Unconscious bias

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Un petit d’un petit
S’étonne aux Halles;
Un petit d’un petit
Ah! degrés te fallent.
Indolent qui ne sort cesse
Indolent qui ne se mène
Qu'importe un petit
Tout gai de Reguennes.

—Luis d’Antin van Rooten, Mots D’Heures: Gousses, Rames, (1967)

“We need to make a distinction between the claim that the world is out there and the claim that truth is out there. To say that the world is out there, that is not our creation, is to say, with common sense, that most things in space and time are the effects of causes which do not include human mental states. To say that truth is not out there is simply to say that where there are no sentences there is no truth, that sentences are elements of human languages, and that human languages are human creations.

Truth cannot be out there — cannot exist independently of the human mind — because sentences cannot so exist, or be out there. The world is out there, but descriptions of the world are not. Only descriptions of the world can be true or false. The world on its own, unaided by the describing activities of humans, cannot.”

- Richard Rorty, Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity

To utter a sentence is to assert a model of the world; a single “narrative” over the infinity of possible alternatives. To construe one is to do likewise. The success of a communication depends on how far the speaker and listener share cultural conventions; how well their respective narratives coincide. Words are, like the world, are out there; the meanings we assign them are not. To understand words is to share cultural conventions by which they acquire meaning.

If speaker and listener do not share cultural conventions, the result is usually incoherence: a monolingual English speaker cannot understand a French sentence, and that is that. Not necessarily, though: ask a French speaker to read van Rooten’s poem to an English speaker and watch what happens. You really should: it’s funny.

Our cultural conventions are buried deep: the very beauty of language is to allow us carry on without having to prove out all assumptions, linguistic architecture, vocabulary, before communicating. To share a language is to pre-agree a set of filters, switches and conventions and heuristics. It is to take certain things as read.

These filters, switches and conventions are “biases”. We need them, so we can put one foot in front of another without holding Newton’s laws of motion, Fowler’s laws of Modern English Usage or Halsbury’s Laws of England in constant contemplation as we go. We want them biases out of the way, running in the background — unconscious — while we get on with whatever we are doing.

An operating condition to sharing meaning is sharing, unstated, unconscious biases.

So, all language is biased. It’s part of its beauty, intractability, ambiguity and humanity. It is bias that sculpts the overwhelming white noise of the universe into meaningful figures; that limits and makes manageable the infinite; that makes the universe coherent.

This not to defend unconscious bias, but to recognise it is inevitable, and to observe there are useful biases and pernicious ones, and to wonder whether the biases targeted by the contemporary fad for unconscious bias training are’t themselves the subject of other kinds of bias — in particular confirmation bias.