Unconscious bias: Difference between revisions

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 S’étonne aux Halles; <br>
 Un petit d’un petit <br>
-Ah! degrés te fallent.
+Ah! degrés te fallent. <br>
 Indolent qui ne sort cesse <br>
 Indolent qui ne se mène <br>
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 Tout gai de Reguennes.
 :—Luis d’Antin van Rooten, ''Mots D’Heures: Gousses, Rames'', (1967)}}
+{{quote|{{rorty on truth}}}}
-To utter a sentence is to prefer one model of the world; one “[[narrative]]” over the infinity of alternatives one could construct. To ''construe'' one is to do likewise: the success of the ''communication'' such an utterance and construal represents depends on how far the speaker’s and listener’s respective narratives coincide — how far they share the cultural conventions on which the language is founded. To understand a language is to understand the cultural conventions which it represents.
+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.
+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]].