Bias: A Philosophical Study

Bias seems to be everywhere. Biased media outlets decisively influence  the political opinions and votes of millions of people. Discriminatory  policies favor some racial groups over others. We tend to judge  ourselves more favorably than our peers, and more favorably than the  evidence warrants. But what is it, exactly, for a person or thing to be  biased?

In Bias: A Philosophical Study, Thomas Kelly explores a  number of foundational questions about the nature of bias and our  practices of attributing it. He develops a general framework for  thinking about bias, the norm theoretic account, and shows how that  framework illuminates much that we say and think about bias in both  everyday life and the sciences. He argues provocatively that both  morality and rationality sometimes require us to be biased; that groups  of people can be biased even if none of their members are; that we are  often rationally required to believe that those who disagree with us are  biased, even if we know absolutely nothing about why they believe as  they do or about their psychologies; and that whether someone counts as  biased is often a relative matter. He defends the possibility of what he  calls 'biased knowing' and argues that the phenomenon has significant  implications for both philosophical methodology and scepticism.

A  central aim of the book is to expand the range of issues that have thus  far been considered under the heading 'the philosophy of bias' by  putting new theoretical questions on the table and proposing bold  answers that can serve as starting points for future inquiry.