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Social-Eyes: Rich Perceptual Contents and Systemic Oppression

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Abstract

There is ongoing philosophical debate about the kinds of properties that are represented in visual perception. Both “rich” and “thin” accounts of perceptual content are concerned with how prior assumptions about the world influence the construction of perceptual representations. However, the idea that biased assumptions resulting from oppressive social structures contribute to the contents of perception has been largely neglected historically in this debate in the philosophy of perception. I draw on neurobiological evidence of the role of the amygdala in visual processing to show that the influence of biased assumptions on visual perception gives us a unique path to rich evaluative content that does not require an appeal to controversial mechanisms like top-down modulation.

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Notes

  1. The fatal shooting of Treyvon Martin by George Zimmerman, for example, garnered much media attention due to the appearance that the incident was racially motivated (Lee 2013). The Ontario Human Rights Commission also recently released a report suggesting that Black individuals are “grossly overrepresented” in violent police interactions: https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/toronto/ohrc-interim-profiling-report-1.4939242.

  2. I’ll be focussing on visual perception in this paper, but similar cases could be made for other sensory modalities, and even for multi-modal perceptual experiences (e.g. Cavedon-Taylor forthcoming).

  3. I use the phase “ecologically valid” in the standard scientific sense that empirical research ought to reflect real-life contexts. However, it is important to note that it neatly corresponds to Lorraine Code’s notion of ecological thinking, which similarly urges that epistemological theories take into account the actual complex relationships that exist between embodied knowers (Code 2006).

  4. On Mandelbaum’s “shallow” account, discussed below, perceptual systems output basic-level categories and so basic-level categorization is genuinely perceptual. Fodor’s original account of modularity also assumed that visual modules output basic-level categorizations (Fodor 1983).

  5. This refers to the sorts of basic object categories that Rosch (1978) postulated as the categories in folk taxonomies that facilitate the most common cognitive tasks. They include categories like chair (as opposed to the subordinate category kitchen chair or superordinate category furniture) because the former is thought to be more useful for everyday cognitive tasks, and is thus more ubiquitously employed.

  6. I’m thankful to an anonymous reviewer for raising this potential objection.

  7. Although this is beyond the scope of this paper, one promising method involves the use of adaptation effects to isolate genuinely perceptual processing from cognitive processing (see, e.g. Block 2014).

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Acknowledgements

I would like to thank Muhammad Ali Khalidi, Jacob Beck, Alice MacLachlan, Kristin Andrews, Daniel Burnston, Lauren Edwards, Brandon Tinklenberg, and audiences at the 2019 European Society for Philosophy and Psychology Conference and the 2019 York Philosophy Graduate Student’s Association Conference for helpful feedback on earlier drafts.

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    Dylan Ludwig

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Ludwig, D. Social-Eyes: Rich Perceptual Contents and Systemic Oppression. Rev.Phil.Psych. 11, 939–954 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s13164-020-00488-4

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