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Perceptual Skill And Social Structure

Accepted version
Peer-reviewed

Type

Article

Change log

Authors

Abstract

jats:pVisual perception relies on stored information and environmental associations to arrive at a determinate representation of the world. This opens up the disturbing possibility that our visual experiences could themselves be subject to a kind of racial bias, simply in virtue of accurately encoding previously encountered environmental regularities. This possibility raises the following question: what, if anything, is wrong with beliefs grounded upon these prejudicial experiences? They are consistent with a range of epistemic norms, including evidentialist and reliabilist standards for justification. I argue that we will struggle to locate a flaw with these sorts of perceptual beliefs so long as we focus our analysis at the level of the individual and her response to information. We should instead broaden our analysis to include the social structure within which the individual is located. Doing so lets us identify a problem with the way in which unjust social structures in particular “gerrymander” the regularities an individual is exposed to, and by extension the priors their visual system draws on. I argue that in this way, social structures can cap perceptual skill.</jats:p>

Description

Keywords

5003 Philosophy, 50 Philosophy and Religious Studies, Eye Disease and Disorders of Vision, Clinical Research

Journal Title

Philosophy and Phenomenological Research

Conference Name

Journal ISSN

0031-8205
1933-1592

Volume Title

99

Publisher

Wiley

Rights

All rights reserved