Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

The capacity to know and perception

2019; Wiley; Volume: 29; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1111/phis.12146

1758-2237

Andrea Kern,

Philosophical Ethics and Theory

It has been argued that acts of thinking and judging must be rationally constrained by something other than acts of thinking and judging in order to have a content that purports to represent how things are. Thus the capacity for judgment is thought not to be a self-standing capacity but one that must cooperate with another capacity. The core idea of minimal empiricism is that a self-conscious capacity for perception fulfills this cooperating role.1 A self-conscious capacity for perception delivers perceptual episodes whose content is not a product of the judgmental activity of the subject; rather, it is given to the judging subject on account of the object that figures in the content of the judgment, in a manner that is available to the subject as a rational constraint on her judgment. Rationalism, by contrast, denies that perception can place a rational constraint on judgment. Perception, as such, cannot be a source of rational constraint.2 Perception is a mere enabling condition for judgment, not something that provides a ground for it. In this paper I will argue that the debate about whether or not perception can or even must be a source of rational constraint is misguided. The debate's topic is the question about how the capacity for judgment relates to the capacity for perception. In order for this question to be intelligible the capacity for judgment and the capacity for perception must be two distinct capacities such that one can wonder what their relation may be. I will argue that this is not what judging is: a capacity that relates to another capacity such as perception, either by being rationally constrained by it, as the minimal empiricist wants, or by being enabled by it, as the rationalist wants. Rather, judging is an act of a rational capacity, which, as such, excludes the idea that it is explained by anything other than the capacity that it is said to "actualize". The concept of judging, I will argue, describes a capacity whose exercise is, if things go well, not related to the deliverances of any other capacity but either directly or indirectly enabled by conditions under which its exercise is revealed to be true to the judging subject and hence is a case of knowledge. To perceive, for a judger, is to judge in a distinctive manner: namely, in a manner that is directly enabled by conditions which are, in the fundamental case, conditions under which one acquires knowledge. This manner of judging contrasts with another manner of judging, not because this other manner of judging has different conditions from it, but because the recognition of the truth of the judgment here is not mediated by other judgments from which the truth of the judgment is inferred; rather, in this case, the truth of the judgment is non-inferentially revealed to the subject. According to minimal empiricism the idea of perception as a rational constraint on judgment belongs to a conception of judgment according to which judging is an exercise of conceptual capacities that are sui generis. Conceptual capacities are capacities in terms of which we understand what it means for a subject to be a rational being. To be a rational being is to be, among other things, in possession of capacities that, once they are fully developed, enable judgments either about how things are or how they ought to be. It is constitutive of the relevant notion of conceptual capacities that their actualization in a judgment is dependent upon the subject's ability to justify her judgment by showing that it is, or is likely to be, as the judging subject claims it to be, namely true.3 To possess conceptual capacities in this sense is to possess the capacity for judgment that one could not have if one were not, on occasion, conscious of the grounds of one's judgment in virtue of which it is a self-conscious act of knowledge. The idea of capacities and competences recently has gained interest in epistemology on account of the thought that epistemic capacities seem to provide the right form of explanation for the non-accidental nexus of a belief and its truth that is required for knowledge.4 The employment of the idea of epistemic capacities in recent epistemology however, differs distinctively from the way in which minimal empiricism employs this notion. Ernest Sosa, for example, does not employ his notion of epistemic competences in order thereby to delineate the topic of rationality in a sense that would entail the idea of self-conscious activity. He employs it in a sense that is explicitly neutral with respect to the idea of self-consciousness.5 I will ignore this difference for the moment and come back to it later. What matters at the moment is the general thought that to refer to capacities is to employ a form of explanation. To think of a particular activity as an instance of a capacity is to think of this activity as an instance of something general that explains—in a way that will have to be specified in what follows—the agreement of this activity with the concept of the capacity under which the activity is brought. It explains why the activity is in accordance with the concept that describes the capacity. When someone exercises the capacity to x then this means that it is no accident that her activity is in accordance with the concept of x. Rather, it is explained by her capacity to x. To put the thought the other way round: The concept of a capacity is empty unless one thinks of a capacity as a form of explanation of the activity that its concept describes. This is the reason why capacities matter in epistemology. Epistemic capacities, in the sense in which recent epistemology conceives of them, are to be capacities both for self-conscious states and for non-self-conscious states. When I introduced the idea of conceptual capacities, the point was that the topic is a distinctive kind of activity: self-conscious acts of judging that things are thus and so that are explained by a distinctive kind of capacity, namely a rational capacity. Our question thus is: What is knowledge qua act of a rational capacity? It is common ground between minimal empiricism and rationalism that the following must hold of any conception of distinctively rational knowledge: Both think that knowledge qua act of a rational capacity consists in an act of judging that things are thus-and-so. To judge that things are thus-and-so is to combine concepts to a propositional unity that thereby, in being combined to that unity, is endorsed as true. To endorse the truth of a propositional content the subject must understand the concepts that make up the content of her judgment, and this must be reflected in her understanding of some of the implications contained in her endorsement of it, however minimal that understanding may be.6 She may understand that to endorse the truth of p entails the endorsement of q and is incompatible with the endorsement of r. This means that in order for someone to judge that p, she must understand herself to possess a manifold of concepts that she can employ in judgments with contents other than p, such as q and r. As has been noted by several authors that share the above characterization, judging is an activity that is related to the concept of truth not as a concept that describes a property external to the activity, but as a concept that describes the self-conscious end of the activity. To judge that p is to settle the question whether p. To call this point a redundancy theory of truth, as it sometimes is, overstates its role because it presents this point as an insight into judging gained from a standpoint other than from judging. Whereas all one wants to say is that, from within an activity of judging that is conscious of itself, that is, conscious of its activity as an activity of judging, truth is the self-conscious end of this activity. According to both, minimal empiricism as well as rationalism, a capacity for judgment, thus conceived, is not a self-standing capacity. The mere idea of a capacity for judgment cannot make intelligible the kind of activity that it wants to make intelligible, unless it is conceived as a capacity that cooperates with a capacity for perception. Why? According to minimal empiricism what motivates the need for another capacity typically takes the form of the following regress-argument: Imagine I answer the question "Why do you judge p?" by saying, "Because I judge q", and the question "Why do you judge q?" by saying, "Because I judge r", and the question "Why do you judge r?" by saying, "Because I judge s". What I am doing in this series of answers is changing the content of the judgment—I rest p on q, q on r, and r on s—while holding constant the nexus between the respective content and myself. Each time, the nexus is that of judging, even as the content varies. Thus, at no point in this series of answers is the explanation of the judgment such as to answer the original question, because every answer is such that it solicits the same kind of question, just with respect to a different content. It follows that there must be an explanation of judgment that answers the question "Why do you judge p?" not by adducing a different content from the one that is to be grounded but instead by adducing a different sort of nexus to this content, namely, one that explains judgment in a way that forecloses the possibility of soliciting the kind of question from which we began. This can only be so, the argument goes, if there is another capacity, distinct from the capacity to judge, that is the source of episodes that exhibit such a different sort of nexus between myself and the content that I come to judge on their basis. The idea of a rational capacity for perception is supposed to be this other capacity. Minimal empiricism thinks that the capacity for perception that cooperates with the capacity for judgment by providing its ground can only do its job because it partakes of those capacities that define the idea of rationality: conceptual capacities. Conceptual capacities belong to the self-consciousness of their bearer because one cannot posses any of them unless one has an understanding of them as something that one can employ in a manifold of different judgments that are rationally related to each other. The idea is that the perceivings that result from the capacity for perception have an objective content just as judgments do. What distinguishes perceivings from judgments, according to the position, is that in perceiving how things are the content of the act—that the object is thus-and-so—is given to the subject through the object's being thus-and-so. By contrast, a judgment is an activity whose content is not given to the subject, but a product of the subject's cognitive activity. Its content is a matter of cognitive work under the control of the subject rather than something that the subject finds herself "saddled with".7 The idea of a rational capacity for perception is supposed to address the problem of judgment's emptiness. An episode whose conceptual content is partly explained by the fact that is the content of the judgment based on it, is supposed to explain why the subject judges that p rather than q or s. For an episode of this sort is supposed to provide a ground for a judgment that is available to the subject herself such that she can justify her judgment in a manner that reveals the judgment to be true and hence be an act of knowledge. To have perceptual knowledge according to this account, e.g. the knowledge that there is something red and rectangular in front of one, is to be in a state, as McDowell puts it, "that includes knowledge of its own credentials as knowledge".8 It is to be in a state that is self-conscious in the sense that it entails, as such, consciousness of itself as knowledge. Rationalism denies that perception can be a rational ground for judgment. Perception cannot play a rational role in the formation of judgment. Minimal empiricism is incoherent.9 The incoherence takes the form of a dilemma of two ways of reading the idea of perception that is supposed to provide a ground for knowledge: Either the perceptions that are to be rational grounds for knowledge are epistemic perceptions whose conceptual contents are facts. In order for a perception to have a conceptual content that is factive its subject must truly judge that things are so. However, if the relevant perception already involves judging that things are so, then it cannot be a ground that justifies the subject's judgment. Or these perceptions are non-epistemic perceptions that have no conceptual content. However, then they cannot rationally ground judgment.10 The ambivalence of minimal empiricism is condensed in McDowell's employment of the locution of "being in a position to know" by which he characterizes what it is for a rational perceiver to perceive an object.11 Someone who perceives an object, McDowell says, "is in a position" perceptually to know that it is thus-and-so. With the phrase "being in a position", he wants to suggest that someone who is in such a position, although she does not yet know that things are thus-and-so, has nothing further to do—i.e. no further cognitive activity is required of her—in order for her to come to know that things are thus-and-so, other than to exercise her capacity for judging that things are thus-and-so, whose possession is required for her to count as someone who is "in a position" to know. However, the idea of "being in a position to know" raises the question of what kind of episode or act it describes. Does "being in a position to know" describe a self-conscious act of perception? Or does it describe a non-self-conscious act of perception? If the former, then being in a position to know means that she who perceives in this sense is conscious of herself as seeing that things are thus-and-so. In this case, however, her being in a position to know is identical to knowing that things are thus-and-so, because self-consciously seeing that things are so involves judging that things are so in a manner that excludes the possibility of their being otherwise. If the latter, then she who is in a position to know does not self-consciously perceive that things are so but ascribes to herself something less than a perception. And if she ascribes to herself something less than a perception, e.g., the appearance of a perception, then she is not in a position to know. Because she then confronts the question whether that appearance is a mere appearance or whether it actually is a perception. And someone who confronts this question cannot be said to be in a position to know, because it takes, in one way or another, cognitive work to answer this question.12 The objection against minimal empiricism is that it is impossible to conceive of perception as a capacity whose operations, as such, partake of rationality. Perception cannot be conceived as a capacity whose operations, as such, are available to a subject as a justification of her judgment. The rationalist concludes that we must analyze perceptual knowledge in terms of an act to endorse a propositional content as true that is enabled by a non-epistemic perception whose role it is to bring the object "into the subjective life of the thinker".13 According to rationalism the role of perception is to explain the transition of a thinker from a state in which the object is not yet part of her subjective life into a state in which it is part of her subjective life. It is supposed to be a state that has no epistemic significance for the thinker in the sense that it is not available to the thinker as something that has a bearing on the truth of her judgment. It does not even ostensibly reveal to the thinker the truth of the judgment she forms. The crucial point here is that the fact that an object is part of the subjective life of the thinker in virtue of being perceived by her is not to mean that it is revealed to the thinker that the object is such-and-such. "Being part of the subjective life of the thinker" does not mean "being revealed to the thinker to be such-and-such". For, "being revealed to the thinker" would entail that the thinker forms a propositional thought about the object that she recognizes to be true. And this is precisely what one does not when one perceives in a non-epistemic sense. When one perceives an object in this non-revealing sense one is supposed to be in a state of consciousness that is different from an act of judging in that one's being in such a state is independent of the conceptual capacities one actualizes in judging. In consequence, the conditions for perceiving an object and the conditions for thinking and hence judging about it are distinct in the sense that one's capacity to perceive an object does not entail that one is able to think about what one perceives. Thus what one perceives, qua being perceived, is not a thinkable object, let alone an object that one thinks. Rather, in order for one to think about an object and hence to be conscious of something one can judge to be so, cognitive conditions must be fulfilled whose specification, according to the rationalist, is logically independent of the capacity for perception. One must possess conceptual capacities that one can employ to make judgments. However, if this is so, that is, if the conditions for perceiving and judging fall apart in the sense that one can specify both capacities independently of each other, then it follows that whenever one judges an object to be thus-and-so one is in a cognitive state that does not, as such, entail an understanding of the content of one's judgment to be an object that can be perceived, let alone that it is perceived. But this raises the question what, on this account, enables one to think of any judgment one makes to be one that is about an object of perception, rather than about a mere object of thought, and that is, about an object which, per definition, cannot figure in an activity that consists in endorsing the truth of a content that purports to represent how things are. There is, as it were, nothing in the account that enables a subject to think of her judgment to have a content that is either true or false, and that is, to think of her activity as an activity of judging at all. Rationalism thinks that it is possible to hold (1) that judging is a rational capacity to endorse the truth of a propositional content while denying (2) that an object's being thus-and-so can be directly revealed to a judger, namely, by being perceived by her. The above difficulty is a result of the incoherence of holding (1) while denying (2). To hold (1) is to think of judging as an actualization of a capacity to endorse the truth of a propositional content that entails that the judging subject has an understanding of the judgment's rational connection to other judgments that she is also able to make. Thus to actualize the capacity for judging p rather than q or r or s, and that is, to make the transition from being able to endorse the truth of p to actually endorsing it, there must be something that explains why the subject, in the light of her understanding of her capacity to judge, makes the transition to the judgment p rather than to the judgment q or r or s. However, to deny (2) is to deny that there is, for a sensible being that is able to judge, an explanation of this transition. Because the only thing that could, in the light of her understanding of the capacity, explain this transition, is denied in principle, namely that an object's being thus-and-so is directly revealed to her. However, if the transition from capacity to act cannot be explained, that is, if it is, in principle, impossible to explain the capacity's actuality, then there is no capacity. A capacity of which it is denied, in principle, that it explains its actuality, is no capacity, be it rational or not. This brings us back to the point of minimal empiricism which is to insist that unless there is a manner of revealing a judgment to be true by reference to something other than other judgments the very idea of a capacity for judgment is empty. Judging, qua act of a rational capacity, must be rationally grounded in something that does not yet entail judgment. Judging, qua act of a rational capacity, can only be rationally grounded in something that already entails judgment. Minimal empiricism and rationalism both think that it is impossible to combine both claims. Both positions think that each claim contradicts the other. To hold on to (1) seems to force one to deny (2) and vice versa. By contrast I will argue in what follows that both thoughts articulate an insight into the nature of judging. There is no contradiction between both claims once we dislodge the assumption that drives the debate between minimal empiricism and rationalism. The assumption is that the idea of a ground that reveals the truth of a judgment is the idea of something actual—an act or episode—which the judging subject comprehends to be a particular instance of a capacity by which she explains her judgment. It is the assumption that to have a ground that reveals the truth of a judgment is to be in a particular state of consciousness that is available to one as something actual that explains one's transition from capacity to act. Once this assumption is in place, it follows that the only way to address the threat of emptiness is to assume that there must be another capacity than the capacity for judgment—a capacity for perception—whose role it is to be the source of episodes that explain judgment's actuality. This assumption entails, conversely, a denial of the idea that the capacity for judgment is the ground of its acts in the sense that it is that which explains the actuality of a judgment. It is the assumption that the capacity for judgment, qua capacity, is not a self-standing capacity. I will argue in the rest of this paper that this assumption is confused. The confusion stems from a blindness toward the idea of a rational capacity, which is taken for granted in the debate but whose implications are not thought through. Once we remove this blindness we will be able to acknowledge that the capacity for judgment is a capacity that takes care of itself. Because it will enable us to recognize that a capacity for judgment is nothing other than a rational capacity either for perceptual or inferential knowledge. The capacity for judgment has no cooperation partner. Perception, I will argue, is not a cooperation partner of the capacity for judgment, but one of two interdependent manners of exercising it. In order to unpack this idea I want to take up Sosa's suggestion I introduced at the beginning and to which I promised to return. Sosa thinks we should construe knowledge as an act of an epistemic capacity. For knowledge, qua non-accidentally true belief, contains the idea of an explanation of its truth. The idea of an epistemic capacity, he thinks, gives us the right kind of explanation. For the concept of a capacity contains the idea of an explanation why a certain activity is in accordance with the concept of the capacity. To think of an activity as an act of a capacity is to bring to it a form of explanation that explains the conformity of the act to its concept in a distinctive manner: it explains it, not through another act of whatever capacity, but through the very capacity that this activity, for this reason, is said to "manifest" or to "actualize". Because perfections flowing from God to creatures exist in a higher state in God Himself, whenever a name taken from any created perfection is attributed to God, it must be separated in its signification from anything that belongs to that imperfect mode proper to creatures. Hence knowledge is not a quality of God, nor a habit, but substance and pure act.14 What distinguishes God's knowledge from finite knowledge of whatever kind is that God's knowledge is an "actus purus", a pure act. The fundamental difference that sets any finite knowledge apart from infinite knowledge is that it is not a pure act but something for which the distinction between knowledge qua "potential" or "habitus" on the one hand, and knowledge qua "act" on the other, is constitutive. By contrast, the distinction between knowledge as "capacity" or "habit" and knowledge as act cannot be applied to God's knowledge. God's knowledge, Aquinas tells us, "does not exist in God after the mode of created knowledge, so as to be universal or particular, or habitual, or potential, or existing according to any such mode".15 Aquinas denies that, with respect to God's knowledge, there is logical room for the idea of potentiality or capacity or habit. God's knowledge does not, as it is sometimes suggested, contrast with human knowledge on account of being the exercise of an infallible capacity instead of a fallible capacity. God's knowledge is not the exercise of any capacity. It is knowledge that does not come to be. It is knowledge that does not consist in a transition from a state of ignorance to a state of knowledge. By contrast, the knowledge of a finite being, of a creature, as Aquinas says, is an actualization of a capacity. It is something that comes to be. Every feature of human knowledge, Aquinas argues, must be understood through this distinction. Now, what does it mean to think of knowledge as something for which this distinction is constitutive? To think of knowledge as something that does not only exist as an activity but also and essentially as a capacity is to think of knowledge as something whose concept contains the idea of conditions by which we understand, on the one hand, the possibility that knowledge not be in act, and, on the other hand, its actuality. Finite knowledge is explained by a capacity for knowledge in that its concept contains the idea of conditions that explains both the possibility of the capacity to not be in act as well as its actuality, the former by the absence of those conditions whose presence explains the transition from capacity to actuality. Look at the capacity to ski, for example. An act of skiing is explained by the capacity to ski in the sense that the concept of skiing contains the idea of conditions that explain, on the one hand, the possibility that the capacity not be actualized, and hence of distinguishing between the capacity for skiing and a particular act of skiing, and that explain, on the other hand, the transition of someone who is capable of skiing to her actually skiing, conditions such as snow on the hill, her possession of skis, her having the desire to ski, etc. That the concept of skiing contains conditions that explain the transition from the capacity to ski to an act of skiing means that part of what it is to understand the concept of skiing is to understand the idea of conditions that explain this transition. One cannot understand what it is to ski without understanding the idea of such conditions. To specify an act as an act of skiing, one must have an understanding of conditions that explain two things at once: the possibility of the capacity to not be actualized as well as its actuality. Let's call the principle that an account of a capacity must contain the idea of conditions that explain both the possibility of distinguishing the capacity from its actuality as well as the transition from one to the other the capacity-act-principle. The capacity-act-principle gives voice to the insight that a finite activity is one that is an actualization of a capacity rather than a pure activity. The thought is that our account of the concept of whatever finite activity cannot presuppose the distinction of act and capacity. Rather, our account of the concept of the relevant act must be such as to render intelligible both the possibility of distinguishing between capacity and act as well as the transition from one to the other. Let's apply the capacity-act-principle to the idea of judging. To think of judging as an act of a capacity means to think of judging as an act that comes to be. It means that the concept of judging contains the idea of conditions that explain both the possibility of distinguishing between judging qua capacity and judging qua act as well as the transition from one to the other. In order for such conditions to explain the possibility that the capacity for judging not be in act, they must be such as to be either actual or potential. For, if it were impossible for these conditions to be merely potential, it would be impossible for them to explain the possibility that the capacity for judging not be in act. If it were impossible for these conditions to be actual, it would be impossible for them to explain the capacity's actuality, and that is, it would be impossible for them to explain the transition from one's being merely able to judge that p to actually judging that p. What idea of conditions satisfies this requirement? The idea of conditions that satisfies this requirement is no other than the idea of conditions under which the truth of a judgment is revealed to a subject. For to explain the transition from capacity to act in the case of judging is to explain the actuality of a capacity that entails that the subject of the act in question is conscious of her capacity and hence of the explanation it confers on her judgment. It follows that the explanation of the subject's judgment must explain the transition from capacity to act in light of the subject's consciousness of her capacity that makes this transition intelligible to the subject herself whose activity is at issue. Conditions under which the truth of a judgment is revealed to the subject so explain this transition from capacity to act. For a subject who endorses the truth of a propositional content under conditions that reveal its truth has an explanation of her endorsement of the truth of p that renders her activity fully rational for herself by revealing anything other than judging that p to be less than fully rational, such as, for example, denying the truth of p or withholding the endorsement of p. We might call conditions of judging under which the truth of a propositional content is revealed to a subject "conditions of knowledge". Because a subject who judges that p under such conditions—conditions under which the truth of her judgment is revealed to her—has an explanation for why she judges that p that is incompatible not only with the judgment's falsity, but also with her not endorsing its truth. By contrast, if someone judges under conditions other than those under which the truth of one's judgment is revealed to one, then the explanation of one's judgment is compatible not only with the judgment's falsity, but also with one not endorsing it. Such conditions can, at best, seem to reveal the truth to one, and hence seem to be incompatible with one's not endorsing it, without actually doing so. It is a trivial consequence that a judgment can be dependent upon conditions under which the truth of a propositional content is revealed to a subject in two ways: It can be dependent upon them either directly, when the transition from capacity to act does not depend on anything other than these conditions, or indirectly, when the transition from capacity to act depends on other judgments from which the truth of the proposition in question is inferred. When the former is the case, the subject acquires what we, for this reason, call perceptual knowledge. In the latter case, it acquires, accordingly, inferential knowledge. The role of the concept of perception, as it is part of the consciousness of a being that is able to judge, is thus not to specify a capacity that is distinct from judging. It specifies a distinct manner of judging, which is distinguished from another manner of judging, not because it has different conditions from it, but because the judgment is enabled by them differently. It is therefore impossible to decompose this manner of judging into an act that is a judgment and another act that is not a judgment. A perceptual judgment is not a judgment enabled by an act of perception. It is enabled by a capacity whose concept contains the idea of conditions that reveal the truth of a proposition to a subject. It is therefore, and in this sense, enabled by nothing other than a capacity for knowledge. [A] competence is a disposition, one with a basis resident in the competent agent, one that would in appropriately normal conditions ensure (or make highly likely) the success of any relevant performance issued by it.16 Sosa's account of what a capacity is ignores the capacity-act-principle, as stated above. Sosa thinks that the distinction between capacity and act—or "competence" and "relevant performance"—is something that is intelligible prior to the account of the capacity. He therefore cannot see that one and the same idea of conditions enables one to distinguish the capacity from the act and understand the transition from the former to the latter. However, as we have learnt from the considerations above, we cannot think of a performance to be "issued" by a capacity unless we have an idea of conditions that enables us to distinguish between capacity and act as well as to conceive of their identity in a particular act. The consequence is that the idea of "appropriately normal conditions" enters Sosa's account of the successful case as an external explanatory factor that is needed in addition to the capacity to explain the successful case of a capacity whose activity, as such, is supposed to be specifiable independently of these conditions. The same decomposition of a capacity into an activity that is specifiable independently of success conditions and a successful case whose explanation requires success conditions characterizes Sosa's account of knowledge which he defines as follows: "Belief amounts to knowledge (…) when its correctness is attributable to a competence exercised in appropriate conditions".17 If we take both definitions together, to possess an epistemic competence does not mean to possess a capacity whose acts are specified through an idea of conditions whose obtaining explains an act of knowledge. Rather, for Sosa, it means to possess something whose acts, as such, are specifiable independently of the conditions that hold in a case of knowledge. It follows that under so-called appropriately normal conditions, according to Sosa, two cases are logically possible: a subject who has an epistemic capacity forms a true belief or it doesn't. Thus whenever the exercise of an epistemic competence results in a true belief, even when it is exercised under so called appropriately normal conditions, its truth is, in a certain sense, a matter of luck. This is because, given Sosa's account of an epistemic capacity, there is nothing that would distinguish it from a case in which the subject forms a false belief and hence there is nothing that could explain the truth of the belief in this case.18 But this undermines the insight that is Sosa's starting point: the idea that the concept of knowledge is the concept of a form of explanation, and hence the concept of something that contrasts with the idea of luck. According to the capacity-act-principle, one cannot construe knowledge that p as an exercise of an epistemic competence unless one gives up the idea that Sosa thinks he must hold on to: the idea that knowledge is "a conjunctive state of affairs containing as conjuncts both P and the believer's believing P" with conjuncts that are logically prior to and independent of the capacity that is supposed to explain "the coincidence of belief and truth".19 According to the capacity-act-principle, one cannot individuate an act as an act of whatever capacity unless one brings to bear an understanding of conditions that explain the possibility of distinguishing the act from its capacity as well as the transition from one to the other. Otherwise the idea of an act that is an exercise of a capacity, or issued by it, is as empty as it is in the case of a pure activity, an "actus purus". According to the capacity-act-principle, no act that is contained in a state of knowledge can be individuated independently of conditions that explain both the possibility that knowledge not be in act as well as the transition from capacity to act. In Sosa's account, by contrast, a believer's believing P is conceived as an act that is logically independent of the very conditions that Sosa brings to bear to explain a case of knowledge. This makes it impossible for him to hold on to his own insight that knowledge is a true belief whose correctness is explained by an epistemic competence. For it undermines the very idea of explanation that the concept of a capacity is supposed to contain. I argued that it is wrong to think of judgment as a capacity that must be constrained by the exercises of another capacity in order not to be empty. This is not to say that judgment is an unconstrained activity. Rather, it is to say that judgment is an activity of a rational capacity for knowledge. This entails that it is an activity whose concept contains the idea of conditions that explain, on the one hand, the possibility of the subject's having concepts that she can employ in judgments without her actually doing so, namely when these conditions do not obtain, as well as her actual employment of them in a judgment of knowledge which entails, trivially in this account, that these conditions obtain. An utterance of the form "I believe that p because I see it" gives voice to this form of explanation. In such an explanation no appeal is made to an occurrence of passive "impressions",20 no matter how we construe them, whether conceptually contentful or not. The appeal is to the capacity for knowledge whose distinctive manner of exercise one thereby specifies. The explanation of judgment therefore not only entails that the judgment is revealed to be true, but also a specification of the distinctive manner of how it is revealed to be true. This account of the relation of judgment to its capacity enables us to dissolve the seeming contradiction between the two thoughts stated above. Once we dislodge the assumption that the idea of a ground for judgment is the idea of something actual—another act or episode—that is prior to the act of judging, the two thoughts can be held together. For what explains a subject's judgment is not another actuality but the subject's capacity for knowledge whose concept contains the idea of conditions whose obtaining explains the transition from capacity to act. What explains judgment's actuality is thus, and in this sense, nothing other than this capacity. This enables us to hold on to the thought that judgment must be grounded in something other than judgment without having to deny that it cannot be grounded in something other than judgment. If we give up the assumption that this "something other" in which judgment must be grounded is a particular act or episode but rather conceive it as something that is distinct from the act of judgment not in being another act, but in being its capacity, then there is nothing that hinders us to also embrace the second thought. Both thoughts, construed that way, can be combined with each other because they then describe the same ground, seen from two different sides. To be sure, not every judgment is a perfect instance of the capacity that is its ground. There can be cases in which the conditions for perceptually knowing that things are thus-and-so do not obtain without the subject knowing this to be so. When this is the case, then this means that the conditions are such that they hinder the subject from perfectly exercising her capacity for knowledge without her knowing this to be so. This happens, for example, when light conditions are such that the object's color is not revealed to one without one's knowing this. There can be conditions of judging that are less than truth-revealing. But it can also be the case that conditions are such that they would be truth-revealing if the subject had not been falsely informed about them and so thinks they are not.21 In such a case the subject is hindered from perceptually knowing how things are because considerations about the conditions hinder her. One might be tempted to object that the possibility of such a situation of misinformation shows that perceiving cannot be a manner of judging, as I have tried to argue. For, one way to describe such a case would be to say that in such a situation the subject sees how things are but does not judge them to be that way and therefore does not know. There is no objection against speaking, in such a case, of the subject as perceiving what yet she does not know, as long as one is not misled into thinking that this is the fundamental concept of perception, the concept that is at work in someone's self-conscious perceptual knowledge. I have argued that it is impossible for a perceptual knower to understand her perceptual knowledge on the basis of a concept of perception that describes a capacity whose perfect exercise yields less than self-conscious knowledge. Therefore the concept of perception that a perceptual knower possesses qua being a perceptual knower is the concept of a manner of judging that is conscious of itself as knowledge. Any other employment of the concept of perception is secondary to this fundamental understanding of perception. Therefore a case of failure to know due to misinformation about the conditions of judging, is not to be described in terms of a gap between perception and judgment but in terms of a hindrance: a hindrance to coming perceptually to know what otherwise one would have come to know. What distinguishes such a case from a case of perceptual knowledge is that in a case of perceptual knowledge there is nothing that hinders the subject from perfectly exercising her capacity for perceptual knowledge. Open access funding enabled and organized by Projekt DEAL.