Tim Butzer

I argue that racially biased perception can be incompetent in a way that undermines perceptual warrant. This can occur even when the subject is unaware of the influence of the bias upon their beliefs or when they possess no defeating evidence that makes it rational for them to doubt the accuracy of their perceptual experiences. When a subject’s racial bias causes their perceptual system to encode inaccurate information about their environment, or to process information in an epistemically incompetent manner, this can reduce their perceptual competence, and thus their perceptual warrant. I discuss a series of cases that illustrate how my proposals treat various instances of racially biased perception. I then distinguish my view from a competing proposal from Jessie Munton (2019) which claims that racially biased priors are epistemically incompetent because they are gerrymandered. A gerrymandered prior is one whose accuracy depends on ongoing manipulations of the environment. I argue that the kinds of manipulations that Munton cites do not necessarily impact perceptual competence and that my account better explains how racist institutions and societal structures can impact the epistemic competence of perceivers.

I criticize an account of perceptual warrant proposed by [Burge, Tyler. 2003. “Perceptual Entitlement.” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 67 (3): 503–548]. Burge contends that a subject's beliefs are entitled only if that subject's perceptual system represents its normal environment in a reliably veridical manner. The normal environment, according to Burge, is the environment in which the contents of the subject's perceptual experiences were fixed. I present a case that shows that the contents of a subject's perceptual experiences can remain fixed while features of its perceptual system relevant to its representational reliability change. This leads to problematic consequences for Burge's view.

I offer an account of perceptual warrant according to which one’s basic perceptual beliefs are immediately and defeasibly warranted if they are formed on the basis of experiences produced by a competent perceptual system. I claim that sub-personal features of one’s perceptual systems can render one competent to perceptually represent a particular environment. When these conditions are met, one is warranted in forming beliefs on the basis of one’s perceptual experiences. I develop my account of perceptual warrant in the context of a Bayesian theory of perceptual processing.

Dogmatists claim that having a perceptual experience as of p can provide one with immediate and defeasible warrant to believe that p. A persistent complaint against this position is that it sanctions an intuitively illicit form of reasoning: bootstrapping. I argue that dogmatism has no such commitments. Dogmatism is compatible with a principle that disallows the final non-deductive inference in the bootstrapping procedure. However, some authors have maintained that such strategy is doomed to failure because earlier stages of in the bootstrapping inference are already problematic. I argue that insofar as these inferences appear problematic, the dogmatist is not committed to sanctioning them. I conclude that the bootstrapping argument presents no significant objection to the claim that perceptual experiences can provide immediate and defeasible warrant to believe their contents.