Language and Perceptual Experience

Abstract

This article is a sequel to ‘The Experience of Perceptual Familiarity’, published in Philosophy in January 1996. There it was argued that the experience of familiarity of appearance consists in awareness of ease of perception. A successful prediction of this hypothesis was that this experience will be absent if the familiar stimulus is perceptually simple. The new paper examines a series of experiments on recognition-memory for colours, often thought to confirm the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, that language influences fundamental cognitive and perceptual abilities. I argue that the hypothesis of Perceptual Familiarity provides a more plausible, non-Whorfian explanation of the results. Language is not influencing non-linguistic perception here, since, as the hypothesis is able to explain, recognition-memory for colours is itself invariably mediated by language.