Research Group
in Analytic Philosophy

Abstract

In this talk, I discuss the strengths and weakness of fragmentationalism vis-à-vis the attitudinal dissonance illustrated by implicit biases. I argue that, depending on the notion of belief at hand, fragmentationalism faces a dilemma: it is either a mere restatement of the phenomenon it is intended to explain (on a non-reductive, dispositionalist account of belief) or, when apparently successful (on a representationalist account of belief), its explanatory grip comes from the notion of access—not fragmentation. More positively, I argue that a representationalist, contextualist, affect-laden, non-fragmentationalist account of the dissonance between implicit and explicit biases provides a more plausible and parsimonious explanation of this phenomenon than fragmentationalism.