Imperfect Cognitions

The eighth meeting of the Spanish Society for Analytic Philosophy (SEFA) took place in Oviedo, Spain, from 10 th –12 th November, 2016. Over 70 speakers presented their research during the three-day conference, and here I summarise just some of the papers given on topics in the philosophy of mind and epistemology. Juan Comesaña , of the University of Arizona, gave the first keynote talk, on rationality and falsity in belief and action. He proposed that some false beliefs can be rational. Consider, for instance, the pre-Einsteinian belief in the additivity of speed. There is a persuasive sense in which this belief was once rational, even though strictly speaking it is false. In defence of the notion that falsehoods can sometimes be rationally believed, Comesaña argued that rational action requires rational belief, and that we can sometimes act rationally on the basis of false beliefs. He demonstrated that this view survives translation into a traditional decision the...

I’m delighted to join the philosophy department of the University of Birmingham as a Research Fellow working on Project PERFECT as it enters its third year. In recent research I’ve been investigating the nature of the implicit/explicit distinction, and considering whether there is a role for agency when implicit cognition drives behaviour. I was awarded my PhD earlier this year, with a thesis on implicit social bias. It’s previously been argued that implicit cognitions do not express our evaluative agency, and that we cannot be held responsible for their manifestation. I’ve argued that just because some cognition bears some or all of the putative features of the implicit, this is not a reliable heuristic for its exclusion from being considered agential. Agency may involve an interplay between implicit and explicit processes, and whether implicit features count as agential might only be illuminated by zooming out and viewing agency as extended over time, against the back...

On 5th and 6th September the University of Sheffield hosted the conference Bias in Context : Psychological and Structural Explanations, organized by Erin Beeghly and Jules Holroyd  (pictured above). Here I summarise the seven papers given at the conference. Joseph Sweetman  (pictured below) opened day one with his paper ‘Evidence-based Social Equality: Current Problems and Future prospects’. The talk was structured around answering five questions related to identifying the phenomenon of social inequality, whether we should do anything about social inequality, and what we should do, what the evidence for social inequality is, and the efficacy of unconscious bias training in Higher Education. After giving answers to the first four questions, Joseph reported on his evaluation of an unconscious bias training programme in order to speak to the fifth. He found that though post-training awareness of unconscious bias was higher in the participants, there were no significant diff...

This post is by Sophie Stammers , PhD student in Philosophy at King’s College London. Here she writes about two policy papers, Unintentional Bias in Court and Unintentional Bias in Forensic Investigation , written as part of a recent research fellowship at the Parliamentary Office of Science and Technology, supported by the Arts and Humanities Research Council. The Parliamentary Office of Science and Technology (POST) provides accessible overviews of research from the sciences, prepared for general parliamentary use, many of which are also freely available . My papers are part of a recent research stream exploring how advances in science and technology interact with issues in crime and justice: it would seem that if there is one place where unbiased reasoning and fair judgement really matter, then it is in the justice system. My research focuses on implicit cognition, and in particular, implicit social bias. I am interested in the extent to which implicit biases differ from...

On 15 th -16 th October 2015 the University of Leeds Minorities and Philosophy chapter hosted the MAP@Leeds Implicit Bias Conference . The conference included a large number of high quality talks covering a wide-range of issues relating to implicit bias. This report focuses on three of these talks.   In her talk, “ What do we want from a model of implicit bias?”, Jules Holroyd  (pictured above) noted that competing models of implicit cognition have emerged from different sources, with different priorities and conceptual frameworks. She set out a framework for assessing these competing models. She set out some desiderata for a model of implicit cognition, set out some test cases, and considered some recent models of implicit bias in light of the desiderata and cases. She showed that models provided by Levy, Schwitzgebel, Mandelbaum, Gendler and Machery each fail to meet the desiderata. In developing this argument she provided a clear articulation of what an accoun...