What is a bias? Standard philosophical views of both implicit and explicit bias focus this question on the representations one harbours, for example, stereotypes or implicit attitudes, rather than the ways in which those representations (or other mental states) are manipulated. I call this approach representationalism. In this paper, I argue that representationalism taken as a general theory of psychological social bias is a mistake, because it conceptualizes bias in ways that do not fully capture the phenomenon. Crucially, this view fails to capture a heretofore neglected possibility of bias, one that influences an individual’s beliefs about or actions toward others, but is, nevertheless, nowhere represented in that individual’s cognitive repertoire. In place of representationalism, I develop a functional account of psychological social bias which characterizes it as a mental entity that takes propositional mental states as inputs and returns propositional mental states as outputs in a way that instantiates social-kind inductions. This functional characterization leaves open which mental states and processes bridge the gap between the inputs and outputs, ultimately highlighting the diversity of candidates that can serve this role.

中文翻译：

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偏差的结构

什么是偏见？关于隐性和显性偏见的标准哲学观点都将这个问题集中在一个港口所具有的表征上，例如，刻板印象或隐含态度，而不是操纵这些表征（或其他心理状态）的方式。我称这种方法为代表主义。在本文中，我认为将代表主义作为心理社会偏见的一般理论是一个错误，因为它以无法完全抓住现象的方式将偏见概念化。至关重要的是，这种观点未能捕捉到一种迄今被忽视的偏见可能性，这种偏见影响着一个人对他人的信念或对他人的行动，但在该人的认知库中却无处可寻。代替表征主义，我开发了一种心理社会偏见的功能性描述，将其描述为一种心理实体，该主体以命题心理状态作为输入，并以构想社会种类归纳的方式返回命题心理状态作为输出。这种功能性特征使思想状态和过程弥合了输入和输出之间的鸿沟，