CFP: Reason in Perception

Reason in Perception

May 7-8, 2026

University of Graz, Austria

Organizers: Daniel Neumann & Denis Džanić

Confirmed speakers: 

Fiona Macpherson, Michelle Montague, John Morrison, Søren Overgaard, Galen Strawson 

Perception is our central interface with the world. But what exactly does this claim entail? There is widespread agreement among philosophers, psychologists, and cognitive scientists that we, as perceivers, are not mere passive recipients of raw sense-data. Perception is instead understood as an active process, insofar as acts of perceiving are characteristically imbued with interpretative activity: the world as perceived variously implies our rational capacities. On this view, perception is not the process of taking the world in, but of making sense of it. This continuous process of perceptual understanding is grounded in our doxastic, linguistic, and agentive capacities as much as in our sensory faculties. 

Questions motivating the conference include the following: What are the perceptual grounds that justify beliefs? Is such justification internal to the perceiver or an external fact about the environment? What is the role of looks, seemings and appearances in perception? How is the relation between the contents of perceptions and those of beliefs to be construed? What are the norms governing the complex activity of perception? Are such norms universally valid or invariable, or are they in some sense contingent? And what are the immediate and far-reaching implications of this understanding of perception for the philosophy of mind, knowledge, and action?

This conference aims to address these questions. Topics we wish to explore include, but are not limited to:

—        the phenomenal character and intentional structure of perception;

—        accounts of (non)propositional content of perception; 

—        perceptual confidence and formal-epistemological modeling of perception;

—        perception of modal, axiological, moral, and other higher-order properties;

—        the distinction between sensory and cognitive phenomenology;

—        accounts of perception in the phenomenological tradition. 

We invite you to submit an anonymized abstract of up to 500 words by January 31, 2026 to: [email protected]

We will notify the authors of accepted papers by February 15, 2026.

Please include a separate file with your name, email address, the title of your talk, and your affiliation (if any) and put ‘Reason in Perception Graz 2026’ in the subject line.

If you have any conference-related questions, don’t hesitate to get in touch:

Denis Džanić ([email protected])

Daniel Neumann ([email protected])