Comments on Kelly: Against Positing a Non-Pejorative Sense of ‘Bias’

Abstract

In Bias: A Philosophical Study, Thomas Kelly posits a distinction between two senses of the word ‘bias’, one pejorative, the other non-pejorative, and he puts this distinction to work in two crucial portions of the book: first, when he defends his central account of the nature of bias against would-be counterexamples; and, second, when he develops a new way of replying to external-world skepticism which hinges on conceding to the skeptic that we are biased against skeptical hypotheses. It is argued here that in neither of these places does Kelly’s distinction succeed in doing the work he needs is to do, and more generally that we should be suspicious of the very idea that ‘bias’ has a non-pejorative sense.