Thomas Kelly, "Bias: A Philosophical Study" (Oxford UP, 2023)
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What is the episode’s opening and sponsor introduction?
Hi everyone, this is Marshall Poe. I'm the founder of the New Books Network, and I'm also a historian. I used to be a history professor, and I love maps. So I'm especially happy to tell you that this episode is sponsored by What's Your Map, which was the winner of the best education podcast at the 2025 British Podcast Awards. What's Your Map is hosted by historian and prize-winning author, Professor Jerry Broughton. In each episode, he invites a guest to share. A map close to their heart and unfurl the ideas, inspirations, and stories behind it. I can tell you I've listened and it's fascinating. The podcast is in its sixth series and is enjoyed by audiences around the globe. You can explore all the maps in the podcast at occulehyphenmundi.com while you listen.
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Hello, and thanks for joining us for this episode of New Books in Philosophy, which is part of the New Books Network. I'm Robert Talis, and I'm professor of philosophy at Vanderbilt University. I co-host the program with Carrie Figder, Malcolm Keating, and Sarah Tyson. My guest today is Thomas Kelly. Thomas is professor of philosophy at Princeton University. He specializes in epistemology, and as I suspect listeners will know, Thomas has written several influential essays on the epistemology of disagreement. Now his new book has just been published with Oxford University Press. It's titled Bias, a Philosophical Study. Now the concept of bias is familiar enough, partly because it's deployed frequently in many different contexts.
For example, we talk about biased jurors, biased procedures, biased laws, biased decisions, as well as biased people. But we also talk about bias as a feature of certain frames of mind or habits, dispositions, or mental processes. Now in a lot of these contexts, maybe most of them, bias is seen as a kind of failing or a bad making feature of whatever it's ascribed to. Now attributions of bias hence are often accusatory. or at least a matter of negative assessment.
How does the host introduce the book and its central questions about bias?
Now, although these phenomena are familiar, lots of questions remain. Consider, is bias a single thing? Is it always bad? Is bias always a kind of misleading? Can bias be eliminated? And so on. Now, in his book, Bias, a philosophical study, Thomas Kelly addresses a broad range of these questions, maybe most of them, maybe all of them. He develops a norm theoretic account of what bias is and then explores its implications, some of which are philosophically pretty surprising. Now, as usual, there's a lot to talk about, but we normally begin with our guest and we'll do the same here. Hi Thomas, how are you? Really good. Hi, Bob, how are you? I'm doing fine. Um, you know, as I just said, w uh w we we begin the program with uh the author saying a few things about himself.
Uh can you tell us a bit about yourself? Sure.
Um I'm a native Midwesterner. In fact I spent the first twenty two years of my life in the Midwest. Born and grew up in the Chicago area. And then I went to a college in Indiana at the University of Notre Dame. And that was very important to me. Then is now Notre Dame had an excellent philosophy department. На вас роли верми філософі. first uh ignited Notre Dame back way back in the last millennium the nineteen nineties. And uh like a lot of things that turned out pretty well in my career, it was just dumb luck on my part. I certainly had I didn't go there because I had a good philosophy department. I had no idea about this.
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Chapters
6 chapters
1
What is the episode’s opening and sponsor introduction?
0:00–2:44
2
How does the host introduce the book and its central questions about bias?
2:44–5:40
3
What background does the host give about Thomas Kelly and his new book?
5:40–16:00
4
What is Thomas Kelly’s personal and academic journey leading to the book?
16:00–31:45
5
How does Kelly define bias as a systematic deviation from a norm?
31:45–47:39
6
What examples illustrate the diverse ways bias shows up in everyday life?
47:39–1:07:48
Speakers
2 identifiedMore from New Books in Philosophy
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Daniel Cohnitz and Jussi Haukioja, "Foundations for Metasemantics" (Oxford UP, 2025)
Philippe Huneman, "When Metaphysics Meets Biology: Kantian Approaches to the Concept of An Organism" (Routledge, 2026)
Rivka Weinberg, "The Meaning of It All: Ultimate Meaning, Everyday Meaning, Cosmic Meaning, Death, and Time" (Oxford UP, 2026)
PJ DiPietro, "Sideways Selves Travesti and Jotería, "Struggles Across the Américas" (U Texas Press, 2025)