Subconscious Inference in Peirce's Epistemology of Perception

Empiricists have traditionally assumed that an epistemic subject has immediate access only to some primitive perceptual objects, so that judgments about kinds, modal properties, and dispositions are parasitic upon and less certain than those about what is given in perception. Against this view, Peirce argues that perception provides doxastic warrants in virtue of subconscious inferential processes that constitute the content of a temporally extended perceptual episode. According to Peirce, perceptual judgments have an abductive logical form, and they supply the perceiver with novel hypotheses about the world. Though the production of these hypotheses is not subject to conscious control, it is subject to subconscious control, when a present percept is compared to other features of perceptual experience. By examining Peirce's account of the continuity and temporality of perception and his investigations of subconscious processes, this paper considers how experience can confirm or falsify prior beliefs and produce novel knowledge.