Workshop: Bias and Metaphilosophy

Workshop schedule

Location

Room N
Institute of Philosophy
KU Leuven
Kardinaal Mercierplein 2
3000 Leuven

Everyone is very welcome to attend.

Abstracts

Dan Kelly (Purdue) – Social Norms and Soft Structure: Connecting Individual and Institutional Approaches to Bias

Recent discussions of bias have assumed an opposition between individual and structural approaches. This paper develops some resources to bridge these levels of explanation and dissolve this opposition. I argue that social norms are the key element of what I will call soft structure, the unwritten rules and informal institutions that mediate between individual and group behaviors. I describe empirical work on social norms and human normative psychology, identifying features that make the layer of explanation it provides well-suited to serve as the connective tissue between decision making agents and their individual psychologies, on the one hand, and formal institutions and their explicit laws and codified procedures, on the other. I conclude that attempts to reconcile individually oriented psychological approaches with institutional and structural explanations of social injustice should recognize this middle level of social reality, and attempts to address prejudice and oppression should leverage what is known about both the individual and group properties of social norms to more effectively influence social roles and informal institutions.

Uwe Peters (KU Leuven) – Implicit Bias, Ideological Bias, and Metaphilosophy

It has recently been argued that implicit biases distort our judgments and decisions about people, research papers, and arguments in ways that lead to significant epistemic costs for the field of philosophy. My aims in the talk are to (1) draw attention to a kind of implicit bias that has so far been overlooked in the philosophical literature on implicit biases, namely implicit ideological bias, more specifically, liberal bias against conservatives; (2) compare this bias with the more familiar kinds of biases, i.e., implicit gender and race bias; and (3) argue that it has epistemic effects on the field of philosophy that are interestingly different from those of other implicit biases.

Krist Vaesen (Eindhoven/Leiden)/Joel Katzav (Queensland) – Ideological biases and their effects on the course of 20th-Century Anglo-American philosophy

Arguably the most frequently voiced concern regarding peer review is the potential for biases on the part of reviewers. Based on three historical case studies, we argue that this concern is indeed to be taken very seriously in academic philosophy. We document how ideological biases—viz. biases with respect to meta-philosophical and political commitments—within the editorial policies of the journals Mind (1921-1972) and the Philosophical review (1948-1960) and within the funding policies of the National Science Foundation’s History and Philosophy of Science Program (1957-1964) have led, in the U.S. and the U.K., to the suppression and marginalization of several legitimate approaches to philosophy. We go on to suggest that the adverse effects of such ideological biases extend to the present day and sketch how they might be addressed.

Ema Sullivan-Bissett (Birmingham) – Implicit Bias as Unconscious Imagining

I propose a new model of the nature of implicit bias, according to which implicit biases are identical to, or partly constituted by, unconscious imaginings. I begin by introducing implicit bias in terms congenial to what most philosophers and psychologists have said about their nature in the literature so far, before addressing scepticism about the coherence of unconscious imagination. I then move to a discussion of the structural nature of implicit biases, in particular whether we should understand them as associations or as states with propositional contents. I argue that my model can accommodate the heterogeneity in the category of implicit bias understood in these terms. Finally I show how the characteristic features of implicit bias can be accommodated by the imagination model. I conclude that implicit biases should be understood as unconscious imaginings. 

Eric Schwitzgebel (UC Riverside) – The Pragmatic Metaphysics of Belief

On an “intellectualist” approach to belief, the intellectual endorsement of a proposition (such as “the working poor deserve as much respect as the handsomely paid”) is sufficient or nearly sufficient for believing it.  On a “pragmatic” approach to belief, intellectual endorsement is not enough.  To really, fully believe, you must also “walk the walk”.  I argue that the pragmatic approach is preferable on pragmatic grounds: It rightly directs our attention to what matters most in thinking about belief.