Q&A 7, Second Answer

My question is: Is any social group inherently disadvantaged in its ability to view the world objectively?

 I think that the answer to this question depends on how one defines a 'social group.'  I believe that people with certain statuses may have disadvantages in ability to know objectively.  For example, people affected by the variety of schizophrenia which produces hallucinations may not have access to the world in as accurate a way as they would were they not affected by the schizophrenia.  Similarly, a person who has not had access to education, but has instead been brainwashed by people holding a highly warped view of reality, might process information in a way which is not ideal in terms of objectivity.

However, do 'people with a particular form of schizophrenia' or 'people without access to education who were raised in a very close-minded, ideologically devout environment' really comprise social groups?  The dictionary definition of 'social group' is 'group of people sharing a social relation,' but that is very vague, and the meaning of 'social relation' is also vague.  Upon further research, I learned that 'social relation' means 'a relation between two living organisms, particularly humans.'  'Relation' is a very vague term with multiple meanings.  As such, I cannot formulate a clear definition of social group, and as such do not think I am qualified to really answer this question.

Q&A 7, First Answer

My question is: While social status may not give one access to a special way of knowing the world, is there any status (perhaps as an autistic person or a person with synaesthesia) which can?

To some extent, I believe that statuses which affect a person's perception (whether by changing their physical ability to receive information from the world or by changing their ability to process that information) can give them a unique way of knowing the world.  However, I do not think that this necessarily gives them any sort of privilege.  Furthermore, it is not only people with such statuses who know the world differently - everyone perceives the world in a slightly different way.  The way someone sees a single object can vary according to millions of factors: their height, the ration of rods to cones in their eyes, whether their hair is in their face at the time, and so on.  I think that the important point here is that, while everyone knows the world in a different way (and some people's ways may be more unusual than those of others), none of those ways are necessarily privileged or special.