Biased by our Imaginings
Today’s post is written by Ema Sullivan-Bissett , who is a Lecturer in Philosophy at the University of Birmingham. Here she overviews her paper ‘ Biased by Our Imaginings ’, recently published in Mind & Language. In my paper I propose and defend a new model of implicit bias according which they are constituted by unconscious imaginings . As part of setting out my view I defend the coherence of unconscious imagination and argue that it does not represent a revisionary notion of imagination. Implicit biases have been identified as ‘the processes or states that have a distorting influence on behaviour and judgement, and are detected in experimental conditions with implicit measures’ (Holroyd 2016 : 154). They are posited as items which cause common microbehaviours or microdiscriminations that cannot be tracked, predicted, or explained by explicit attitudes. The canonical view of implicit biases is that they are associations . The idea is that one’s concept of, say, woman is associat...