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Updated: Oct 15, 2025

Creating Objects and Object Categories for Studying Perception and Perceptual Learning
Published on: November 2, 2012
Perception is not all-purpose
Bence Nanay1,2
1University of Antwerp, D 413 Grote Kauwenberg 18, 2000 Antwerp, Belgium.
Abstract:
I aim to show that perception depends counterfactually on the action we want to perform. Perception is not all-purpose: what we want to do does influence what we see. After clarifying how this claim is different from the one at stake in the cognitive penetrability debate and what counterfactual dependence means in my claim, I will give a two-step argument: (a) one's perceptual attention depends counterfactually on one's intention to perform an action (everything else being equal) and (b) one's perceptual processing depends counterfactually on one's perceptual attention (everything else being equal). If we put these claims together, what we get is that one's perceptual processing depends counterfactually on one's intention to perform an action (everything else being equal).
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