Perceptual Knowledge and the Primacy of Judgement

This chapter argues that judgement, or belief, is the key to understanding the possibility of perceptual knowledge. It suggests that any adequate account of human perception should explain, at least in general, how our perceiving what we do can give us the kind of knowledge we all know we have of the world around us. Awareness of things, even repeated awareness of things of the same kind, does not on its own give you the resources for having beliefs about them that are either true or false. To understand how perception can provide us with knowledge we must understand the connection between what we perceive and the possibility of thought and belief about what we perceive. This chapter contends that being capable of judgement is a condition of knowing something about the world by perception.