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Philosophical Psychology
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Understanding implicit bias: A case for regulative
dispositionalism
Annemarie Kalis & Harmen Ghijsen
To cite this article: Annemarie Kalis & Harmen Ghijsen (2022) Understanding implicit bias:
A case for regulative dispositionalism, Philosophical Psychology, 35:8, 1212-1233, DOI:
10.1080/09515089.2022.2046261
To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/09515089.2022.2046261
© 2022 The Author(s). Published by Informa
UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis
Group.
Published online: 02 Mar 2022.
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ARTICLE
Understanding implicit bias: A case for regulative
dispositionalism
Annemarie Kalis
a
and Harmen Ghijsen
b
a
Department of Philosophy and Religious Studies, Utrecht University, Utrecht, The Netherlands;
b
Faculty of Philosophy, Theology and Religious Studies, Radboud University Nijmegen, Nijmegen,
The Netherlands
ABSTRACT
What attitude does someone manifesting implicit bias really
have? According to the default representationalist picture,
implicit bias involves having conicting attitudes (explicit
versus implicit) with respect to the topic at hand. In opposi-
tion to this orthodoxy, dispositionalists argue that attitudes
should be understood as higher-level dispositional features
of the person as a whole. Following this metaphysical view,
the discordance characteristic of implicit bias shows that
someone’s attitude regarding the topic at hand is not-fully-
manifested or ‘in-between’. However, so far few representa-
tionalists have been convinced by dispositionalist argu-
ments, largely because dispositionalism cannot provide
explanations in terms of underlying processes. We argue
that if dispositionalism wants to be a genuine contender, it
should make clear what it has to oer in terms of under-
standing of implicit bias. As a concrete proposal, we combine
dispositionalist metaphysics with the idea that our normative
practices of attitude ascription partly determine what it
means to have an attitude. We show that such regulative
dispositionalism can account for two prominent normative
features of implicit bias. We conclude by suggesting that in
order to engage in a meaningful debate with representation-
alism, dispositionalists might have to put the question ‘what
counts as a good explanation?’ back on the table.
ARTICLE HISTORY
Received 11 November 2019
Accepted 18 February 2022
KEYWORDS
Implicit bias;
dispositionalism;
representationalism; implicit
attitudes; belief;
mindshaping
Introduction
Suppose you sincerely claim to believe that women are just as capable as
men in any field of science, and yet after taking an Implicit Association Test
(IAT, Greenwald et al., 1998), you turn out to be consistently slower and
more error-prone when grouping together stimuli related to female and
science than when you’re grouping together stimuli related to male and
science. In other words, you seem to suffer from implicit bias. The default
understanding of the discordance characteristic of implicit bias is that
CONTACT Annemarie Kalis A.Kalis@uu.nl Department of Philosophy and Religious Studies, Utrecht
University, Janskerkhof 13, Utrecht 3512BL, The Netherlands
PHILOSOPHICAL PSYCHOLOGY
2022, VOL. 35, NO. 8, 1212–1233
https://doi.org/10.1080/09515089.2022.2046261
© 2022 The Author(s). Published by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group.
This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives
License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/), which permits non-commercial re-use, distribution, and reproduc-
tion in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited, and is not altered, transformed, or built upon in any way.
subjects have conflicting attitudes with respect to the topic at hand.
1
While
one such state, the explicit attitude, is causally responsible for what someone
says they believe, another state (or set of states) forms the implicit attitude
which is causally responsible for producing the kind of automatic behavior
measured by tests like the IAT. Even though there are many different
accounts of the nature of these conflicting attitudes, the default position is
that one must appeal to conflicting attitudes to provide a satisfactory
account of implicit bias (e.g., Gendler, 2008a, 2008b, 2011; Holroyd, 2016;
Levy, 2015; Madva, 2016; Madva & Brownstein, 2018; Mandelbaum, 2016).
During the last two decades dispositionalist approaches have challenged
this way of thinking about implicit bias, by rejecting its underlying meta-
physical understanding of what attitudes are. Rather than viewing attitudes
as relations to internal representations, as is the representationalist ortho-
doxy (and more or less the default in philosophy of cognitive science),
dispositionalists argue that attitudes, such as how one evaluates gender
equality, are higher-level dispositional states of the entire person. From this
alternative metaphysical understanding, a different account of implicit bias
follows. When attitudes are seen as states of the person as a whole, it no
longer makes sense to explain implicit bias in terms of contradictory
attitudes: that would require an individual to be in two contradictory states
at the same time. Instead, dispositionalists explain the discordance typical of
implicit bias as different strands of a person’s cognition and behaviour
pointing into conflicting directions, suggesting that the person’s attitude
toward the topic is not-fully-manifested or ‘in-between’ (Schwitzgebel,
2001, 2010).
The aim of this paper is to show what is needed in order to develop
dispositionalist accounts of implicit bias into a genuine alternative to the
default representationalist understanding. We believe this is necessary
because so far, dispositionalist accounts of implicit bias have been quite
unsuccessful in convincing representationalists (Brownstein, 2019; Holroyd,
2016; Johnson, 2020; Quilty-Dunn & Mandelbaum, 2018a). One important
advantage of representationalist accounts is that they can easily connect
their analysis of implicit bias as discordance between explicit and implicit
attitudes to a large body of empirical work on underlying processes and
mechanisms (Porot & Mandelbaum, 2021; Quilty-Dunn & Mandelbaum,
2018a). In contrast, dispositionalism deliberately presents itself as
a ‘superficial’ account in the sense that it does not commit to specific claims
on how dispositional patterns are realized at the level of cognitive processes
and mechanisms (Schwitzgebel, 2013). According to representationalists,
this makes the account superficial also in the more pejorative meaning of the
term: it seems to show that dispositionalism just lacks the kind of explana-
tory power that representationalism brings to the table (Greely, 2014;
Quilty-Dunn & Mandelbaum, 2018a).
PHILOSOPHICAL PSYCHOLOGY 1213
In order for dispositionalism to be a genuine contender in the debate, it
thus needs to provide a better story of the kind of understanding of attitudes
and implicit bias it has to contribute. More specifically, it needs to show that
its metaphysical approach comes with explanatory tools that are not part of
the representationalist toolbox. Our proposal is that by combining
a dispositionalist metaphysics with a regulative approach to attitude ascrip-
tion, dispositionalists can show that certain normative aspects of our folk
psychological practices partly determine what it means to have an attitude.
We will argue that such a regulative dispositionalism has unique resources to
explain two important normative features of implicit bias, which also have
wider ramifications for our understanding of attitudes in general. Firstly,
regulative dispositionalism can explain why the discordance characteristic
of implicit bias bothers us in a specific way, and secondly, it can show how
first-person attitude statements can be a tool for change.
The paper will be structured as follows. In section two we provide an
overview of those existing forms of dispositionalism that feature most
prominently in the debate, and show how they fall short in providing
a convincing alternative to representationalism. We continue by developing
our proposal for such an alternative (regulative dispositionalism) in section
three. In section four we argue that regulative dispositionalism can account
for two important normative features of implicit bias that cannot easily be
grasped from a representationalist perspective. In the conclusion (section
five) we discuss some possible representationalist objections, and argue that
dispositionalists should reopen the debate with representationalism by put-
ting the question ‘what counts as a good explanation?’ back on the table.
Dispositionalist approaches to implicit bias
As said, dispositionalist accounts of implicit bias provide a specific kind of
metaphysical understanding of attitudes. Whereas representationalists
claim that attitudes should be understood as relations to representations,
dispositionalists claim that attitudes are multi-track dispositions or, in
another version of the same idea, a pattern of different dispositions that
we ascribe to individuals (Baker, 1993; Machery, 2016; Ryle, 1949;
Schwitzgebel, 2002). Attitudes thus manifest in a multitude of ways: the
attitude someone has shows in what that person thinks, feels, says and does,
both consciously and non-consciously. Because attitudes are dispositional
patterns, dispositionalists reject the idea that attitudes could be either
implicit or explicit: the predicates ‘implicit’ and ‘explicit’ just cannot be
meaningfully applied to states of an individual (Machery, 2016).
Not all forms of dispositionalism about implicit bias present themselves
in opposition to representationalism. For example, Welpinghus (2020)
defends a view according to which implicit bias should be understood as
1214 A. KALIS AND H. GHIJSEN
the disposition to evaluate members of a different social group less (or
more) favorably, without intending to do so. However, she does not defend
the more general view that attitudes are dispositions, nor does she develop
her position as a contender to representationalism. Another example of such
a position is found in Johnson (2020): although she raises objections against
traditional representationalist accounts (most notably that they cannot
account for truly implicit bias), her functionalist account still grounds the
dispositions relevant for implicit bias in specific types of representational
states. Here we will focus on accounts that propose a dispositionalist under-
standing of implicit bias in full opposition to the idea that attitudes are
relations to representations. The two prominent accounts defending such
a view are Machery’s trait view (Machery, 2016) and Schwitzgebel’s liberal
dispositionalism (Schwitzgebel, 2001, 2002, 2010, 2013). We will discuss
them in turn, and show how they fail to convince as genuine alternatives to
the representationalist approach.
Machery’s trait view
Machery (2016) argues that attitudes are traits, and thus that we should
understand them in the same way in which we understand character traits
like courage. Just as we do not take traits to be reducible to a specific under-
lying representational state, we should not expect an attitude to be reducible
in this way either. Machery takes attitudes to be dispositions to respond to
stimuli in the environment in a certain way, dispositions that are brought
about by various underlying states and processes. For instance, a negative
attitude toward a certain social group is related to the set of one’s moral
beliefs, emotions, non-propositional associations between concepts, etc.,
which together determine whether one will be disposed to, say, see members
of this group in a bad light.
2
On Machery’s view, this set of underlying states
and processes forms the psychological basis of the disposition.
Although Machery does not explicitly argue against representationalism,
he does reject a core assumption of the representationalist framework: the
idea that attitudes are mental states. Thus, by extrapolation his view neces-
sarily also goes against the idea that attitudes would be representational
mental states. By arguing that attitudes are not mental states, Machery
(2016) reaches the conclusion that attitudes cannot be either implicit or
explicit. Whereas mental states and processes might be labeled as implicit or
explicit (depending for instance, on whether they’re introspectable or con-
scious), attitudes describe broad behavioral tendencies, and thus this cate-
gorization simply does not apply to them.
This also leads Machery to a different account of what is expressed by
explicit avowals, such as someone saying “Yes, I really believe the genders are
equal!”. Usually, such avowals are taken as expressions of an explicit attitude,
PHILOSOPHICAL PSYCHOLOGY 1215
which might conflict with one’s implicit attitude. But Machery rejects the idea
that attitudes can be either explicit or implicit; his alternative suggestion is that
explicit avowals can be understood in various different ways. They can be
directives (ordering oneself to believe in gender equality), expressives (expres-
sing one’s positive feelings about gender equality), commitments (committing
oneself to the norm of gender equality), or subjective reports of what one takes
one’s attitude to be (Machery, 2016, p. 114). With regard to the latter inter-
pretation, Machery stresses that subjective reports of one’s own attitudes will
often be mistaken. Being dispositions, attitudes are not themselves subject to
introspection. People’s subjective reports of their attitudes are (mostly)
formed by considering those components of the disposition’s psychological
basis that are introspectable
3
: their picture is thus necessarily incomplete. In
cases of implicit bias, what might look like a conflict between a so-called
‘explicit attitude’ and ‘implicit attitude’ actually just reflects the fact that one’s
avowals only tell part of the story about what one’s attitude really is: what is
often overlooked are precisely those behaviors, thoughts and/or feelings that
are outside the agent’s awareness and control.
Machery’s main argument for accepting this dispositional trait view of
attitudes comes from psychological research on implicit bias. By now it is well
known that people’s scores on different psychological measures of implicit
bias vary over time and between contexts, and are only modestly correlated
with one another (see, e.g., Gawronski, 2019; Jost, 2019; Machery, 2021 for
discussion). Machery argues that this lack of coherence in implicit measures
undermines the idea that the construct measured by these psychological
measures is one unitary underlying mental state. In contrast, he argues, by
taking an attitude to be more like a trait, low correlation between different
measures can be explained by the idea that each measure taps into a different
element of the psychological basis that determines the attitude trait.
4
Even though we share Machery’s conclusion that the fragmentation shown
by implicit measures raises serious doubt about the validity of a unitary
understanding of ‘implicit attitude’, we are not convinced that a trait concept
does much better here. After all, wouldn’t one expect a trait like courage to be
determined by a set of underlying states and processes that all point in
a similar direction? If not, it seems difficult to see why these underlying states
and processes together should be interpreted as determining one and the
same trait. For example: if someone has a strong fear response to darkness,
snakes, spiders and a whole list of other commonly feared entities, yet at the
same time has such a strong sense of moral duty that they would run into
a burning building to save a stranger, then why assume that this diverse
collection of psychological factors belongs to the psychological basis of just
one trait, namely, courage? Just as with attitudes, in ascribing a trait we expect
sufficient coherence in one’s cognitive and behavioral responses, and refrain
from ascribing the trait if such coherence is absent.
5
1216 A. KALIS AND H. GHIJSEN
Secondly, we are not convinced Machery’s trait view should be seen as
a genuine alternative to representationalism: many representationalists
clearly acknowledge that we shouldn’t think of implicit attitudes as
a unitary type of mental state. For instance, Holroyd and Sweetman
(2016) recommend to be cautious with generalizations about implicit bias,
because there is “functional heterogeneity in the way that different implicit
associations operate” and because “there may be heterogeneity in the pro-
cesses underpinning different implicit associations” (p. 88). Similarly, Byrd
(2021) argues that, although strong debiasing experiments point in the
direction of an associationist view of implicit bias, there is still room for
an interactionist view according to which implicit bias can be related to both
associative and non-associative processes – again making ‘implicit attitude’
into a heterogeneous kind. Such representationalists are perfectly happy to
accept that implicit attitudes are not a unitary kind of mental state, even
though they are still firmly wedded to the idea that we should understand
them within a (broader) representationalist framework. This more nuanced
understanding of implicit attitudes seems perfectly compatible with
Machery’s (2016) trait view, especially because Machery explicitly acknowl-
edges (Machery, 2016, p. 107) that the trait view is not meant to exclude
such a position. The main difference seems to be that Machery uses the label
‘attitude’ to refer to a disposition which is determined by a motley of
relevant representational states and processes, whereas on the above
nuanced representationalist views, each of the underlying representational
states is labeled as a separate implicit attitude.
Machery’s dispositionalism thus cannot really be seen as a fully-fledged
alternative to representationalist ways of thinking. His argument against
standard representationalist views backfires by also being applicable to his
own account, and a nuanced version of his position seems to be quite
compatible with nuanced forms of representationalism. It thus seems that
Machery’s view, like those of Johnson (2020) and Welpinghus (2020), is not
the best candidate for showing how dispositionalism could be a genuine
contender to representationalist accounts of implicit bias.
Schwitzgebel’s liberal dispositionalism
In various papers, Eric Schwitzgebel has developed a more radical anti-
representationalist account of implicit bias, which he grounds in his disposi-
tionalist metaphysics of attitudes.
6
According to his metaphysical position,
attitudes are constituted by a cluster of dispositions which include not just
behavioral, but also cognitive and phenomenal dispositions (Schwitzgebel,
2002). He labels his form of dispositionalism ‘liberal’, to emphasize that it
allows for ‘inner’ manifestations of attitude dispositions, thus contrasting it to
more traditional forms of dispositionalism that faced charges of behaviorism.
PHILOSOPHICAL PSYCHOLOGY 1217
To give an example, holding the belief that the genders are equal involves,
amongst other things, being disposed to say certain things (such as affirming
that the genders are equal when asked), being disposed to respond to certain
situations in certain ways (such as not eliminating potential job candidates
based on their gender), and being disposed to feel certain things (such as
feeling outrage when a woman is belittled). Which precise dispositions
‘belong’ to a certain attitude is difficult to specify, but according to
Schwitzgebel we have a fuzzy set of folk psychological expectations of
someone who believes in gender equality. This is referred to as the disposi-
tional stereotype for that specific attitude; we have such stereotypical expec-
tations for many common attitudes.
However, these expectations are sometimes violated. Some of our attitude
patterns only partially manifest, resulting in in-between or fragmented atti-
tudes (Schwitzgebel, 2001, 2010). On Schwitzgebel’s account, this shows that
having an attitude is not a dichotomous matter: there is not always a clear
answer to the question whether or not a person believes or desires something.
Implicit bias is a core example of such fragmented believing. Although we
explicitly profess to believe in the equality of the genders, thereby manifesting
one of the behavioral dispositions for the belief that the genders are equal, we
also display behavior that does not fit so well with that ascription of the belief
(e.g., we are faster to associate male rather than female with science). This also
provides an explanation of the observed low correlations between different
implicit measures: following Schwitzgebel’s account, such low coherence just
indicates the fragmentation of such attitude patterns.
For Schwitzgebel, the existence of in-between attitudes is an important
argument against representationalist theories. Whereas representationalists
are committed to there being a yes or no answer to the question whether
someone has a certain attitude (given that this is determined by the presence
of a specific kind of mental state), liberal dispositionalism has conceptual
room for fuzzy cases. After all, on their view the question whether or not
someone has a certain attitude becomes the question whether the person
displays the relevant stereotypical pattern to a sucient extent. However, this
argument of in-between believing has not convinced most representational-
ists. As outlined in the previous section, by now there are several nuanced
views on the table that allow for attitudes to be realized by a variety of
representational states and processes, which can point in different directions.
For example, Quilty-Dunn and Mandelbaum (2018a) claim Schwitzgebel’s
(2013) description of representationalism as a ‘belief-box’ account is mislead-
ing: they argue that representationalism actually does not commit to an
inflexible notion of belief storage. On their view, all representationalism
commits to is the claim “that different mental states can share contents
because they incorporate the same representations” (Quilty-Dunn and
Mandelbaum, p. 2357). So, someone’s belief that tigers have stripes, and that
1218 A. KALIS AND H. GHIJSEN
person’s belief that tigers are dangerous, share certain constituents (namely:
the concept TIGER). And importantly: “since constituents are repeatable in
different contexts, the representational theory of mind can explain how we
can freely recombine concepts in systematic and productive ways” (p. 2357).
This architectural flexibility provides a different explanation of what
Schwitzgebel calls ‘fuzzy cases’: various implicit measures pick out different
(only partially overlapping) implicit attitudes, which incorporate the same
representations only in so far as they share the same content. True, this
account does not allow for real metaphysical fuzziness about attitudes: each
separate implicit attitude is still either present or absent. However, represen-
tationalists do not seem convinced that allowing for such genuine metaphy-
sical fuzziness would provide explanatory advantage. After all, don’t we want
an account of belief precisely to answer questions on when someone can and
cannot be said to have a a belief? Greely (2014) even argues that Schwitzgebel’s
position is not a genuine metaphysical account, precisely because it leaves the
metaphysical question open for all difficult cases.
So what are the advantages of defending a liberal dispositionalist account
over a representationalist one? A core advantage Schwitzgebel (2013) brings
forward is that his liberal dispositionalism is a deliberately superficial
account. Dispositionalist criteria for ascribing attitudes do not need to
presuppose the existence of specific underlying mechanisms or processes.
So in order to determine whether or not someone has a certain attitude, we
don’t need to ‘look inside’ to investigate someone’s cognitive apparatus: all
we need to do is answer the question whether someone manifests the
relevant dispositional pattern to a sufficient extent.
However, it is not clear that liberal dispositionalism can actually answer
this question, with in-between attitudes being so central to the account.
Moreover, Quilty-Dunn and Mandelbaum (2018a) convincingly argue that
the feature of superficiality makes dispositionalism also superficial in
a second, potentially more harmful sense: dispositionalism has relatively
little explanatory or predictive value in making sense of the cognitive science
of belief.
7
The cognitive science of belief addresses important explanatory
questions: for instance, why does having a certain belief lead you to selec-
tively avoid counterevidence to it, and why do people suffer from fragmen-
ted forms of believing such as implicit bias? Liberal dispositionalism has no
answer to such questions.
Schwitzgebel’s response has been that this is not what dispositionalism is
supposed to contribute. What it does contribute is a metaphysical account that
has pragmatic value, in that it “directs our attention to what we ought to care
about most in thinking about belief” (Schwitzgebel, 2021, p. 351). As he
argues, many “intellectualist” approaches attach too much weight to explicit
attitude statements (such as “I strongly believe the genders are equal!”) in
determining what our attitudes are. In contrast, for a dispositionalist, ‘what
PHILOSOPHICAL PSYCHOLOGY 1219
one says’ is just one of the nodes in our dispositional profile. This shows that
we shouldn’t take our own attitude statements too seriously: in order to
genuinely count as having a certain attitude, we should ‘not only talk the
talk, but also walk the walk’. This can make us take the phenomenon of
implicit bias more seriously, and helps to avoid taking a noxiously comfor-
table view of ourselves (Schwitzgebel, 2013, 2021). However, many represen-
tationalists will completely agree that explicit attitude claims should not be
taken at face value: precisely because they identify attitudes with internal
representational states, their approach has ample room for the fact that we
often seem to give mistaken reports about our own attitudes. So this prag-
matic argument will also not be of help for developing a dispositionalist
alternative to representationalist approaches.
8
To conclude, we have argued that whereas Machery’s account is not in
clear opposition to nuanced versions of representationalism, Schwitzgebel’s
more radical account fails to show how liberal dispositionalism has clear
advantages over representationalism: specifically, it fails to show how it can
understand features of implicit bias that representationalism cannot. In the
next sections we want to take up this challenge. As we will show,
a dispositionalist metaphysics of attitudes suggests that our folk psycholo-
gical practices of attitude ascription might partly determine what it means to
have an attitude. We will embrace this suggestion and show how it leads to
a position which we label regulative dispositionalism. Crucially, we will argue
that such regulative dispositionalism comes with explanatory tools that do
not belong to the representationalist toolbox.
Regulative dispositionalism
In an early paper Schwitzgebel remarks that the “stereotypes [for belief and
other folk psychological categories] capture more than mere statistical
regularities [. . .] They capture something about how we think people
ought to think, feel, and behave” (Schwitzgebel, 2002, p. 262).
9
Tumulty
(2011, 2014) also notes that Schwitzgebel’s notion of dispositional stereo-
types relies on the presence of a folk psychological practice somehow
‘prescribing’ these stereotypes. However, neither Schwitzgebel nor
Tumulty have further developed the idea that dispositional stereotypes
originate in our normative folk psychological practices, nor applied this
idea to questions concerning the understanding of implicit bias. That is
exactly what we will do in this section, by starting from recent work on the
idea that folk psychology is a regulative practice.
For a long time, it was taken for granted that the practice of ascribing folk
psychological states such as beliefs and desires was geared toward description:
the idea was that in ascribing attitudes, we aim to report on the presence of
psychological states in the other person (or, in case of self-ascription, in
1220 A. KALIS AND H. GHIJSEN
oneself). This was assumed by views that had otherwise completely opposite
views on how to best understand this descriptive practice, with theory-theory
and simulation theory being the main contrast (Churchland, 1981; Davies &
Stone, 1995; Gordon, 1986; Stich & Ravenscroft, 1994).
Recent critiques of the view of folk psychology as a descriptive practice
have led to the idea that folk psychology is primarily a practice that regulates
and shapes our minds and behavior (De Bruin, 2017; McGeer, 2007, 2015,
2021; Vierkant & Paraskevaides, 2012; Zawidzki, 2008, 2013). The main idea
of these so-called mindshaping approaches is that in ascribing attitudes to
each other, we impose normative expectations; we appeal to the agents in
question to also manifest other, not (yet) observed features that belong to
the ascribed attitude. Such regulative practices make us more predictable
and readable to each other, thereby enabling successful coordination and
collaboration.
Regulation is not the only role of folk psychological ascription: we also
use such ascriptions to teach others what it means to have attitudes, and
what the criteria for legitimate ascription are (which can be as mundane as
telling your children that if they say they want a peanut butter sandwich,
then we expect them to actually eat it). In addition, the success of regulative
practices that shape our minds and behaviors also implies that attitude
ascriptions will often be pretty helpful as descriptions of our psychology
(for an overview of the three roles of regulation, pedagogy and description,
see, McGeer, 2021). But the crucial idea of mindshaping approaches is that
our folk psychological practice does not describe a fully preexisting psycho-
logical reality: that reality is, at least in part, created by the mindshaping
effects of our folk psychological practices.
So when we ascribe attitudes, what kind of normative expectations are at
stake? McGeer (2007) argues that some of these directly follow from norms
of basic rationality: in ascribing to someone the belief that the earth is round
we expect the person not to say things that blatantly contradict that idea,
such as saying “the earth is flat”. However, McGeer also emphasizes that
many of the norm-governed expectations are not grounded in norms of
rationality. The norms governing our social interactions are wildly varied,
often specific to particular cultures or groups within cultures, and most of
the time only vaguely articulated (McGeer, 2021, pp. 1050-1).
10
The exam-
ples McGeer mentions in this context have to do with other folk psycholo-
gical practices than just ascribing attitudes, such as greeting politely or
expressing anger in an appropriate way, but it’s not difficult to see that
these practices have important connections. For instance, ascribing the
belief to someone that they were insulted, will lead to different behavioral
expectations depending on the prevailing norms for expressing anger (also,
you would have to know a great deal about what could be insulting in this
context to ascribe the belief in the first place).
PHILOSOPHICAL PSYCHOLOGY 1221
Despite the impossibility of providing an exhausting list of normative
expectations inherent in folk psychological ascriptions, McGeer does hold
that they will be built around a set of general constraints that are written into
our nature as rational beings (McGeer, 2021). Among these are evidential
constraints that govern what is appropriate to believe, evaluative constraints
that govern what is appropriate to desire, and executive constraints that
govern what is appropriate to prefer and do in light of one’s beliefs and
desires. This bedrock to our folk psychological practice also underscores
McGeer’s realism with regard to our ascriptions: “3rd person attributions
are, typically, not just a facon-de-parler. Typically, we do not treat others as
if they had the requisite states; we assume our psychological attributions
actually describe how things are with them, psychologically speaking”
(McGeer, 2021, pp. 1054-1055).
11
However, McGeer does not elaborate on
the details: as far as we know neither she or any of the other mindshaping
theorists has so far provided an account explaining under what conditions
we can legitimately say that an agent has a certain attitude.
Our core suggestion is that mindshaping accounts like McGeer’s can be
seen as a natural partner for a dispositionalist metaphysics of attitudes.
Combining these perspectives leads to a position we propose to call regula-
tive dispositionalism: a position which claims that because attitude ascrip-
tion is a practice that regulates and shapes our minds according to norms,
the normative aspects of these attitude practices form an intrinsic part of the
answer to the question what attitudes are. To answer the question whether
someone with implicit bias does or does not really believe that the genders
are equal, we should investigate whether or not the relevant dispositional
pattern is sufficiently manifested (this is the dispositionalist view). But in
order to answer that question, we should examine how much coherence
(and what kind) we expect from people who explicitly commit to gender
equality. In other words: according to regulative dispositionalism, we can
only answer metaphysical questions about attitudes by looking into the
normative criteria for attitude ascription.
Note that, like Schwitzgebel’s view, regulative dispositionalism acknowl-
edges that there are cases in which there is no determinate answer to the
question whether or not someone has a certain attitude. However, we
believe regulative dispositionalism has an important advantage over
Schwitzgebel’s view. By combining a dispositionalist metaphysics with
a mindshaping approach to folk psychology, the position becomes signifi-
cantly stronger as an alternative to representationalist views. Firstly, it is
a genuine alternative: it clashes with representationalist metaphysics. After
all, according to regulative dispositionalism the content of someone’s atti-
tude and whether or not someone has that attitude, are determined by
normative criteria that are defined and upheld within a folk psychological
community. On the other hand, for a representationalist, the contents and
1222 A. KALIS AND H. GHIJSEN
presence of attitudes are fully determined by the presence or absence of the
relevant representational states. From a representationalist point of view,
our folk psychological practices cannot have anything to bear on the meta-
physics of attitudes, except as potential causal factors in bringing about the
relevant states. This means that regulative dispositionalism and representa-
tionalism give mutually exclusive answers to the question what are the
criteria for having attitudes.
12
Secondly, next to it thus being a genuine contender, we also believe that
regulative dispositionalism has advantages over representationalist
accounts. As we will explain in the next section, by emphasizing that
normativity is part of the metaphysics of attitudes, regulative dispositional-
ism becomes able to account for two important normative features of
implicit bias. Firstly, it can show why the discordance characteristic of
implicit bias is an uncomfortable resting point for agents. And secondly, it
can show how it is possible that explicit attitude statements can be tools for
change.
Two normative features of implicit bias
We started the paper with the observation that implicit bias is often char-
acterized by discordance: whereas some of the things someone does or says
suggest that he or she believes that the genders are equal, other behaviors,
responses or feelings of that person suggest otherwise. Representationalism
has a clear explanation of such discordance: “beliefs are representational
states that are literally stored in the mind, just as episodic and semantic
memories are. The idea that our beliefs are fragmented can therefore be
explained by positing architectural divisions between belief stores. It is thus
because two inconsistent sets of beliefs are stored separately that they persist
despite inconsistency, and that they are accessed at different times to
produce different behaviors” (Quilty-Dunn & Mandelbaum, 2018a, p. -
2358).
13
Dispositionalists also provide an explanation: they understand
discordance as having an attitude which is incompletely manifested or in-
between. However, this metaphysical debate has so far failed to address an
important aspect of discordance: the fact that the discordance characteristic
of implicit bias is an uncomfortable resting point for agents. Indeed, if
fragmented attitudes are the rule rather than the exception (as most parti-
cipants in the debate seem to argue), then why do we feel that something is
painfully amiss if our verbal reports and behaviors don’t line up? Finding
out that one suffers from implicit bias is worrying in a specific way: one
realizes that one responds, feels or makes decisions in ways that “conflict
with our professed beliefs and values” (Holroyd et al., 2017). But why would
this be worrying, to the extent that it often comes with a felt pressure to
change? Seen from a representationalist point of view, such discomfort
PHILOSOPHICAL PSYCHOLOGY 1223
cannot arise from the mere fact of attitude fragmentation itself. The cogni-
tive system does not contain rules that ‘check’ for consistency between
different attitude fragments: indeed, the fact that there are no such checks
precisely explains how fragmentation is possible (Porot & Mandelbaum,
2021; Quilty-Dunn & Mandelbaum, 2018a). So in order to explain the
normative pressure agents experience, representationalism needs to bring
in ‘external’ normative structures and motivational processes that explain
why inconsistencies bother us.
Quilty-Dunn and Mandelbaum (2018a) propose that dissonance theory is
a good candidate for such a normative structure, and this indeed seems
plausible for various forms of fragmented believing such as induced com-
pliance. In studies investigating this phenomenon, subjects are manipulated
into doing things that go against their standing attitudes. In order to reduce
dissonance, participants in such studies often respond by changing their
own narrative about what they believe, without being aware of doing so.
However, precisely for implicit bias, this cannot be the full story: dissonance
theory claims that people resolve dissonance by choosing the path of least
resistance, in other words that they reduce inconsistencies via the easiest
available route (Harmon-Jones & Harmon-Jones, 2007; Quilty-Dunn &
Mandelbaum, 2018a). However, people who find out that they manifest
implicit bias, generally draw the conclusion that they should bring their
responses, feelings and so on in line with their explicit attitude statements –
and certainly not the other way around, even if this would be the path of
least resistance. But why would this be so?
This is where regulative dispositionalism has a story to offer. According
to this perspective, implicit bias is a prime example of agents partially failing
to meet the normative expectations that guide attitude ascription. Although
someone meets some of the norms held in our community for believing in,
for example, gender equality (such as how we expect people with this belief
to talk about gender equality), he or she violates certain other relevant
norms for the same belief (such as the norm not to favor men in hiring
decisions). The relevant norms are, as explained above, of various kinds.
They involve basic inference rules but also norms regarding the relative
‘weight’ of the various elements of an attitude. Crucially, they also involve
norms prescribing which attitudes a society considers morally preferable.
Taken together, all these constraints form a normative framework regulat-
ing what counts as having a ‘fully-fledged’ attitude, what counts as coher-
ence or the lack of it, and how discordance should be resolved. The lack of
coherence displayed by people suffering from implicit bias, makes them
candidates for being regulated or corrected in specific directions (McGeer,
2021, p. 1054). This is what we do when we say to someone: “you say you
believe in gender equality, but if so why do you keep hiring only men?”
Importantly, social regulation is thus not geared toward coherence per se.
1224 A. KALIS AND H. GHIJSEN
What we expect from each other is not that agents resolve inconsistencies in
whatever way (by choosing the path of least resistance), but that they resolve
them in a way that leads them to have attitudes that withstand social and
moral scrutiny.
14
Moreover, the idea that in ascribing attitudes we impose normative
expectations, also applies to self-ascription. In saying things like “yes,
I believe in gender equality!” we impose normative expectations on our-
selves; we appeal to ourselves to actually meet the normative expectations
that go with this self-ascription. As McGeer (2007) argues: when agents
“have publicly attributed a belief to themselves, they feel some pressure not
to let their companions down in the expectations those companions now
form about what they will say or do, and they find themselves responding to
that pressure by monitoring what they say or do a little more carefully”
(p. 146). This sheds interesting light on why the discordance or in-between
believing manifested in implicit bias is such an uncomfortable resting
position for agents: it is precisely when they explicitly express their attitudes
that agents open themselves up for regulation and correction.
Representationalists might argue that this normative background story is
precisely that: a mere background story, which need not be part of our
metaphysical or psychological account of attitudes. Instead, they prefer to
separate normative questions from metaphysical and psychological ones
(for a similar argument regarding human thinking, see, Elqayam & Evans,
2011). Our response to such an objection would be that this is precisely
where regulative dispositionalism is in genuine and meaningful disagree-
ment with the representationalist point of view. Whereas it is obvious that
normative standards in themselves cannot explain why human attitudes
manifest the way they do (given that deviation from such standards is so
common), regulative dispositionalism argues that such normative standards
are an intrinsic part of the explanation, needed in order to understand why
the discordance characteristic of implicit bias bothers us in the way it does.
The second normative feature regulative dispositionalism can shed light
on, directly follows from this analysis of discordance. As said, agents
suffering from implicit bias experience normative pressure to resolve the
discordance in a specific way: namely by bringing their behavior, feelings
etcetera in line with their first-person attitude statements. However, how is
it even possible to do something like this? We want to propose that
regulative dispositionalism can clarify how it is possible that agents leverage
their own statements regarding what their attitudes are, for developing more
coherent and justifiable attitudes. As said, McGeer (2021) distinguishes
three different roles for attitude ascription: regulation, pedagogy and
description. She points out that these roles are differently distributed across
first-personal, second personal and third-personal ascriptions of attitudes.
Whereas we use third-personal ascriptions (‘John believes that women are
PHILOSOPHICAL PSYCHOLOGY 1225
equally good at chess as men’) most often for descriptive purposes, second-
personal ascriptions usually have either a pedagogical or regulative role.
First-personal ascriptions sometimes have a descriptive function (when we
want to give others information about ourselves) but according to McGeer,
their dominant role is regulative: “by attributing mental states to ourselves
in an engaged 1st-personal mode, we give others ample opportunity to call
us to account when our actions do not mesh with the claims we make about
how we are minded” (McGeer, 2021, p. 1054). Thus, first-personal expres-
sions of attitudes play the role of commitments (McGeer, 2015).
McGeer here builds on work by Richard Moran on the relation between
self-knowledge and avowal (Moran, 2001). Moran developed the influential
position that statements such as ‘I believe women are just as capable as men’
should not be understood as reports of one’s own belief state, but as avowals
that are backed by reasons. Such statements are transparent in the sense that
the evidence for their truth is not found ‘in our heads’: we back up our belief
statements not by pointing inwards (I really believe so!) but by directly
pointing at the reasons for considering women as being equally capable as
men. From this it follows that in asking ourselves what we feel, think, believe
etcetera, we are not asking ourselves to report on our inner states, but to
actively make up our minds. In other words, figuring out what one thinks is
a matter of figuring out what to think.
Now compared to mindshaping accounts, Moran’s understanding (having
a strong Kantian foundation) of the role of normative constraints is very
narrow: for him, the norms on the basis of which we figure out what to think,
are basically just the norms of rationality. Moreover, in the same Kantian
spirit Moran argues that the first-personal stance is the only stance from which
agents can authentically shape their own minds: observing one’s own mind
from an outside perspective is, for Moran, always a form of alienation (Moran,
2001). As a critical response to this narrow analysis, recent mindshaping
accounts have emphasized that self-regulation should be seen as a dynamic
interplay between making first-personal commitments and observation of
one’s own thoughts, emotions and behavior (De Bruin, 2017; McGeer, 2015).
Combining these ideas on the role of first-personal mindshaping with
a dispositional metaphysics suggests that explicit attitude statements such
as ‘I believe that the genders are equal’ should be seen as avowals by which
agents, in making themselves susceptible to normative regulation by
others and by oneself, can work toward the development of fully-fledged
attitudes in the dispositionalist sense. Thus, such avowals can help agents
to ‘not only talk the talk, but also walk the walk’. This picture stands in
sharp contrast to that sketched by representationalists, and is also different
(although less radically so) from the kinds of dispositionalism defended by
Machery and Schwitzgebel. All of them tend to stress the descriptive
understanding of first-personal attitude statements as self-reports of our
1226 A. KALIS AND H. GHIJSEN
attitudes.
15
On their own, such self-reports do not count as genuine
manifestations of the relevant attitudes. And given that our capacities for
self-knowledge are pretty limited, this leads them to the conclusion that
ascribing attitudes to oneself amounts to just ‘saying things’: self-reports
will, most of the time, not stand up to scrutiny. We believe that regulative
dispositionalism has unique tools for showing in what sense explicit
attitude claims are more than just reports on one’s internal state, by
providing an account of the power first-person expressions can have. For
many people, taking an explicit stance on where they stand with regard to
important issues is a crucial step toward living out those statements in
their everyday lives. True, this is not easy–and having ideally coherent
attitudes might be just that: an ideal which human beings might strive for
but will never completely reach. But nevertheless, we should not under-
estimate the role of ‘what we say we believe’ in our normative practices. By
expressing such a commitment, agents open themselves up to regulation
and correction by others and themselves, and thus open up a path for
change.
By emphasizing the power of explicit avowals, our regulative disposition-
alism is probably closer to intellectualism than someone like Schwitzgebel
might like. However, in our view precisely this makes our dispositionalist
position stronger vis-à-vis representationalism. Representationalists cannot
account for the idea that avowals could have power as tools for change, and
might not want to. As with the issue of discordance, they might prefer to
explain any effectiveness of avowals externally by reconceptualizing such
‘power’ as a causal force brought about by social pressures. Our ambition in
this paper is not to refute that way of thinking, but to clarify that it is here
that we find the core point of disagreement between representationalism
and regulative dispositionalism. Whereas representationalism proposes
a metaphysics of attitudes that aims to be purely descriptive and to
a substantial extent normatively neutral,
16
regulative dispositionalism
argues that certain normative features of attitudes and implicit bias can be
understood much better by acknowledging that our normative practices of
attitude ascription are part and parcel of the metaphysics of attitudes
themselves.
Conclusions
In this paper we have proposed to reframe the opposition between repre-
sentationalism and dispositionalism in terms of the following question: is it
possible to understand what it means to have an attitude, or to suffer from
implicit bias, without taking the normative features of practices of attitude
ascription into account? Representationalism argues yes, while regulative
dispositionalism answers no. We believe our position fares better than
PHILOSOPHICAL PSYCHOLOGY 1227
existing dispositionalist accounts on two points. Firstly, by claiming that the
normative features of attitude ascription should be part of the metaphysical
account, regulative dispositionalism offers a genuine alternative to repre-
sentationalism. Secondly, regulative dispositionalism has a clear answer to
the question what it contributes to our understanding of the phenomena at
stake: by integrating normativity in the metaphysics, it becomes possible to
explain certain normative features of attitudes in general, and implicit bias
in particular. For these reasons, we believe regulative dispositionalism offers
a better starting point for engaging in philosophical debate with
representationalism.
However, even if representationalists were to agree concerning the con-
tributions just mentioned, these clearly do not provide a decisive argument
against the representationalist understanding of implicit bias, or attitudes in
general. Representationalists might object that their lack of tools for explain-
ing normative features is a small price to pay, compared to the advantage of
having conceptual tools that connect so easily with the cognitive science of
attitudes. Moreover, they might consider it perfectly satisfactory to refer to
‘external’ causal social mechanisms for explaining normative features like
the ones we have been discussing. This raises the question: doesn’t the
debate ultimately come down to a fundamental disagreement regarding
the question what a metaphysical account of attitudes and implicit bias is
supposed to do?
We think this might indeed be the case. However, this does not close off
meaningful philosophical debate. To the contrary, we hold that our under-
standing of both attitudes in general, and implicit bias in particular, could
benefit from addressing these fundamental disagreements directly, by put-
ting the question ‘what counts as a good explanation?’ back on the table.
Whereas representationalism has teamed up with cognitive science in pro-
viding explanations in terms of underlying processes and mechanisms,
regulative dispositionalism can be seen as offering a different form of
explanation: it provides insight in how our social-cultural settings and folk
psychological practices shape our attitudes. Moreover, it shows how these
practices both sustain, and can help reduce, implicit bias. Our society is
structured such that we have different expectations of women than of men,
of blacks than of whites–and such expectations play an important role in
causing and maintaining practices of discrimination (Beeghly & Madva,
2020; Haslanger, 2019). This means that mindshaping “is, thus, a double-
edged sword: it will certainly enrich our cognitive powers, but not always in
a salubrious direction” (McGeer, 2021, p. 1052). Individuals manifesting
implicit bias seem to be hit by precisely this double-edged sword: in so far as
they explicitly express egalitarian attitudes, our society expects them to be
consistent, and to adhere to the normative stereotype of the relevant atti-
tude. However, the implicit normative expectations that saturate social
1228 A. KALIS AND H. GHIJSEN
categories like gender and race, simultaneously nudge us toward ‘discordant
strains’ of discriminatory thoughts, emotions and behavior. This dynamic
makes it difficult for agents to attain genuine, coherent egalitarian beliefs.
So even if representationalists correctly point out that dispositionalism is
a superficial account in that it neither provides nor supports specific cogni-
tive scientific explanations, this does not mean that dispositionalism does
not have explanatory potential. Like representationalists, dispositionalists
want to understand why people suffer from phenomena like implicit bias,
and more in general why they have the attitudes that they do. But while
representationalists look for answers in underlying processes and mechan-
isms, dispositionalists claim that answers to these questions require an
analysis of the social and cultural processes that shape our attitudes: pro-
cesses that are inherently normative in nature. Our understanding of impli-
cit bias could benefit greatly from a genuine debate between
representationalism and dispositionalism; however, such a debate might
require the participants to face their deeper philosophical disagreements.
Notes
1. To clarify our use of the relevant concepts: Throughout the paper we will use the term
‘attitude’ as referring to any kind of evaluative relation human beings take toward an
object, thus remaining non-committal on for example, whether attitudes are necessarily
propositional. We use the term ‘belief’ as referring to one of the more common types of
attitudes human beings adopt. The term ‘implicit bias’ refers to the situation in which
someone displays biases in behavior, thoughts and/or feelings toward specific social
groups that are largely outside the agent’s awareness and control (Brownstein & Saul,
2016; Johnson, 2020). Note that we focus on cases of implicit bias that are characterized
by discordance. According to e.g., Holroyd (2016), it is important to also acknowledge
cases in which implicit and explicit bias are aligned (as for example, in ‘wholehearted
sexists’). Whereas we agree that this is an important type of bias, we think describing
such cases in terms of ‘alignment’ makes sense only from a representationalist point of
view: on the kind of dispositionalist account we will defend in this paper, ‘wholehearted
sexists’ just display a wholehearted (non-fragmented) sexist attitude.
2. Note that Machery explicitly distinguishes attitudes from beliefs. Where beliefs are
introspectable mental states, attitudes are dispositional entities that might be partly
determined by beliefs. We will later discuss Schwitzgebel’s view, which also takes
beliefs to be dispositional entities.
3. Mostly, because one can also base one’s subjective report by, for instance, reflecting
on one’s own past behavior.
4. Note that Machery (2021) is even more pessimistic, taking the fact that psychological
research on implicit measures is largely stagnant with respect to these fundamental
anomalies as a reason to think that they cannot even measure broad traits.
5. Machery (2021) seems more amenable to this idea: “If indirect measures are only
predictive in narrow contexts, then it makes no sense to conclude that one is racist,
sexist, and so on, when one receives an apparently damning IAT score since racism
and other biases manifest themselves across contexts: Racists think, speak, and act
PHILOSOPHICAL PSYCHOLOGY 1229
racist in many different contexts, although of course not invariably” (p. 8). Our
disagreement with Machery (2016) might thus mostly concern the question how
much coherence between implicit measures can be expected.
6. Note that Schwitzgebel, in contrast to Machery, is explicitly concerned with attitudes
in the sense of propositional attitudes, such as beliefs and desires.
7. Note that Quilty-Dunn and Mandelbaum raise multiple objections against disposi-
tionalism. It would go beyond the scope of this paper to respond to all of them, but we
do think that the objection regarding cognitive science and belief is particularly
relevant in the context of this paper.
8. Schwitzgebel (2021) himself also acknowledges that this pragmatic argument does not
in itself go against all forms of representationalism.
9. See, Schwitzgebel (2010, p. 547; 2013, p. 95) for other places where he briefly refers to
the relevance of normative features.
10. Also see, Lavelle (2021) for an analysis of culture-specific folk psychological norms.
11. On this point, McGeer’s mindshaping theory differs from some other versions.
Whereas for example, Fernandez Castro (2020) argues that “propositional attitude
ascriptions emerge in contexts where our normative expectations are violated” (p. 60),
thus reserving so-called ‘mentalizing’ for situations in which we require a specific
explanation for the other’s behavior, McGeer holds that “typical adult human beings
are in fact inveterate and prolific mentalizers both in quotidian and non-quotidian
contexts” (McGeer, 2021, p. 19).
12. This is not to say that it is impossible to provide a representationalist re-interpretation
of the role of folk psychological normative criteria in the ascription of attitudes.
A representationalist could argue that through social learning, such criteria are
‘implanted’ into agent’s representational systems, and that it is the presence of such
representations that ultimately determines whether or not the agent has the relevant
attitude. Unsurprisingly, we do not take this to be a promising response (mostly
because we think changes in our normative practices directly change the ascriptive
criteria without these changes first having to be ‘implemented’ in individuals’ repre-
sentational systems), but this is certainly an issue up for debate.
13. The position of Quilty-Dunn and Mandelbaum (2018a) is one of the main represen-
tationalist accounts of fragmentation, but of course there are other options on the
table. One might also appeal, for instance, to two (or more) different types of
representational states to explain how conflicting behavior is possible without leading
to a full-fledged contradiction between these representational states (e.g., Gendler,
2008a).
14. Furthermore, in a sense measures of implicit bias like the IAT actually ‘track’ such
normative expectations. We consider it important to find out whether people are
faster in grouping together stimuli related to female and science than grouping
together stimuli related to male and science, because we think such a difference is
normatively relevant.
15. Note that Machery also mentions that a first-person attitude statement can express
a commitment to a moral norm (p. 114), and that Schwitzgebel, as mentioned, now
and then hints at the potentially commissive nature of avowals (e.g., Schwitzgebel,
2010, p. 547). However, neither of them provide a substantial account of avowals as
commitments.
16. Although for example, Quilty-Dunn and Mandelbaum (2018b) argue that basic rules
of logic such as modus ponens are built into our cognitive architecture, thus explain-
ing how within belief fragments, agents can make implicit inferences.
1230 A. KALIS AND H. GHIJSEN
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Funding
This research was supported by the Dutch Research Council (for Annemarie Kalis, grant VI.
VIDI.195.116; for Harmen Ghijsen, grant VI.VENI.275.20.056);];
Notes on contributors
Annemarie Kalis is Associate Professor in Theoretical Philosophy at Utrecht University.
Her areas of expertise are philosophy of psychology and philosophy of mind and cognition,
focusing in particular on agency and normativity. She has published on various topics such
as weakness of will, intention, reasoning, the nature of folk psychology and self-control.
Harmen Ghijsen is Assistant Professor in the Center for Cognition, Culture and Language at
Radboud University. His research is focused on epistemology, philosophy of mind and
philosophy of science and investigates the relations between belief, bias and perception.
ORCID
Annemarie Kalis http://orcid.org/0000-0001-8574-492X
Harmen Ghijsen http://orcid.org/0000-0002-3005-972X
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