The Structure of Bias

Abstract

What is a bias? Standard philosophical views of both implicit and explicit bias focus this question on the representations one harbours, for example, stereotypes or implicit attitudes, rather than the ways in which those representations (or other mental states) are manipulated. I call this approach representationalism. In this paper, I argue that representationalism taken as a general theory of psychological social bias is a mistake, because it conceptualizes bias in ways that do not fully capture the phenomenon. Crucially, this view fails to capture a heretofore neglected possibility of bias, one that influences an individual’s beliefs about or actions toward others, but is, nevertheless, nowhere represented in that individual’s cognitive repertoire. In place of representationalism, I develop a functional account of psychological social bias which characterizes it as a mental entity that takes propositional mental states as inputs and returns propositional mental states as outputs in a way that instantiates social-kind inductions. This functional characterization leaves open which mental states and processes bridge the gap between the inputs and outputs, ultimately highlighting the diversity of candidates that can serve this role.

The Unconscious Mind Worry: A Mechanistic-Explanatory Strategy

“…This could indicate that, similar to Phillips's criticism presented in the previous section, the IAT simply measures the "fluency" of the brain in processing information rather than any mental phenomenon. A further explanation that would speak against categorizing implicit attitudes as mental states is that they are "truly implicit" (Johnson 2019). Contents are truly implicit if they are not represented in the system but are a consequence of the specific architecture and transformation rules between contents.…”

Implicit Bias as Mental Imagery

“…This representation mediates between the trigger and the biased behavior (Holroyd 2016; Brownstein 2016; Del Pinal and Spaulding 2018; cf. Johnson 2019 for an alternative framing of implicit bias). And my claim is that this representation is neither a propositional attitude nor a mere association (as the two major accounts of implicit bias would claim).…”

“…And the mental representation (presumably about people with various skin colors) that is responsible for this behavior is what this article is about. Implicit bias is a genuinely heterogenic phenomenon (see Holroyd and Sweetman 2016 for a detailed taxonomy; see Johnson 2019 for even more heterogeneity). Because of this heterogeneity, it may be helpful to consider examples from the literature about cognitive biases in general alongside various (diverse) examples of implicit bias.…”

Oppressive Things*

“…To address such worries, we propose to adopt a functionalist and pluralist interpretation of racial biases, as well as biases involving other social categories. This approach is functionalist to the extent that anything that reliably produces a particular outcome on the basis of variable inputs will count as biased; an account of how something is biased thus requires specifying how the biases is implemented , as well as the class of outcomes that it is biased toward (compare Johnson 2020a). But critically, this will make it clear that racial biases can be instantiated by not only psychological processes, but also social structures and physical things.…”