The Rationality of Perception rewrites perception's rational role and its rational standing. This book is ambitious and creative. It is sure to have a big impact on the philosophy of perception, as epistemic questions return to focus.
Perception is not an unjustified justifier, according to Siegel. Instead, its epistemic status can vary. Accordingly, the power of conscious perception to support judgments, beliefs, and outlooks can vary. In this view, perception's epistemic status depends on its etiology. If their precursors differ, experiences that share content and phenomenology can differ epistemically and rationally, even if a subject could not tell them apart. But this is not just due to differences in external factors, such as reliability. Instead, it stems from what happens within a perceiver. In particular, experiences can stem from inferences, and epistemic variability arises from better or worse inferences. Given inferential routes to experience, the surprising implication is that experiences...
