Résumé
What David Henderson and I call iceberg epistemology is the view that the justificatory basis for a doxastically justified belief often includes background information that (i) contributes in a holistically evidential way to the belief’s propositional justification, (ii) is implicitly present in the standing structure of the agent’s cognitive system, (iii) does not become explicitly represented while the belief is being formed, and yet (iv) figures in the causal explanation of the belief’s formation. We call such implicit information morphological content. I will summarize an argument, based largely on the “frame problem” in cognitive science (and articulated at greater length in Horgan and Tienson 1996 and in Henderson and Horgan 2000, 2011) that epistemically competent human belief-formation must, and therefore does, rely extensively on morphological content. I will describe a way of understanding morphological content and its causal-explanatory relevance (also articulated at greater length in those three texts) that draws heavily upon ideas from connectionist modeling in cognitive science. Finally, I will argue that morphological content, despite not being consciously present during belief formation, nevertheless affects the phenomenal character of belief-forming conscious experience in an epistemologically important way that Matjaž Potrč and I (in Horgan and Potrč 2010) call chromatic illumination.
