Episode 85: Bryce Huebner discusses race and cognitive science
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What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
Hey, Matt Teichman here from Elucidations. Before we get going today, I just thought I'd ask if you're a fan of the show to maybe go to our iTunes page and leave a rating and a review, and that way more people can discover it. All right, thanks.
Hello, and welcome to Elucidations, a philosophy podcast recorded at the University of Chicago. I'm Matt Teichman.
And I'm Francie Russell.
With us today is Bryce Huebner, Associate Professor of Philosophy at Georgetown University. And he's here to discuss race and cognitive science. Bryce Huebner, welcome.
Thank you. Thanks for having me on the podcast.
So I'm going to open my question just by citing two recent statistics. One is that of all the PhD students in philosophy in America, less than 1% of those students are black. And of all the tenured philosophy professors in the United States, about 4% are black. So just from those numbers alone, it's clear that philosophy is a very predominantly white discipline, and it speaks to who is participating and able to participate in the discipline of philosophy in the 21st century. Something that's interesting is a lot of people have thought that one way to address this issue is to address it at the level of syllabus design and in terms of the content of philosophy. So I wondered, what do you think about this as an approach?
I think that there's a lot to be said in favor of diversifying and making your syllabi more inclusive. One of the things that I focused a lot on in my teaching over the last couple of years is trying to make sure that I'm not just including philosophers from the Western European tradition. and bringing in philosophers from the African and Africana traditions, bringing in philosophers from the Indian and Chinese traditions, and bringing in perspectives from disability and from other parts of philosophy that aren't mainstream. But at the same time, I think that you're running a real risk in trying to bring in those perspectives of generating effects that are likely to backfire. So the thought here, roughly, is that if you're someone who already is highly committed to
to racial egalitarianism, to gender inclusiveness, and to including disability perspectives in your thinking and in your approach to doing philosophy, shifting those perspectives can be really productive. But if you're not, if you're the sort of person who is highly trained in the Western tradition, is only trained in analytic philosophy, or only trained in a particular strain of continental philosophy, What might happen when you include those other perspectives is that you present them to students, for example, in ways that show that you're not as excited, that you're not as interested, and that you're not as well informed about those perspectives. Students will pick up on that. And it's one of the sorts of things that we are learning from a cognitive science perspective about humans that we pick up on those sorts of effectively valenced, minor sorts of differences in presentation.
and treat them as more decisive evidence about the value and structure of the things we're being presented. So a person who adds at the end of a course that is centered on the Western European tradition A piece by someone who is of African descent might present that information in a way that suggests to the students that this is something that is to be marginalized, that is to be rejected, or is to be ignored. Because the professor themselves has already shown that they reject it, that they've ignored it, and that they don't care about it.
Okay, that was really helpful, but maybe a little disheartening for certain people. So if adding philosophers of more diverse origins and descents isn't the answer all the time, what do you think that we should do?
I think that any of us who are committed to transforming the kind of space that is generated within philosophy from an exclusively or predominantly white space to a multicultural or diverse space is has to be committed not just to changing their own attitudes, but to changing the structure and organization of philosophy as a discipline.
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Chapters
4 chapters
1
What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
0:00–8:24
2
What statistics reveal the racial imbalance in philosophy PhD programs and faculty?
8:24–17:20
3
How effective is diversifying philosophy syllabi for reducing implicit bias?
17:20–33:41
4
Why does simply adding diverse philosophers risk backfiring in the classroom?
33:41–35:14
Speakers
1 identifiedMore from Elucidations
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