Research Group
in Analytic Philosophy

Abstract

In this talk, I’ll present, further develop, and defend some ideas that I first floated in my book Bias: A Philosophical Study (2022).  After introducing a general framework for theorizing about bias, I'll argue for three claims that many people find deeply counterintuitive if not obviously false: (i) Externalism about bias: a person can count as biased because of their social environment, even if all of their internal cognitive processes are functioning impeccably; (ii) Rationality requires bias: in some cases, rationality can require a person to be biased, in a pejorative sense of ‘bias’; (iii) Introspection is necessarily unreliable: the empirically well-documented fact that introspection is a highly unreliable way to tell whether we’re biased isn’t a contingent fact about our psychologies.  Rather, it’s something that holds of necessity: even God could not have made us highly reliable detectors of our own biases by way of introspection.  (Note: Although this talk draws on ideas from the earlier book, it presupposes no familiarity with that work.  On the other hand, there will be plenty of new claims and arguments as well.  So the talk should be potentially interesting to someone who has read the book from cover to cover as well as to someone who has never heard of it before.)