Ranking Exercises in Philosophy and Implicit Bias

In recent decades, ranking exercises have become increasingly important to philosophy.And in recent years, philosophers have become increasingly concerned about the situation of underrepresented groups in philosophy. The Australasian Philosophical Association published a report on women in philosophy in 2008 (Goddard 2008), and the British Philosophical Association and Society for Women in Philosophy in the United Kingdom did so in 2011 (Beebee and Saul 2011). The American Philosophical Association has a long-standing Committee on the Status of Women (http://www.apaonlinecsw.org/), and the Canadian Philosophical Association has an Equity Committee, both of which have published many reports (see, e.g., the APA Newsletters on Feminism and Philosophy, Spring and Fall 2009; and various reports here: http://www.acpcpa.ca/en/equitycommittee.php). There is the new Women in Philosophy Task Force (http://www.web.mit.edu/wphtf/ welcome.html), and there have been a variety of international conferences and workshops in recent years on underrepresented groups in philosophy, and many widely read papers (the best known of which is Haslanger 2008). There have been articles on the topic from the Philosophers Magazine to the New York Times, and there are blogs, campaigns, and even songs devoted to these issues. Although most of this work has been specifically on women in philosophy, not all of it has. Haslanger’s paper, for example, also calls attention to the situation of racial minorities in philosophy; the Cardiff conference (http://www.cf.ac.uk/encap/ newsandevents/events/conferences/groups.html) was on underrepresented groups more generally in philosophy; Penn State’s Philosophy in an Inclusive Key Summer Institute is for promising undergraduate members of all underrepresented groups in philosophy (http://www.psu.edu/dept/rockethics/education/piksi/index.shtml); the Rutgers Summer Institute for Diversity in Philosophy (http://www. philosophy.rutgers.edu/events/summer-institute) is for talented undergraduate students whose “experiences and background foster greater diversity in the field of philosophy”; and the recently created Young Black Philosophers Association and Collegium of Black Women Philosophers (http://web.me.com/ktgphd/CBWP/ welcome.html) are also vital new initiatives. It seems a good time, then, to reflect on ways that ranking exercises may intersect with issues concerning underrepresented groups, and that is the goal of this paper. More specifically, I will explore the implications for these exercises of the implicit biases against stigmatized groups that psychologists over the last few decades have shown to be widely held. I will do this by examining methodologies bs_bs_banner