Jordan Scott

It is increasingly common to hear talk of ‘racist perceptions’. While these have begun to be studied in the philosophy of mind (e.g. in debates about the border between perception and cognition), they’ve received relatively little attention in analytic philosophy of race, particularly regarding the analysis of racism. This paper advances an account of racist perceptions and draws out their implications for debates about the nature of racism. First, it argues for an account on which racist perceptions are best seen as manifesting racism rather than being racist-making. Second, it argues that views on which racist attitudes are irrational or immoral will be particularly ill-suited to handle racist perception. A desire to account for racist perception should push us towards either a bias-centred account of racism, or an ideology-based account.

The standard view among philosophers of normativity is that practical reasons balance permissively (i.e., when reasons are tied between incompatible actions, either action is rational), while epistemic reasons balance prohibitively (i.e., when reasons are tied between incompatible doxastic attitudes, neither attitude may be rationally formed). Those who disagree, typically epistemic permissivists, think that epistemic reasons behave like reasons for action and that all reasons exhibit permissive balancing. One thing widely agreed on is that a third possibility, that all reasons exhibit prohibitive balancing, is off the table. This paper aims to get that option back on the table. I defend the view that all reasons balance prohibitively, and the apparent permissive balancing of practical reasons is an illusion. What we take to be cases of choosing on the basis of tied practical reasons, actually involve finding extra, tie-breaking, reasons.

Performances, epistemic and practical, can be understood as having aims and methods which jointly determine whether the performance was successful. In this paper, I advance a novel, structural account of the rationality of performances that draws on this aims/methods framework. Performance-rationality, I argue, is a distinct kind of structural rationality determined by internal conflict within methods (i.e. when methods have incompatible, jointly unsatisfiable steps). I argue that this account represents an important advance on structural views which are centred around incoherent combinations of mental-states. This method-based picture allows us to unify epistemic and practical rationality in an intuitive framework, sheds new light on the normativity of structural rationality, and offers a new way of thinking about what unifies rational norms.

Personal racism used to be widely considered a kind of cognitive defect, with racists being people with biased, irrational racial attitudes. This kind of epistemic “racism-in-the-head” view has fallen largely out of favor in recent decades. Few philosophers have defended it, with many turning toward moral or socio-political rival accounts. This paper offers a robust defense of the epistemic view. It advances a new, broader version, claiming: Personal racism is determined solely by the number and significance of one's biasing attitudes about racial groups. This bias centered view of racism avoids key problems with previous epistemic views. It also improves upon dominant moral and socio-political views in accounting for a broader range of racist attitudes.

Epistemic instrumentalism is often thought to face an insurmountable barrier, the ‘too few reasons’ problem. This has prompted some epistemologists to turn to a rival social kind of epistemic instrumentalism that claims epistemic normativity is instrumental to the goals of communities rather than individuals. This paper argues that this is a mistake as regular epistemic instrumentalism is better able to address the too few reasons problem than its social counterpart. In Sect. 2, I outline the two few reasons objection, highlighting that it contains two separate problems: The problem of indifference and the problem of avoidance. I offer a dual strategy for the instrumentalist that appeals to doxastic non-voluntarism, and show how this improves upon standard instrumentalist defences. In Sect. 3, I argue that social instrumentalism does not improve upon the regular kind. It fails to capture instrumentalist motivations, and also fails to offer a compelling solution to the too few reasons problem. Insights from social epistemology can, however, be used to strengthen regular instrumentalism. I conclude that epistemic instrumentalists should not be motivated to take the social turn.

An increasingly common view is that ‘racism’ can be defined as prejudice plus power. However, this view is ambiguous between two interpretations. The first proposes a descriptive definition, claiming that a prejudice plus power account of ‘racism’ best accounts for our ordinary usage of the term. The second proposes a revisionary definition, claiming that we should adopt a new account of ‘racism’ because doing so will bring pragmatic benefit. In this paper, I argue that the prejudice plus power view is unsatisfying on either interpretation.