This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Notes
I think that I haven’t quite put my finger squarely on the worry here. But I’m pretty confident that there is a worry here for somebody to put a finger on. Brendan Dill may have come closer, in his comments on an earlier draft of this paper: “The real question is whether the behavior and affect that follows from the representational component of the alief is sensitive to changes in the subject’s more conventional mental states. If they are, then that favors an idea that the three are distinct, since the R component would remain unchanged while the AB components would switch in response to changes in the subject’s beliefs and desires. If they are not, then that favors a unity view where the three are inseparable—the alief is activated or not as a fully interconnected RAB repertoire.” (Dill, p.c.) I think that this is right, with the complication that we’ll need to make sure that we’re taking into account not just changes in the agent’s superficial, cognitively-easily-accessible conventional mental states when we’re doing this test. And to the extent that it’s hard to pull apart the predictions of attributions of automatic, impenetrable, etc. versions of conventional mental states from those of attributions of aliefs, it’s going to be difficult to do the relevant experiments.
Tamar Gendler (p.c.) suggests certain types of bizarre phobias and attractions as potential examples—if one has (to use her examples) a phobia about chocolate rabbits, or a thing about smurfs, it’s very plausible that the affective and motivational bits of the phobia, or the pathological attraction, will be bad fits (given the subject’s other conventional attitudes) with the representation of objects as chocolate rabbits, or as smurfs. As Gendler puts it, some good candidates for the right kind of non-separable RAB clusters are, for example, “‘Smurfs, sexy, [censored]’ or ‘Chocolate rabbit, SCARY, retreat’—in those cases, the R pulls one way and the AB pull another—and no changes in the subject’s more conventional mental state are going to alter the AB pattern. I manage to convince you that smurfs aren’t sexy. You say: “I agree completely. Smurfs are completely unsexy. I have no desire to couple with smurfs.” But then I show you a smurf image. And it turns you on. Or I show you the physics of candy-making and convince you that chocolate rabbits are totally harmless. And you say: “I completely agree. Chocolate rabbits are harmless and delicious! I have an intense desire to eat a chocolate rabbit. Yummy!” And then I show you a chocolate rabbit. And you faint in fear.” (Gendler, p.c.)
These seem like promising cases to me, though resolving what’s going on in any given case is again going tocomplicated by the fact that we’ll want to make sure that the affective and motivational components of the would-be alief are bad fits, not just with the subject’s conscious, explicitly acknowledged and endorsed beliefs, desires, etc., but also with the subject’s unconscious, sub-personal, fragmented ones. One explanation of why the candy-making lessons and the smurf-sexiness debunking aren’t effective in defusing the fear or attraction is that the fear and attraction aren’t grounded in beliefs. Another is that they’re grounded on beliefs that, on account of their relative cognitive impenetrability, aren’t responsive to these kinds of rational, evidence-based methods of updating. (I get worried at this point—as does Gendler (p.c.)—about the extent to which there’s more than a terminological dispute here. There’s a bunch more to say about this, but here probably isn’t the place to say it.).
Brendan Dill (p.c.) offers what seems to me a very promising suggestion for getting a tighter handle on the phenomenon. He suggests that we need to distinguish between two different kinds of non-rational associative psychological processes: one kind is brutely associative—Dill’s example is a case where writing down “male” on the pre-test form reminds one that one forgot to put a letter in the mail that morning, which then triggers anxiety and distraction which causes one to do badly on the test. The other kind is a sort of would-be-reason process, in which one has a thought that would “serve as a reason for the elicited behavior” (e.g. concern, double-checking, etc.) “if the alief were converted to a belief” (Dill, p.c.). So one candidate account of what’s happening here is that the awareness of one’s gender (race, etc.) would serve as a reason (in the internal sense, where it makes sense to talk about having bad reasons) for concern, lack of confidence in one’s responses, double-checking, etc. if one believed the negative content of one’s stereotype-concordant aliefs. I think that the distinction is well-drawn, and important to notice. I also wouldn’t be surprised if the actual facts about stereotype threat turned out to be mixed—that both of these kinds of rogue psychological causation were happening in actual cases of decline in performance under stereotype threat.
As Brendan Dill pointed out in comments on an earlier draft of this paper, the studies on the cognitive costs of interracial interaction seem to speak in favor of this possibility, since the subjects weren’t primed with any particular concepts—they were just presented with an interlocutor who was a member of the relevant category.
It’s not a sure thing that this is so. It might be, as we saw above, that the categorization schemes are epistemically objectionable as well as morally objectionable, or that their moral objectionableness is due to their bad epistemic effects—of promoting unsound unconscious inferences, for example. But this isn’t the only way in which the categorization can be objectionable.
Tamar Gendler (p.c) also points out that this kind of conflict is a common literary trope –for example, one of the things that’s so bad about the society in George Orwell’s 1984 is the way in which it forces this kind of conflict between, for example, epistemic norms and prudential ones.
References
Anderson, L., & Lepore, E. (n.d.). Slurring words. Noûs.
Bargh, J., & Chartrand, T. (1999). The unbearable automaticity of being. American Psychologist, 54(7), 462–479.
Bargh, J. A., Gollwitzer, P. M., Lee-Chai, A., Barndollar, K., & Trötschel, R. (2001). The automated will: Nonconscious activation and pursuit of behavioral goals. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 81(6), 1014–1027. American Psychological Association. doi:10.1037/0022-3514.81.6.1014.
Bortolotti, L. (2010). Delusions and other irrational beliefs. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Brown, J. D. (1986). Evaluations of self and others: Self-enhancement biases in social judgments. Social Cognition, 4(4), 353–376. doi:10.1521/soco.1986.4.4.353. Guilford.
Brown, J. D., & Dutton, K. A. (1995). Truth and consequences: The costs and benefits of accurate self-knowledge. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 21(12), 1288–1296. doi:10.1177/01461672952112006.
Driver, J. (1989). The virtues of ignorance. The Journal of Philosophy, 86(7), 373–384.
Driver, J. (1999). Modesty and ignorance. Ethics.
Dunning, D., Meyerowitz, J. A., & Holzberg, A. D. (1989). Ambiguity and self-evaluation: The role of idiosyncratic trait definitions in self-serving assessments of ability. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 57(6), 1082–1090. doi:10.1037/0022-3514.57.6.1082.
Egan, A. (2008). Seeing and believing: perception, belief formation and the divided mind. Philosophical Studies, 140(1), 47–63.
Egan, A. (2009). Imagination, delusion, and self-deception. In T. Bayne & J. Fernandez (Eds.), New York: Psychology Press.
Elga, A. (2005). On overrating oneself, and knowing it. Philosophical Studies, 123(1), 115–124.
Fitzsimons, G., & Bargh, J. (2003). Thinking of you: Nonconscious pursuit of interpersonal goals associated with relationship partners. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 84(1), 148–164.
Fodor, J. (1983). The modularity of mind. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Gendler, T. (2007). Self-deception as pretense. Philosophical Perspectives, 21, 231–258.
Gendler, T. (2008a). Alief and belief. Journal of Philosophy, 105(10), 634–663.
Gendler, T. (2008b). Alief in action (and reaction). Mind & Language, 23(5), 552–585.
Gilbert, D. (1991). How mental systems believe. American Psychologist, 46(2), 107–119.
Gilbert, D., Krull, D., & Malone, P. (1990). Unbelieving the unbelievable: Some problems in the rejection of false information. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 59(4), 601–613.
Gilbert, D., Tafarodi, R., & Malone, P. (1993). You can’t not believe everything you read. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 65, 221.
Horn, L. R. (1989). A natural history of negation. Chicago: Chicago University Press.
Hornsby, J. (2001). Meaning and uselessness: how to think about derogatory words. In P. French & H. Wettstein (Eds.), Midwest studies in philosophy (Vol. 25, pp. 128–141).
Huebner, B. (2009). Troubles with Stereotypes for Spinozan minds. Philosophy of the Social Sciences, 39(1), 63–92.
Keller, S. (2004). Friendship and belief. Philosophical Papers, 33(3), 329–351. doi:10.1080/05568640409485146.
Leslie, S.-J. (n.d.). The original sin of cognition. Journal of Philosophy.
Lewis, D. (1982). Logic for equivocators. Noûs.
Macrae, C. N., Bodenhausen, G. V., Milne, A. B., & Jetten, J. (1994). Out of mind but back in sight: Stereotypes on the rebound. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 67(5), 808–817. American Psychological Association. doi:10.1037/0022-3514.67.5.808.
Mandelbaum, E. (2011). The architecture of belief: An essay on the unbearable automaticity of believing. In J. Prinz (Ed.), University of North Carolina, Carolina.
Reed, G. M., Kemeny, M. E., Taylor, S. E., Wang, H.-Y. J., et al. (1994). Realistic acceptance as a predictor of decreased survival time in gay men with AIDS. Health Psychology, 13(4), 299–307. doi:10.1037/0278-6133.13.4.299.
Richard, M. (2008). When truth gives out. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Schwartz, B. (2005). The paradox of choice. New York: Harper Perennial.
Schwitzgebel, E. (2001). In‐between believing. The Philosophical Quarterly, 51(202), 76–82.
Schwitzgebel, E. (2002). A phenomenal, dispositional account of belief. Noûs, 36(2), 249–275.
Stalnaker, R. (1984). Inquiry. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Sterelny, K. (2003). Thought in a hostile world: The evolution of human cognition. Oxford: Blackwell.
Stroud, S. (2006). Epistemic partiality in friendship*. Ethics, 116, 498–524.
Taylor, S. E., & Brown, J. D. (1988). Illusion and well-being: A social psychological perspective on mental health. Psychological Bulletin, 103(2), 193–210. doi:10.1037/0033-2909.103.2.193.
Taylor, S. E., & Brown, J. D. (1994). Positive illusions and well-being revisited: Separating fact from fiction. Psychological Bulletin, 116(1), 21–27. American Psychological Association. doi:10.1037/0033-2909.116.1.21.
Wegner, D. M., Schneider, D. J., Carter, S. R., & White, T. L. (1987). Paradoxical effects of thought suppression. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 53(1), 5–13. doi:10.1037/0022-3514.53.1.5.
Williamson, T. (2009). Reference, inference, and the semantics of pejoratives. In J. Almog & P. Leonardi (Eds.), The philosophy of David Kaplan. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Acknowledgments
Thanks to Brendan Dill, Tyler Doggett, Jason Stanley, and especially Tamar Gendler, for comments on drafts of these comments, and to Anne Barnhill, Carrie Ichikawa Jenkins, Dilip Ninan, and the participants in 2010 Oberlin Colloquium for extremely helpful discussions.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Egan, A. Comments on Gendler’s, “the epistemic costs of implicit bias”. Philos Stud 156, 65–79 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-011-9803-5
Published:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-011-9803-5