Speaker: Martin Jönsson, Lund University

Title: The structure of PREJUDICE

Abstract:

(joint work in progress with Mark Bowker)

Prejudice is an important, multifaceted, societal problem. It thus behooves us to try to clarify the meaning of ‘prejudice’ (PREJUDICE) in order to be better equipped to understand and prevent prejudice, and to better mitigate its effects when we are unable to prevent it. In this paper, we reintroduce a method originally due to Coleman and Kay (1981) and report the results of an empirical study in which the method is applied to PREJUDICE. By doing so, we hope to both 1) draw attention to the general usefulness of the method for the systematic analysis of philosophically interesting concepts, and for philosophical methodology, as well as 2) further our understanding of PREJUDICE specifically, and how to reasonably investigate it. With respect to our second goal, we 2a) demonstrate in our study that PREJUDICE lacks necessary features, and that the goal of trying to provide a conceptual analysis for it (in the traditional sense of a set of individually necessary and jointly sufficient features), is thus futile, 2b) indicate how the experimental setup provided by Coleman and Kay’s method can be used to constrain explications (in the Carnapian sense) of PREJUDICE by way of operationalizations of similarity, simplicity and precision, and 2c) argue, in the light of our results, that some accounts of PREJUDICE in the philosophical literature have been insufficiently sensitive to the importance of unjustified negative behavior as a central feature of PREJUDICE.