Dear all, Reminder: The sixth and final meeting of this term's Cambridge Mind Seminar will be on Tuesday 19 June at 11am. Sophie Archer (Oxford) will present a paper.
The Cambridge Mind Seminar is an advanced philosophy of mind seminar with short talks by local and not-so-local people, followed by discussion. Meetings take place on Tuesdays from 11:00-13:00. Location: Angevin Room, Queens’ College. Refreshments will be provided. Belief and Implicit Bias Sophie Archer (Oxford) 19 June, 11:00 (Angevin Room, Queens’ College) Abstract: A classic, and troubling, example of implicit bias is the avowed anti-racist, certain aspects of whose behaviour nonetheless indicate a particular pattern of discrimination along racial lines. This behaviour ranges from so-called ‘microbehaviours’ like making less eye-contact with black people, to consistently preferring otherwise identical CVs of Emilys and Gregs over those of Lakishas and Jamals. I will assume for the sake of argument that such an implicitly biased person believes that the races are equal and has an additional implicit mental state, which explains their divergent behaviour. My question will be: is this additional mental state also a belief? I will argue that it is not. First, I will argue that the implicit state need not have propositional content in order to explain the behaviour we posit it to (as Eric Mandelbaum has alleged). Secondly, I will argue that even if it does have propositional content and is capable of responding directly to epistemic reasons, this is not sufficient for its being a belief. If it is also capable of responding directly to conditioning, as it appears to be, it is not a belief. For no state capable of this could be a belief. Cambridge Mind Seminar Easter 2018 Schedule • 1 May: Henry Shevlin (CFI, Downing College) • 8 May: Solveig Aasen (Oslo) • 15 May: Neil Barton (Vienna) • 22 May: No meeting • 29 May: No meeting • 5 June: Anastasia Berg (Corpus Christi) [Angevin Room, Queens’ College] • 12 June: Umrao Sethi (CUNY) [Angevin Room, Queens’ College] • 19 June: Sophie Archer (Keble College, Oxford) [Angevin Room, Queens’ College] _______________________ Dr Maarten Steenhagen Lecturer and Director of Studies Faculty of Philosophy / Queens’ College University of Cambridge _____________________________________________________ To unsubscribe from the CamPhilEvents mailing list, or change your membership options, please visit the list information page: http://bit.ly/CamPhilEvents List archive: http://bit.ly/CamPhilEventsArchive Please note that CamPhilEvents doesn't accept email attachments. See the list information page for further details and suggested alternatives.
