Imperfect Cognitions

Today’s post is written by Ema Sullivan-Bissett , who is a Lecturer in Philosophy at the University of Birmingham. Here she overviews her paper ‘ Biased by Our Imaginings ’, recently published in Mind & Language. In my paper I propose and defend a new model of implicit bias according which they are constituted by unconscious imaginings . As part of setting out my view I defend the coherence of unconscious imagination and argue that it does not represent a revisionary notion of imagination. Implicit biases have been identified as ‘the processes or states that have a distorting influence on behaviour and judgement, and are detected in experimental conditions with implicit measures’ (Holroyd 2016 : 154). They are posited as items which cause common microbehaviours or microdiscriminations that cannot be tracked, predicted, or explained by explicit attitudes. The canonical view of implicit biases is that they are associations . The idea is that one’s concept of, say, woman is...

In this post, Sophie Stammers , Research Fellow on Project PERFECT at the University of Birmingham, introduces her article, “ A Patchier Picture Still: Biases, Beliefs and Overlap on the Inferential Continuum ” recently published Open Access at Philosophia. ‘Implicit’ is a designation that does a lot of work in the philosophy and cognitive science of thoughts. This follows many decades of research which demonstrates that human minds don’t always behave in ways that many of have expected them to. For instance, people (a) sometimes appear to be unaware of factors which influence their decisions; or (b) they often think or do things in spite of evidence to the contrary, or fail to think or do things in spite of evidence in favour; or (c) people think or do things automatically, without having deliberated first; or (d) they think or do things in spite of sincerely disavowing the thinking or doing of these things – or, all of (a)-(d) at once. Many theorists have made sense of...