Myisha Cherry
"Can You Find it in Your Heart to Forgive?: Race, Request, & Repair"
The hurry and bury ritual is a public ritual of asking for and about the forgiveness of black victims of anti-black racism, white violence and state violence. In the ritual requesters intend to spark forgiveness through the request. However, given the US racial context, the request has certain features and it has these features despite the intention of the requester. These features actually show disrespect for the victim and at least, in some cases, could block instead of spark forgiveness. Therefore, requesters have moral and practical reasons to resist requesting.
Lorraine Code
"WHO DO WE THINK WE ARE?"
I will propose that the title question of this contribution needs to be posed urgently and insistently, suggesting that philosophical engagements with epistemological, ethical, political and other related matters frequently take a starting point less fundamental than they perhaps should. The fundamental suggestion is that inquiry in its critical-creative purpose tends to take for granted a tacit sense of who we are - an ontological assumption that the we is everyone and no one. This assumption can shape subsequent argument that remains oblivious to its own starting point.
Saba Fatima
"Experiencing Prejudice: Examining the Muslim American Case"
Dan Kelly
"Soft Structure, Informal Institutions, and the Empirical Psychology of Normativity"
We consider recent debates between proponents of individualist and structuralist approaches to bias, prejudice, and injustice. We use Charlotte Witt’s views on gender and feminism, especially the normative ascriptivism at its heart, to explore the geography of the debate. We then describe recent empirical work on the psychology of social norms and cultural transmission, and develop the notions of soft structure and informal institutions with respect to it. Finally we revisit the putative bifurcation between individualist and structuralist approaches to bias and injustice, and show how the resources developed in previous sections show theorists need not choose between them.
Calvin Lai
"Change in Implicit Bias & Behavior"
What changes implicit biases? And to what extent do these changes translate into corresponding changes in behavior? Using a meta-analysis of almost 500 studies and experiments on over 20,000 people, I describe how experimentally induced changes in implicit bias are smaller, more fleeting, and more tenuously connected to behavior than previously expected.
Alex Madva
"Social Norms, Social Experience, and the Indeterminate Content of Implicit Racial Bias"
This talk argues that the differences between implicit and explicit bias have less to do with their intrinsic features, such as their conscious accessibility or controllability, and more to do with their relational and contextual features: how they interact with agents' background assumptions, values, character traits, and perceptions of social norms and power relations. In short, implicit bias (a negative but inherently vague gut feeling) becomes explicitly endorsed when social contexts and authority figures normalize and rationalize prejudice, while explicit bias becomes disavowed and implicit when we collectively insist on the norms of egalitarian social justice.
Kate Manne (Philosophy Dept. Colloquium)
"How Misogyny Turns on Gaslighting"
In this talk, I will explore some of the ways in which gaslighting may make a woman willing and able to not only recant her former testimony regarding misogynistic violence and sexual abuse, but even to reject the very questions or concerns on which it was premised. Raising the sorts of issues to which a woman's story provided answers (e.g., “Was he abusive?”) is effectively billed as a symptom of rational breakdown (e.g., paranoia, being delusional or 'crazy') or, just as importantly, morally bad character (e.g., ingratitude, being insufficiently forgiving, or self-pitying and maudlin). Concepts and phrases like “playing the victim” and “fishing for sympathy” make merely raising the specter of moral wrongdoing done to oneself suspect and fraught from certain social positions, relative to others, where the most privileged men are located. I will also say something about the collective conceptual, moral, and narrative resources which may be useful to resist such revisionist history via self-erasure and reformation.
Paul Silva
"A Bayesian Explanation of the Irrationality of Sexist and Racist Beliefs that Involve Generic Content".
Various sexist and racist beliefs ascribe certain negative qualities to people of a given sex or race. Epistemic allies are people who think that in normal circumstances rationality requires the rejection of sexist and racist beliefs upon encountering many members of these groups who lack the target negative quality. This is a common view among philosophers and non-philosophers. But epistemic allies face three problems. First, sexist and racist beliefs often involve generic propositions. These sorts of propositions are notoriously resilient in the face of counter-instances. Second, background beliefs can enable one to explain away counter-instances to one’s beliefs, thus making it rational to retain one’s beliefs in generics in the face of many counter-instances. The final problem is that the kinds of judgements epistemic allies want to make about the irrationality of sexist and racist beliefs upon encountering many counter-instances is at odds with the judgements that we are inclined to make in seemingly parallel cases about the rationality of non-sexist and non-racist generic beliefs. Thus epistemic allies may end up having to give up on plausible normative supervenience principles. In what follows I explain how a Bayesian approach to the relation between evidence and belief can neatly untie these knots.
Shannon Sullivan
"The Physiology of Trauma and Healing".
Building on my book The Physiology of Sexist and Racist Oppression (2015), this presentation will use William James's theory of emotion and take up examples of PTSD in soldiers and sexual assault victims to argue for an irreducibly psychophysiological understanding of trauma, and thus also possible healing from trauma.
Myisha Cherry
"Can You Find it in Your Heart to Forgive?: Race, Request, & Repair"
The hurry and bury ritual is a public ritual of asking for and about the forgiveness of black victims of anti-black racism, white violence and state violence. In the ritual requesters intend to spark forgiveness through the request. However, given the US racial context, the request has certain features and it has these features despite the intention of the requester. These features actually show disrespect for the victim and at least, in some cases, could block instead of spark forgiveness. Therefore, requesters have moral and practical reasons to resist requesting.
Lorraine Code
"WHO DO WE THINK WE ARE?"
I will propose that the title question of this contribution needs to be posed urgently and insistently, suggesting that philosophical engagements with epistemological, ethical, political and other related matters frequently take a starting point less fundamental than they perhaps should. The fundamental suggestion is that inquiry in its critical-creative purpose tends to take for granted a tacit sense of who we are - an ontological assumption that the we is everyone and no one. This assumption can shape subsequent argument that remains oblivious to its own starting point.
Saba Fatima
"Experiencing Prejudice: Examining the Muslim American Case"
Dan Kelly
"Soft Structure, Informal Institutions, and the Empirical Psychology of Normativity"
We consider recent debates between proponents of individualist and structuralist approaches to bias, prejudice, and injustice. We use Charlotte Witt’s views on gender and feminism, especially the normative ascriptivism at its heart, to explore the geography of the debate. We then describe recent empirical work on the psychology of social norms and cultural transmission, and develop the notions of soft structure and informal institutions with respect to it. Finally we revisit the putative bifurcation between individualist and structuralist approaches to bias and injustice, and show how the resources developed in previous sections show theorists need not choose between them.
Calvin Lai
"Change in Implicit Bias & Behavior"
What changes implicit biases? And to what extent do these changes translate into corresponding changes in behavior? Using a meta-analysis of almost 500 studies and experiments on over 20,000 people, I describe how experimentally induced changes in implicit bias are smaller, more fleeting, and more tenuously connected to behavior than previously expected.
Alex Madva
"Social Norms, Social Experience, and the Indeterminate Content of Implicit Racial Bias"
This talk argues that the differences between implicit and explicit bias have less to do with their intrinsic features, such as their conscious accessibility or controllability, and more to do with their relational and contextual features: how they interact with agents' background assumptions, values, character traits, and perceptions of social norms and power relations. In short, implicit bias (a negative but inherently vague gut feeling) becomes explicitly endorsed when social contexts and authority figures normalize and rationalize prejudice, while explicit bias becomes disavowed and implicit when we collectively insist on the norms of egalitarian social justice.
Kate Manne (Philosophy Dept. Colloquium)
"How Misogyny Turns on Gaslighting"
In this talk, I will explore some of the ways in which gaslighting may make a woman willing and able to not only recant her former testimony regarding misogynistic violence and sexual abuse, but even to reject the very questions or concerns on which it was premised. Raising the sorts of issues to which a woman's story provided answers (e.g., “Was he abusive?”) is effectively billed as a symptom of rational breakdown (e.g., paranoia, being delusional or 'crazy') or, just as importantly, morally bad character (e.g., ingratitude, being insufficiently forgiving, or self-pitying and maudlin). Concepts and phrases like “playing the victim” and “fishing for sympathy” make merely raising the specter of moral wrongdoing done to oneself suspect and fraught from certain social positions, relative to others, where the most privileged men are located. I will also say something about the collective conceptual, moral, and narrative resources which may be useful to resist such revisionist history via self-erasure and reformation.
Paul Silva
"A Bayesian Explanation of the Irrationality of Sexist and Racist Beliefs that Involve Generic Content".
Various sexist and racist beliefs ascribe certain negative qualities to people of a given sex or race. Epistemic allies are people who think that in normal circumstances rationality requires the rejection of sexist and racist beliefs upon encountering many members of these groups who lack the target negative quality. This is a common view among philosophers and non-philosophers. But epistemic allies face three problems. First, sexist and racist beliefs often involve generic propositions. These sorts of propositions are notoriously resilient in the face of counter-instances. Second, background beliefs can enable one to explain away counter-instances to one’s beliefs, thus making it rational to retain one’s beliefs in generics in the face of many counter-instances. The final problem is that the kinds of judgements epistemic allies want to make about the irrationality of sexist and racist beliefs upon encountering many counter-instances is at odds with the judgements that we are inclined to make in seemingly parallel cases about the rationality of non-sexist and non-racist generic beliefs. Thus epistemic allies may end up having to give up on plausible normative supervenience principles. In what follows I explain how a Bayesian approach to the relation between evidence and belief can neatly untie these knots.
Shannon Sullivan
"The Physiology of Trauma and Healing".
Building on my book The Physiology of Sexist and Racist Oppression (2015), this presentation will use William James's theory of emotion and take up examples of PTSD in soldiers and sexual assault victims to argue for an irreducibly psychophysiological understanding of trauma, and thus also possible healing from trauma.