What Is Cognitive Penetration?

For the purposes of this course, you may assume that
to say that vision is cognitively penetrated is to say that
‘our beliefs, desires, emotions, actions, and even the languages we speak can
directly influence what we see’ (Firestone & Scholl, 2016 p. 5).
An alternative of thinking about cognitive penetration is introduced.
(Because this is a first-year course, we skip over Pylyshyn’s two
attempts to characterise the notion: although these are interesting,
we lack time to get into the details.)