Expecting the World: Perception, Prediction, and the Origins of Human Knowledge

Expecting the World: Perception, Prediction, and the Origins of Human Knowledge* Perception, I shall argue, is the successful prediction of the current sensory signal using stored knowledge about the world.This model of perception is increasingly common in cognitive scientific discourse 1 .But it has so far made little impact on philosophical theorizing 2 .Nonetheless, the model has intuitive appeal, is backed by increasing neuroscientific evidence, and has been shown to be computationally effective.It depicts the perceptual process as involving the Bayesian estimation of distal properties and features.If correct, it explains why perception, although carried out by the brain, cannot help but reach out to a distal world; it shows why that 'reaching out' reveals a world that is already