Research Group
in Analytic Philosophy

Abstract

The aim of my talk is to solve a certain problem that emerges from research on implicit bias. In a nutshell, the problem amounts to the following: experimental evidence suggests that beliefs that people have about different social groups are plainly inconsistent: one might believe that a social group is F, and at the same time believe that it is not F. If this picture, according to which a person has plainly inconsistent beliefs, is correct, it would render people extremely irrational, which they presumably are not. Some might argue that this provides a reason to reject the picture. This is not the strategy that I would suggest. Instead, I will argue that the picture doesn’t necessarily entail extreme irrationality. I will discuss several ways to square the idea that people have plainly inconsistent beliefs with the idea that they are not extremely irrational. The best way to do so is to combine inferentialism about belief with the observation that the knowledge about the inconsistent beliefs in question is subject to motivated reasoning.