Perception provides us with access to the external world, but that access is shaped by our own experiential histories. Through perceptual learning, we can enhance our capacities for perceptual discrimination, categorization, and attention to salient properties. We can also encode harmful biases and stereotypes. This article reviews interdisciplinary research on perceptual learning, with an emphasis on the implications for our rational and normative theorizing. Perceptual learning raises the possibility that our inquiries into topics such as epistemic justification, aesthetic criticism, and (...) moral knowledge should include not only an examination of cognition but also of perception. (shrink)

While shaping and defending a criterion to individuate the sensory modalities, philosophers have to deal with groups of perceptual states that don’t fit into the catalogue of the senses comfortably. I call these groups «grey areas». In this paper, I present the «artificial grey area», which is about perceptions obtained through artificial devices that replace or augment one’s sensory abilities. More precisely, the spotlight is on the results that the experiential criterion, the experiential-ontological criterion and the subtractive criterion provide when (...) artificially-assisted perceptions fall under their scope. The main theses of the paper are that each sensory device allows users to access a peculiar sensory world, and that each of these worlds should be associated with a peculiar, independent sensory modality. (shrink)