This post offers a commentary on the final few chapters of Jonna Vance's Thinking and Perceiving in which she expands on the concept of perceptual expertise as "an enhanced capacity for perceptual recognition or discrimination with respect to some feature or category." For example, "one can be a perceptually expert recognizer or discriminator of bird species, cars, or tumors depicted in X-rays." The question here is whether perceptual expertise is always virtuous. Daniel Burnston offers the opinion that it is not: "there is no guarantee that perceptual expertise will have a net positive contribution to the proportion of true beliefs or knowledge." And this raises interesting questions about the ethics of recognition. For example, "are privileged epistemic agents subject to different epistemic obligations than marginalized or oppressed epistemic agents are?"
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