Join us on November 22, 2024 for a colloquium with Thomas Kelly, Princeton University. The talk will take place in Dodd Hall 167 from 4:00PM – 6:00PM with a reception to follow.
In this talk, I’ll argue for three claims about bias that many people find deeply counterintuitive if not obviously false: (i) Externalism about bias: a person can count as biased because of their social environment, even if all of their internal cognitive processes are functioning impeccably; (ii) Rationality requires bias: in some cases, rationality can require a person to be biased, in a pejorative sense of ‘bias,’ and the only way to escape being biased is to be irrational; (iii) Introspection is necessarily unreliable: the empirically well-documented fact that introspection is a highly unreliable way to tell whether we’re biased isn’t a contingent fact about our psychologies. Rather, it’s something that holds of necessity: even God could not have made us highly reliable detectors of our own biases by way of introspection
Thomas Kelly is a Professor of Philosophy at Princeton University, where he has taught since 2004. Prior to coming to Princeton, he was a Junior Fellow in the Society of Fellows at Harvard University, where he received his PhD, writing a dissertation under the supervision of Robert Nozick, Derek Parfit, and James Pryor. He works primarily in epistemology and has addressed topics such as the significance of disagreement, the nature of evidence, and the relationship between theoretical and practical rationality. His book Bias: A Philosophical Study appeared from Oxford University Press in 2023.
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