Forming Impressions Expertise in Perception and Intuition

Perception and intuition are our basic sources of knowledge about the concrete world around us, and more abstract matters such as mathematics, metaphysics, and morality. Perception and intuition, however, are also capacities we deliberately improve in ways that draw on our knowledge about these domains. How can the sensory and intellectual impressions that lie at the foundation of our knowledge themselves be informed by our knowledge? In Forming Impressions: Expertise in Perception and Intuition, Chudnoff addresses this and other questions that derive from trying to understand the improvability of our basic sources of knowledge. At the extreme of improvement lies expertise, and there is a wealth of research on the structures and mechanisms underlying expert perception and expert intuition that promises to illuminate the nature and significance of improvements to these sources of knowledge in general. Taking this cue, the first part of the book lays the groundwork for the rest by elaborating an interpretation of the psychology of expertise. The second part develops a setting for thinking about the epistemology of expert perception and expert intuition. The third part of the book explores the significance of the resulting view of intuition and its improvability for recent debates about philosophical methodology. Chudnoff defends a rationalist view of the role of intuition in philosophy that can be traced back to classic works on methodology such as Descartes' Rules and Spinoza's Emendation of the Intellect.

Elijah Chudnoff, Associate Professor of Philosophy, University of Miami

Elijah Chudnoff is Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of Miami, where he has taught since receiving his PhD from Harvard University in 2008. He works primarily on topics at the intersection of theory of knowledge and philosophy of mind. He is the author of Intuition (2013, Oxford University Press) and Cognitive Phenomenology (2015, Routledge).

Preface
Introduction
Part 1: Characterizing Expert Impressions
1. Locating Expert Impressions
2. Expertise and Perceptual Modularity
3. The Accessibility of Expert Intuition
Part 2: The Epistemology of Expert Impressions
4. Presentational Conservatism
5. Cognitive Penetration, Expertise, and Background Information
Part 3: Expert Impressions in Philosophy
6. The Standard Picture
7. The Place of Expert Intuition in Philosophy
Conclusion
Bibliography