Colloquium: Gabby Johnson (Claremont McKenna)

Often our biases toward people take the form of explicit beliefs, e.g., my belief that Jan is bad with computers might be based on my beliefs that Jan is elderly and elderly people are bad with computers. In such cases, our methods of epistemic evaluation seem straightforward: the conclusion is unwarranted just in case one of the beliefs on which it is based is unwarranted or the method of inference is invalid. Some biases, however, are less straightforward: perhaps my belief that Jan is bad with computers is a perceptual belief, something arrived at via testimony, or else arrived at though a mental transition that otherwise falls short of propositional inference from other beliefs. What story of epistemic evaluation do we want to tell for these sorts of biases? In this talk, I draw on Tyler Burge’s notion of epistemic entitlement to present a broadly externalist, competency-based approach that begins to answer this question. According to this account, we are entitled to such beliefs insofar as they stem from a relevantly reliable psychological competency aimed, in some cases, at predictive accuracy and, in other cases, at tracking causal-explanatory patterns in the environment. Time permitting, I’ll explore connections between my account of social entitlements and related phenomena including Wittgensteinian hinges, social-kind generics, and debiasing in AI.