Perceptual Skill And Social Structure

Abstract

Visual 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. 1

Perceptual learning

“…They may also further solidify the stereotypic associations that drive them, in a self‐perpetuating cycle. Such perceptual manifestations of bias have prompted philosophers to question whether statistical generalizations are always justified (Gendler, 2011; Munton, 2019). Cases of perceptual biases plausibly constitute both moral and epistemic failures 36…”

Social structural explanation

“…Our exposure to certain material representations or descriptive norms, such as the fact that there are fewer women than men in STEM and more Blacks than whites in prison, creates semantic associations that track these regularities (Huebner, 2016). But unjust social structures can cause our cognitive apparatus to issue in certain objectionable states such as flawed perceptual skill, which is epistemically accurate but nevertheless biased because it tracks biased regularities (Munton, 2019). So does our exposure to material objects.…”

Cognitive Penetration: Inference or Fabrication?

“…I first examine a prominent explanation in the literature, according to which some cognitively penetrated perceptual experiences are like conclusions of bad inferences: just as beliefs resulting from bad inferences are less justified, perceptual experiences resulting from bad inferences also have less justificatory power. I call this theory 1 For some defenses of the Downgrade Thesis, see Ghijsen [2016], Long [2018], Lyons [2011Lyons [ , 2016, McGrath [2013], Munton [2019], Siegel [2012Siegel [ , 2013Siegel [ , 2017, Teng [2016], and Vance [2014].…”