ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on the possible phenomenon, with an emphasis on visual experience of colour, thus offering an analysis that brings together the two observations. It offers a brief introduction to the notion of cognitive penetrability and focuses on relevant empirical research and its interpretation. The chapter further identifies the special importance of alleged cases of the cognitive penetration of colour vision. Modularists of this strength maintain that modular systems—Fodor takes visual “input systems” to be of this sort—are therefore informationally encapsulated with respect to cognitive processes. Cognitive penetration of perception involves, at least, a cognitive effect on conscious perceptual experience, where this effect is non-trivially direct, and the effect on perception involves phenomenal difference. A number of experiments, both old and recent, exploit the relation between colour-related cognitive representations and colour experience. A fourth alternative interpretation claims of a case that there is no relevant cognitive relatum and instead that apparent effects are instead some kind of intra-perceptual adjustment.
