Non-Inferential Knowledge of Perception

Those who take visual perception to be transparent face a puzzle: How does one know that she sees given that seeing is not itself an object of awareness? Most solutions to this puzzle are inferentialist in that they claim that one comes to believe that she sees on the basis of a belief that she has about the extra-mental environment. In this paper, I argue for a non-inferential alternative. I show that extant inferentialist accounts are committed to the claim that the contents of vision are inexpressible—quite literally, you can never say what you see. In light of this, I develop a non-inferential solution to the above puzzle that avoids the problem of inexpressibility. Rather than an inferential transition, I suggest that one may simply transition from the having of (but not an awareness of!) a particular visual experience to the belief that she sees thus-and-such. Properly understood, this non-inferential transition is perfectly reliable, always issuing in true belief, thereby underwriting one’s knowledge that she sees.