Imperfect Cognitions

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...

Today Michael Brownstein and Jennifer Saul introduce Implicit Bias and Philosophy, Volumes 1&2 . We’re Michael Brownstein and Jennifer Saul .    Michael is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at John Jay College/City University of New York.   He works in philosophy of psychology, with emphasis on the nature of the implicit mind, and on related topics in the philosophy of action and ethics.    Jenny is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Sheffield and Director of the Society for Women in Philosophy UK.   Her research is primarily in philosophy of language, feminist philosophy, and philosophy of race. Back in 2009, very few philosophers were working on implicit bias. (You could probably count them on the fingers of one hand, perhaps two.) Jenny thought there was a lot of potential for philosophical work on the topic, and decided to apply for a research network grant to bring philosophers and psychologists toget...