Qua Seeing-in, Pictorial Experience is a Superstrongly Cognitively Penetrated Perception

According to Richard Wollheim, pictorial experience is constituted by the sui generis twofold perceptual experience of seeing-in, whose content is (partially at least) conceptual. In this paper, I maintain that if a seeing in experience is suitably reconceived, Wollheim’s ideas can be justified. I want to claim, first, that a seeing-in experience is the paradigmatic case of a superstrongly cognitively penetrated experience. By ‘superstrongly cognitively penetrated’, I mean: 1) a seeing-in experience is strongly cognitively penetrated; 2) the content of a seeing-in experience in that fold features that experience as a whole, i.e. as regards the temporal entirety of the perceptual process underlying it, for a concept is needed to discriminate the content of the recognitional fold from the content of the configurational fold. Second, I stress that a seeing-in experience is a genuine, though admittedly sui generis, perceptual experience. Hence, its being superstrongly cognitively penetrated does not undermine its perceptual character.