Perceptual Confidence

In the distance, you see a figure walking toward you. At some point you might say, “That looks as though it could be Isaac.” A minute later, when he’s fifty meters away, you might say, “That looks as though it’s probably Isaac.” Eventually, when he’s only a few meters away, you might say, “This is Isaac.” All of these reports reflect your confidence at the level of belief—your doxastic confidence. But they also seem to reflect your confidence at the level of perception—what I’ll call your “perceptual confidence.” Just as you assigned more and more doxastic confidence to the possibility it’s Isaac and less and less doxastic confidence to the possibility it’s not Isaac, your perceptual experience assigned more and more perceptual confidence to the possibility it’s Isaac and less and less perceptual confidence to the possibility it’s not Isaac. These two kinds of confidence can come apart, as when you remain perceptually confident it’s Isaac, with the same feeling of recognition, even after you learn he’s out of town. You might say, “I know he’s out of town, but that still looks as though it could be Isaac.” This example supports perceptual confidence, the view that our perceptual experiences assign degrees of confidence. The goal of this paper is to introduce, clarify, and motivate perceptual confidence, and then catalogue some of its more interesting consequences, such as the way it blurs the distinction between veridical and illusory experiences, fills a hole in our best scientific theories of perception, and implies that experiences don’t have objective accuracy conditions. The most plausible alternative is post-perceptual confidence, the view that while our perceptual experiences represent external objects and their properties, they do not themselves assign degrees of confidence. Applied to our initial example: your perceptual experience eventually represents that it’s Isaac, but at no point assigns confidence to that possibility or its negation. Instead, your perceptual experience merely causes and justifies your confidence at the level of belief. Perhaps your perceptual experience initially causes and justifies ten percent confidence it’s Isaac because of a background belief like: if my perceptual experience represents Isaac in the distance, I should have