Perceiving meaning and the argument from evidence-insensitivity

Various illusions of meaning appear to be insensitive to counter-evidence. That is, in a similar fashion to the well-known Muller-Lyer illusion in vision, certain illusions of meaning seem not to fade away even after one endorses beliefs that rebut the illusion one is having. Such apparently evidence-insensitive illusions have been employed to support the view that we can perceive meanings because evidence-insensitivity is typically taken to be a perceptual trait. In this paper, I offer a comprehensive examination of allegedly evidence-insensitive illusions of meaning and argue that none is, in fact, evidence insensitive in a way that might support the view that we can perceive meanings.