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Stereotypes, Ingroup Emotions and the Inner Predictive Machinery of Testimony

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Abstract

The reductionist/anti-reductionist debate about testimonial justification (and knowledge) can be taken to collapse into a controversy about two kinds of underlying monitoring mechanism. The nature and structure of this mechanism remains an enigma in the debate. We suggest that the underlying monitoring mechanism amounts to emotion-based stereotyping. Our main argument in favor of the stereotype hypothesis about testimonial monitoring is that the underlying psychological mechanism responsible for testimonial monitoring has several conditions to satisfy. Each of these conditions is satisfied by our “hot” stereotypical capacities. Intergroup emotions play a key role here. Intergroup emotions inform the agent about which candidate stereotype is better suited to the current situation. Emotions serve as evidence that makes a certain stereotype and its particular profile of features more or less expected.

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Notes

  1. We use “knowledge” with quotation marks to refer to representations in general (as it is typically used in cognitive science); and we use knowledge without quotation marks to refer to the normative sense that this term has in epistemology.

  2. We follow the convention of using small caps to refer to representations of categories, and we use italics to refer to their features.

  3. Importantly, intergroup emotions should not be confused then with shared emotions (Gilbert 2002) nor with collective emotions (Huebner 2011).

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Acknowledgements

Jose M. Araya acknowledges CONICYT/ANID Postoctorado 3190505. We also sincerely thank the anonymous reviewers for their insightful comments. Their suggestions notoriously improved the manuscript.

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  1. Instituto de Filosofía y Ciencias de la Complejidad (IFICC), Santiago, Chile

    José M. Araya & Simón Palacios

  2. Departamento de Filosofía, Universidad Alberto Hurtado, Santiago, Chile

    Simón Palacios

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Correspondence to Simón Palacios.

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Araya, J.M., Palacios, S. Stereotypes, Ingroup Emotions and the Inner Predictive Machinery of Testimony. Topoi 41, 871–882 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11245-022-09798-x

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