Softening the Border: A Capacities Approach to the Perception–Cognition Distinction

ABSTRACT Approaches to the perception–cognition distinction tend toward two extremes. Many embrace a hard border, treating perception and cognition as mutually exclusive, non‐overlapping categories. By contrast, eliminativism denies that any principled, theoretically useful distinction exists between perception and cognition. This article offers a third way, describing a principled but soft border between perception and cognition. This non‐exclusive approach differentiates perception from cognition while allowing that they overlap. Because it rests on the notion of a psychological capacity, we call it the capacities approach . Perception and cognition are distinct psychological faculties, each of which comprises a collection of psychological capacities. What unifies and differentiates each such collection is the distinctive way in which its capacities are exercised. Perceptual capacities are those that can be exercised in a stimulus‐dependent manner, whereas cognitive capacities are those that can be exercised in a stimulus‐independent manner. Because some capacities, including those associated with approximate number, language, and imagery, can be exercised in each such manner, some capacities belong to both perception and cognition. We argue that the capacities approach offers an illuminating taxonomy and handles both the empirical facts and the tricky cases better than its rivals.