in this sense counts as perception,
then, clearly, cognition affects perception. Perception, some of it anyway, would be cognition. There would be
nothing modular about it. Someone who lacks knowledge would have diminished perceptual powers. Despite good
eyesight, they could not see what is directly in front of them.1
So the first step in trying to decide whether perception is modular, whether it is modifiable by cognitive affairs, is
to carefully distinguish perception from cognition. This can be a tricky business. We can talk of an experience of an
iPod in contrast to beliefs about or knowledge of the iPod. Or the way the iPod looks. Or we can invoke technical
terms and speak of its ‘phenomenal appearance’. Such terms are generally intended to suggest a conscious stage in
the processing of sensory information that is independent—logically independent—of those later cognitive or
conceptual processes characteristic of knowledge, thought, judgment, and reasoning. But they only suggest it. They
do not imply it. That is because these words themselves can be and often are used to describe mental states already
contaminated by cognitive elements. If visual experience of an object is understood to comprise what the object
looks like to you, what you see it as, or what it appears to you to be, then visual experience is infected with a
cognitive virus from the get-go. With such an inclusive notion of experience, the (p.164) modularity of perception
is no longer an open question. Perceptual experience is—by definition—not modular.
To avoid this result one must focus, instead, on something we might call pure perception, what used to be called
the sensation or (sometimes by psychologists) the percept. The target is the distinctively sensory aspect of a larger
and more inclusive experience—something itself untainted by cognitive ingredients. We are looking, in short, for a
stage2 in the processing of incoming information that, logically speaking, could occur in one whatever one’s
thoughts, judgments, hopes, expectations, and values might be. We want perception of an iPod to be, in this
respect, like stepping on an iPod, something a person can do whatever is going on in the rest of hismental life.
But how do we isolate the sensory core, this cognitively unspoiled experience? Is there such a thing? Of course
there is. It is something that sentient beings enjoy virtually every minute of their waking life. In what follows I offer
a test, a criterion, a way of telling what should be included and—more importantly for present purposes—what
should be excluded from this purified perceptual state. I call it the Goldilocks test. As a practical matter, Goldilocks
is not always easy to apply. It is, for example, not clear how it is to be applied to gustatory and olfactory sensations.
Even in the case of vision the test does not always yield reliable results. Not unless one makes unrealistic
assumptions about the subjects being tested. I return to some of these shortcomings later. Nonetheless, even if
never performed, Goldilocks is an effective analytical tool. It serves as a useful way of thinking about perception, an
intuitive guide to the target—pure perception—whose causal isolation from cognitive affairs is at issue in debates
about the modularity of perceptual processes. As a further benefit, Goldilocks also poses a challenge to those
hoping to demonstrate the permeability ofperception.
To describe the test, and to illustrate its application, I will use an example of alleged cognitive penetration
conveniently provided by Susanna Siegel in her recent book, The Contents of Visual Experience.3 Siegel argues that
an expert’s perception can be affected by his or her knowledge in a dramatic way. A novice sees a pine tree and
experiences merely a arrangement of variously colored shapes and textures. An expert forester, on the other hand,
someone who effortlessly recognizes pine trees when he sees them, has quite a different experience. He experiences
not simply the colors and shapes the novice sees, but also something the novice does not see: the property pine-
tree-ness. The forester’s visual phenomenology is different. His beliefs and expectations, his reactions and
dispositions are different, of course. He sees (the fact) that it is a pine tree. He sees, and thus knows, what kind of
tree it is. He sees it as a pine tree. It looks like (p.165) a pine tree to him. He sees it to be a pine tree. None of this
is true of the novice. But aside from these cognitive differences, there is also, according to Siegel, a difference in the
forester’s visual experience of the tree, a difference in how the tree looks to him in a sense of ‘looks’ that indicates a
genuine difference in visual phenomenology.
This is an astonishing claim about cognitive penetration: someone coming to see a new property, a kind property,
pine-tree-ness, as a result of acquired knowledge and experience of instances of that kind. I do not believe it. I
think pine trees look much the same to experts as they do to novices. My skepticism is nourished by the failure of
such alleged visual differences to pass the Goldilocks test.
Before illustrating this, though, a word of caution. Quite obviously, what one knows, prefers, expects, and wants
can causally affect one’s perceptual experiences. It can do so by affecting where one looks and therefore what one
sees. That is to say, it affects experiences by changing the stimulus. No one defending the modularity of perception
is denying these obvious facts. What is in question, instead, is whether such cognitive differences can alter the
experience without changing the stimulus. Can they affect the processing of a stimulus—and thus the product of
that process, the experience itself—without doing so merely by affecting the stimulus on which that process
operates? That is the issue.
I will therefore assume in what follows that a comparison of experiences that allegedly exhibit cognitive influence is
a comparison of experiences that are responses to exactly the same physical stimulus. The expert forester and the
novice are shown the same tree from the same angle in the same light for an interval so brief that no eye
movements occur. Or, if we suppose the tree is seen long enough for eye movements to occur, I will assume that
eye movements (including saccades) are exactly the same. Despite the implausibility of this ever occurring in real
life, the assumption is required and completely harmless in the present context because the question being asked is
not whether knowledge can affect which stimuli are processed (obviously it can), but whether it can affect how a
stimulus is processed (controversial). So I assume that experiences allegedly exhibiting cognitive penetration,
experiences that are allegedly different as a result of this influence, are responses to exactly the samestimulus.
Using Siegel’s example, then, Goldilocks goes like this. E is an expert forester. N is a woodsy novice. If E’s visual
experience is in some way enhanced, enriched, or merely altered by his special cognitive/conceptual condition with
respect to pine trees, if the pine tree they both see looks different to E, this should become apparent in their
pictorial representations of the tree. So we ask N to paint what he sees.4 E is asked to judge the painting. E can
have one of three different reactions: Goldilocks #1: too little; Goldilocks #2: too much; and Goldilocks #3: just
right. Only Goldilocks #3, I submit, is a credible response.
(p.166) Goldilocks #1: Too little. E complains that N has left something out of his painting: the pine-tree-ness of
the tree.5 E experiences, he sees, pine-tree-ness when he looks at the tree, but he doesn’t see it when he looks at N’s
painting. He doesn’t see it, of course, because N didn’t put it in his painting, and N didn’t put it there because he
didn’t see it when he looked at the tree. According to Siegel, though, for E it is as though N left out the color of the
needles or the shape of the cones—properties of the tree (and its parts) that both N and E see when they look at the
tree.
Mystified by E’s complaint because he thinks his painting is virtually photographic in its realism, N hands E the
paintbrush and invites him to fill in what is missing: ‘Show me, please, what you see that I don’t see.’
What is the forester going to add or change to make N’s painting a more accurate depiction of how the pine tree
looks to him? What pigments will E select? Where will he apply the pigment? What details N so carefully recorded
in his painting of the tree will E paint over? Since we are supposing N’s painting is virtually photographic in its
realism, would E also find something missing in N’s photograph of the tree? Does E experience something cameras
fail to capture?
These, obviously, are meant to be rhetorical questions. If N was doing his job, he didn’t leave anything out of his
painting. Neither did his camera. This is not to say that Goldilocks #1 is never the right reaction of an expert or
trained observer to the efforts of a novice. It is not to deny the possibility of genuine perceptual learning.6 Yes,
perhaps a person’s perceptual experiences can be enriched by exposure to and prolonged training with relevant
stimuli. Perhaps after long experience tasting and comparing wines, the connoisseur actually begins to taste things
(the hint of tannin) he didn’t taste before. Maybe musicians hear things (a change of key?) novices never hear.
Maybe prolonged exposure or practice ‘tunes’ earlier processes in the sensory pathways to make them more
sensitive to subtle differences important to specialists. If this is so—and there is certainly evidence that it is so—
these improvements in perceptual acuity will result in greater discriminatory power. They will reveal themselves in
a Goldilocks test. If E, as a result of long experience in the forest, actually perceives shades of green or subtle
differences in bark texture that N does not see, this will be evident in E’s corrections to N’s painting. E will paint
what he sees, the differences he sees, that N does not see. E will pass the test by responding with a plausible (to
independent experts) Goldilocks #1: (p.167) N left something out, subtle differences in color or texture that E
sees when he looks at a pine tree. But Goldilocks #1 is not a believable reaction with respect to pine-tree-ness. N
didn’t leave this out of his painting. If he did, if Goldilocks #1 is E’s reaction to N’s painting, why can’t E restore the
missing feature in his own depiction of the tree? His failure to do so provides us with convincing reasons to think
there is nothing missing in N’s painting. In the relevant sense of ‘looks’ the pine tree looks the same to both of
them.
Goldilocks #2: Too much. The forester complains that N has put too much in his painting. N depicted the tree as
having five needles in each cluster with long slender cones, something not characteristic of pine trees in general. N
did so, of course, because the tree he was painting turned out to be a White Pine tree and White Pine trees have five
needles in each cluster and long slender cones. But in doing this N did not, the forester complains, depict the pine-
tree-ness of the tree, something he sees when he looks at the tree. At best, N depicted white-pine-tree-ness or,
maybe, an even more specific kind-property—eastern-white-pine-tree-ness. To paint pine-tree-ness N should have
avoided details not characteristic of pine trees in general.7
Once again, I can’t imagine this to be a possible reaction, not one Siegel would put into the mouth of her expert. If
one is going to see kind properties, one should be able to see them despite seeing details that are distinctive of
more specific kinds. The forester, after all, saw these details when he looked at the tree itself. He noticed the five
needles in each cluster and the long slender cones. That did not, or so we are told, prevent him from seeing the
pine-tree-ness of the tree. So the details N included in his painting shouldn’t prevent E from seeing that property in
N’s painting. This point should have been obvious from the beginning. N did not misrepresent what both he and E
saw when he put White-Pine details in his painting. If these details did not prevent the forester from experiencing
pine-tree-ness when he saw the tree, they shouldn’t prevent him from experiencing it when he looks at N’s
painting. So ‘too much’ cannot be the right reaction. This leaves Goldilocks #3, the only reaction I can imagine the
forester having.
Goldilocks #3: Just right. N’s painting looks just right to the forester. It depicts the tree exactly as he sees it,
exactly as he would have painted it. Nothing added, nothing subtracted. The forester sees pine-tree-ness in N’s
painting in the same way he sees it when looking at the pine tree.8 So N’s painting is just right—just right to N who
does not see pine-tree-ness in either the tree or the painting, and just right to the forester who sees pine-tree-ness
in both. The forester’s experience is different from N’s, according to Siegel, when both see a pine tree, yes, but it is
also different when both are looking at the painting.
(p.168) If this is the option we are forced to accept, then since N’s painting of the pine tree is not a pine tree, E’s
visual experience of N’s painting misrepresents the painting. It represents it as having a visible (to E) property—
pine-tree-ness—it doesn’t have. N’s experience of the painting, on the other hand, is (at least in this respect)
veridical. It represents what he sees (the canvas surface) as having a spatial arrangement of colors, shapes, and
textures—colors, shapes, and textures the canvas actually has.
What Goldilocks #3 means, of course, is that N always and unintentionally includes in his painting of a pine tree
properties (pine-tree-ness) he does not see in the tree he is painting. This sounds suspicious. If N always and
inevitably paints pine-tree-ness in his paintings of pine trees by arranging colors, shapes, orientations, and sizes
(the properties he does see) the way he does, it begins to sound like pine-tree-ness is really just an arrangement, a
configuration, of simple properties both E and N experience when looking at pine trees. If this is so, the property of
pine-tree-ness that E sees is simply an arrangement, a spatially structured array of colored shapes that N also
experiences when he sees pine trees. He just doesn’t know that that arrangement is characteristic of pine trees. It is
like a child who does not know what a triangle is when seeing—and, yes, even painting—three lines arranged as in
Figure 6.1.
Without realizing it, the child sees and paints

triangularity because he sees and paints three lines
arranged in one of the ways that constitute the normal
look of a triangle. The child just doesn’t understand that
that arrangement of lines is a triangle. There is, however,
nothing more to seeing the property triangularity than
seeing three lines that look the way Figure 6.1 looks to
normal observers.9
Figure 6.1: Triangulation
To insist, on the contrary, that experts not only know
(understand) more than novices but see more, that their
visual experience is different, is to opt for Goldilocks #1: N has left something out of his painting, something E sees
when he looks at the (p.169)
tree (or triangle). This leaves us with the question of why,

despite seeing it, E cannot paint it. There are, of course,
properties E knows the pine tree has when he sees that it is a
pine tree that he cannot paint. Some properties are not
paintable. But these properties contribute nothing to the
phenomenology of seeing a pine tree. They are not represented
in E’s experience of the tree.
It may be objected, though, that Goldilocks yields

counterintuitive results when applied to familiar Figure 6.2: Duck/rabbit
perceptual phenomena and is for that reason unacceptable
as a test for perceptual differences. I do not think so.
Consider the familiar duck/rabbit(Figure 6.2).
When D sees the drawing as a duck and R (this could be D a moment later) sees it as a rabbit, are their perceptions
different? Does it look different to them in that sense of the word ‘looks’ that captures the phenomenal character,
the sensory aspect, of their perceptual experiences? Or is this instability in how one perceives the figure only a
difference in how one interprets, or is disposed to interpret, the drawing (as of a duck rather than of a rabbit) or,
perhaps, a difference in the pattern of eye fixations (on the bill of the duck rather than the nose of the rabbit)?10
Using the Goldilocks test, we ask D to paint the way the duck/rabbit looks to him. Will R regard this as an accurate
painting of the way the duck/rabbit looks to him? Won’t they both draw the same thing—a duck/rabbit? If so, then
Goldilocks decrees that R and D are having the same visual experience of the duck/rabbit. Since the difference in
their experience is not paintable, it isn’t visual. This is not a visual phenomenon at all. One sees it as a duck and
one sees it as a rabbit, yes; it looks like a duck to one, like a rabbit to the other, yes; but what they see—the
duck/rabbit—is the same. And, as their drawings attest, it looks the same to both of them. They do not have
different visual experiences of it.
The same is true of other unstable perceptions. Consider figure and ground reversal (Figure 6.3). (p.170)
There is clearly a difference between seeing a white figure

—a vase, say—on a black background and seeing two faces
in profile flanking a white background. This can change
rapidly. Is it a visual difference? It is clearly a difference in
how the figure looks—first this way, then that way—but,
once again, this doesn’t settle matters. Is the difference in
how the drawing ‘looks’ to be understood in a purely visual
sense of this word or in some other way? Goldilocks makes
it hard to see how this could be a difference in the Figure 6.3: Figure–ground ambiguity
experience. If asked to draw the way Figure 6.3 looks to
them, won’t they both draw the same thing—viz. Figure
6.3? How could they not? What else is left to draw? When we use words, verbal representations, we describe the
figure differently, yes. One describes it as ‘a vase’ and the other as ‘two faces’, but their pictorial descriptions are
the same—an ambiguous figure. Goldilocks tells us it is the latter, the pictorial descriptions, that are critical for
identifying and distinguishing visual experiences.
There are, nonetheless, practical limitations in applying Goldilocks. It is not at all clear, for instance, what the
analogue of Goldilocks would be with taste, smell, or touch. I can ‘describe’ to you—using pictures—how something
looks to me, but how do I describe in analogous sensory terms how things taste, smell, or feel to me? How do we
use Goldilocks to decide whether a wine really tastes different, more complex, to the connoisseur, or whether he or
she is simply able to identify something in the wine that the unwitting novice also tastes? To use Goldilocks to
decide this, we need the analog of a picture, a ‘gustatory description’, a replication that a novice can produce that
the expert can evaluate for accuracy and respond with Goldilocks #3: ‘Yes, that is the way it tastes to me’ or
Goldilocks #1: ‘No, you left out the taste of apricots.’
(p.171) Aside from these difficulties, though, there are problems in using Goldilocks even in the case of vision.11
These problems relate to the fact that a painting of what one sees or of how things look is an expression of what one
thinks (judges, believes, knows) one sees, not—not necessarily anyway—of what one actually sees. It may not,
therefore, be a reliable guide to the character of the visual experience. This can be illustrated using an old example
from epistemology: the speckled hen. Imagine a speckled hen with 21 clearly visible speckles on its facing side. N
observes the hen and paints what he sees. E, an expert, observes the hen from the same angle for the same amount
of time. He then examines N’s painting. He claims (Goldilocks #1) N left something out. He painted too few
speckles. E didn’t take the trouble to count the speckles so he can’t be sure exactly how many he saw, but he is quite
sure there are more speckles on the hen than there are on N’s painting of the hen. As a result, E is convinced that
his experience of the hen was more specklish than his experience of N’s painting. So if N’s painting is a true
description of what N saw, there is more to what E sees when he looks at the hen than there is to what N sees when
he looks at the hen. N left something out of his painting, the 21st speckle, something that E, but apparently not N,
saw when he looked at the hen.
Can we conclude from this that N and E had different visual experiences? That E saw things N failed to see? No. It
shows, at best, that E thinks, or is inclined to think, that he saw more speckles on the hen than there were on N’s
depiction of the hen—that, therefore, if the painting is an accurate representation of how the hen looked to N, E’s
experience of the hen was richer, more specklish, than N’s. But why suppose that the painting is an accurate
representation of how the hen looked to N? Maybe N failed to paint some of the speckles he saw. N (just like E) did
not, after all, count the speckles. Maybe he saw more than he thinks he saw. Maybe, in fact, he saw all 21 speckles
that E saw. N just misjudged, underestimated, how many that was. If this is what happened, then despite
Goldilocks #1, E’s experience was not more specklish than N’s. They had exactly the same visual experience. Both
of them saw 21 speckles. It is only their judgments that are different—judgments that (in the case of N) resulted in
his painting too few speckles.
Pine trees, of course, are complex stimuli. So if N left out branches, cones, or needles in his painting of the tree, one
cannot infer he didn’t see them. Likewise, if E regards N’s painting of the tree as ‘just right’ (Goldilocks #3), we
cannot infer that the painting is just right, that it faithfully represents what E experienced when he looked at the
tree. Maybe E saw things that N did not see when they looked at the tree, but E doesn’t (p.172) notice (detect)
their absence in N’s painting. This would then be a case of difference blindness, a failure to detect or identify visible
differences. It is not genuine blindness, a failure to see visible differences.
If this is possible—and I here assume it is12—then Goldilocks is not an infallible guide to differences in experiences
even in the case of vision where Goldilocks has its most compelling application. Not unless we assume—
unrealistically—total visual recall on the part of the subjects being tested. This, though, only shows something that
should have been evident from the beginning: Goldilocks is not so much a test, a practical tool for showing two
experiences are the same (Goldilocks #3) or different (Goldilocks #1). I don’t expect anyone to actually use this
test. Goldilocks provides, instead, a way of thinking about what would have to change if genuine penetration were
to occur. A person’s experience would have to change in the sense of the word ‘experience’ in which a person could
(in the case of vision) replicate the difference in pictorial terms. Inability to do so leaves one with reasons to think
such differences do not exist.
It is for this reason I conclude that one’s unstable experience of duck/rabbits and figure–ground is not—not in the
strictest sense—a perceptual phenomenon. It is also why I remain skeptical of alleged accounts of cognitive
penetration. Before I believe that experts see things I don’t see, I want a demonstration of the superior powers of
discrimination this improved acuity confers on them. I want them to pass the Goldilocks test. Until they do, until I
have a convincing Goldilocks #1 reaction, I will go on believing things look to them the way they look to me. Yes,
they know a lot more than I do, and, yes, they come to know it by looking, but that doesn’t mean they see more.
Acknowledgments
My thanks to Dennis Stampe and Judith Fortson for their help. I am grateful to Judith for suggesting ‘Goldilocks’
as an appropriate name for my test.
References
Bibliography references:
Dretske, F. (2007). What change blindness teaches about consciousness. In J. Hawthorne (ed.), Philosophical
Perspectives, vol. 21(1): Philosophy of Mind, 215–20. Oxford: Blackwell.
Dretske, F. (2010). What we see: the texture of conscious experience. In B. Nanay (ed.), Perceiving the World, 54–
67. New York: Oxford University Press.
(p.173) Fahle, M. (2002). Introduction. In M. Fahle and T. Poggio (eds), Perceptual Learning, ix–xx. Cambridge,
Mass.: MIT Press.
Fahle, M., Edelman, S., and Poggio, T. (1995). Fast perceptual learning in hyperacuity. Vision Research 35: 3003–
13.
Gibson, E. J. (1963). Perceptual learning. Annual Review of Psychology 14: 29–56.
Siegel, S. (2010). The Contents of Visual Experience. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Watanabe, T., Nañez, J. E., and Sasaki, Y. (2001). Perceptual learning without perception. Nature 413: 844–8.
Notes:
(1) They could, of course, see it, the iPod, that which is in front of them. What they couldn’t see is what it is (that is
in front of them).
(2) A conscious stage of course. We are not concerned, for instance, with peripheral activity in the receptors or the
optic nerve.
(3) I introduced Goldilocks in my commentary on Siegel’s book in an ‘Author Meets Critics’ session at the Pacific
Division Meetings of the American Philosophical Association in Seattle, Wash., April 2012.
(4) Assume for the sake of the thought experiment, the imagined test, that N has the artistic talents of a 17th-c.
Dutch master.
(5) I ignore things that are necessarily left out in a two-dimensional representation of a three-dimensional scene—
e.g. stereoscopic cues for depth. These will also be absent in E’s painting of the tree, so they are not something he
would find ‘missing’ in N’s painting.
(6) By ‘genuine perceptual learning’ I mean what Eleanor Gibson (1963) meant when she defined perceptual
learning as a ‘relatively permanent and consistent change in the perception [my emphasis] of a stimulus array
following practice or experience with this array’. It is what Fahle (2002: ix) clearly intends by defining it as an
improvement in discrimination as a result of learning to perceive something new that one could not perceive
before. Psychologists (see Watanabe et al. 2001; Fahle et al. 1995) sometimes mean something more general by
perceptual learning—e.g. an improvement in a human’s ability to perform perceptual tasks (e.g. distinguishing
triangles from squares). This more general notion of perceptual learning clearly includes cases in which there may
be no perceptual change at all and, therefore, nothing that is relevant to the topic of this chapter.
(7) Just as the concept of a pine tree leaves out properties not characteristic of pine trees in general.
(8) Siegel says that a non-pine tree (e.g. a hologram) could look exactly the same as a pine tree to an expert who
knew it wasn’t a pine tree (Siegel 2010: 105). So the forester can see pine-tree-ness in something he knows is not a
pine tree. I infer, therefore, that even if E knows N’s painting is not a pine tree, he could (according to Siegel) still
see pine-tree-ness when he looks at it. If he cannot, we are back to Goldilocks #1. N left something out of his
painting—a property the forester sees when he looks at the pine tree but not when he looks at N’s painting.
(9) The existence of illusions and hallucinations should make it clear that one can see the property triangularity
without seeing a triangle—i.e. when no object one sees actually has this property. If lines are arranged in three
dimensions to look (from one’s perspective) like a closed figure and thus like a triangle, one sees (experiences)
triangularity without actually seeing (experiencing) a triangle. If this sounds a little odd, think of seeing or
experiencing the color red or movement without seeing or experiencing anything (any object) that is red or moving.
(10) If the latter, the experiential differences are attributable to a difference in the stimulus, not to a difference in
how the stimulus is processed. As such, the example would not illustrate the relevant cognitive influence on
perception.
(11) I here ignore inverted spectrum possibilities—i.e. the possibility that red things look green to the novice and
green things look red. Since this perceptual ‘inversion’ (since birth) also holds for the pigments the novice now uses
to paint the things he sees, his painting of the pine tree will look ‘just right’ (i.e. green) to the expert (Goldilocks
#3), and just right to the novice (i.e. red), despite looking (in the relevant sense of ‘looking’) much different to the
two of them (green to the expert, red to the novice). If such spectral inversion is deemed a real possibility, it is a
possibility that challenges all efforts to compare intersubjective (but maybe not intrasubjective) experiences. Since
it is a challenge to all conceivable tests, I do not take it as a serious objection to the Goldilocks test.
(12) There is an enormous literature on change (or difference) blindness. I hope my example is sufficiently
plausible not to need supporting argument. Despite differing judgments about what they saw, despite a Goldilocks
#1 reaction on the part of E, my claim that N might have seen all the speckles E saw and that, therefore, they might
have had exactly the same visual experience, is something that (if further support is needed) I defend in Dretske
(2007) and (2010).
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Perception versus Conception: The Goldilocks Test - Oxford Scholarship 10/8/19, 10(39 AM

Oxford Scholarship Online

The Cognitive Penetrability of Perception: New

Print publication date: 2015

Perception versus Conception

Abstract and Keywords

Without realizing it, the child sees and paints

when he looks at the (p.169)

tree (or triangle). This leaves us with the question of why,

It may be objected, though, that Goldilocks yields

There is clearly a difference between seeing a white figure

Gibson, E. J. (1963). Perceptual learning. Annual Review of Psychology 14: 29–56.

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