Susanna Siegel is Edgar Pierce Professor of Philosophy at Harvard University. She currently works on topics in the philosophy of mind and epistemology. Her books The Contents of Visual Experience and The Rationality of Perception were published by Oxford University Press. Other publications include “Rich or Thin?”, a debate with Alex Byrne about the contents of perception in Contemporary Debates in the Philosophy of Perception; “The Epistemology of Selection Effects”, in Oxford Studies in Epistemology; and “Cognitive Penetrability: Modularity, Epistemology, and Ethics” with Zoe Jenkin, in Review of Psychology and Philosophy. She is past President, American Society for the Scientific Study of Consciousness; and upcoming President, Southern Society for Philosophy and Psychology. In 2018 she gave the Saul Kripke Lecture, CUNY Graduate Center, and in 2020 she delivered the Jack Smart Lecture, at ANU. In 2019 she was named Centenary Fellow, Scots Philosophical Association, University of Glasgow, and in 2012 was awarded Walter Channing Cabot Fellow.
Zan Boag: Philosophers and the lay person have very different ideas of what perception means. What does it mean to philosophers and how do we take in information from the outside world?
Susanna Siegel: As lay people we count three different things as perception. First, there’s sensory perception: what we see, hear, touch, feel and smell, either consciously or unconsciously.
A second kind of perception is your overall take on a situation – your personal vision. An optimist perceives things as basically looking up. You and a sibling might have different takes on your family’s dynamics, and in that case you’re perceiving the same situation differently.
Third, there’s perception as a culture-shaping force. Stereotypes belong here. Women bosses or public figures are more easily seen as angry or aggressive if they criticise a person or a policy. We speak of how perceptions of a political candidate might be shaped by campaign coverage. Despite their differences, perceptions of all three kinds have this in common: they characterise the world as it appears to us. We navigate the world on their basis, drawing inferences from them, acting on the basis of them, relying on them to interpret what we find.
Philosophers study all three topics: sensory perception, personal vision, stereotypes. But each one is so complex that it needs analysis from other disciplines as well: cognitive neuroscience for sensory perception; social psychology for personal vision; politics, history, and sociology for stereotypes.
It’s something that’s quite relevant for you in the US at the moment, particularly personal vision
