ThinkBlog

Project Implicit at Harvard University: under the “Demonstration,” you’ll find tests that challenge your assumptions that you are really as impartial an observer as you’d like to think.

The Enlightenment’s prejudice against prejudice (cf., Gadamer) means that we all would like to think that we could become the perfectly rational, completely objective individuals that weigh only the evidence and that we would be impervious to pathos. Take the tests. See what happens. (These are particularly useful for people who take scientific pursuit so seriously that they fail to see the underlying assumptions of it: if these tests reveal to you that you’re biased when you believe you’re not, either you are wrong, or their method is.)

Challenging assumptions is one of the foremost pleasures of “doing” philosophy. It takes gentility and grace (often more than I have) along with firmness and reason to really get a person to understand that what they’ve taken for granted for twenty—thirty—even seventy years is written in stone absolutely nowhere, but has become a safe, comfortable mental arena for the testing of other ideas. Without these challenges to assumptions, ignorance is allowed to settle like acid and cut deep channels in the limestone of the mind; sometimes so deep that people are thoroughly unable to change apart from divine intervention. Take, for instance, the racism of the son of a deep-south farmer who has never had the pleasure of an African-American’s company. It might take the friendship of that guy in his platoon taking a bullet for him to change his mind. Or the legalist who believes that sin lies in external things: it might take an enormously selfless act of sacrifice on the part of the free Christian for the legalist to believe that the Bible has nothing to do with Dos and Don’ts. Hopefully it won’t take you and me that much to face the biases in our own lives.

Project Implicit at Harvard University: under the “Demonstration,” you’ll find tests that challenge your assumptions that you are really as impartial an observer as you’d like to think.

The Enlightenment’s prejudice against prejudice (cf., Gadamer) means that we all would like to think that we could become the perfectly rational, completely objective individuals that weigh only the evidence and that we would be impervious to pathos. Take the tests. See what happens. (These are particularly useful for people who take scientific pursuit so seriously that they fail to see the underlying assumptions of it: if these tests reveal to you that you’re biased when you believe you’re not, either you are wrong, or their method is.)

Challenging assumptions is one of the foremost pleasures of “doing” philosophy. It takes gentility and grace (often more than I have) along with firmness and reason to really get a person to understand that what they’ve taken for granted for twenty—thirty—even seventy years is written in stone absolutely nowhere, but has become a safe, comfortable mental arena for the testing of other ideas. Without these challenges to assumptions, ignorance is allowed to settle like acid and cut deep channels in the limestone of the mind; sometimes so deep that people are thoroughly unable to change apart from divine intervention. Take, for instance, the racism of the son of a deep-south farmer who has never had the pleasure of an African-American’s company. It might take the friendship of that guy in his platoon taking a bullet for him to change his mind. Or the legalist who believes that sin lies in external things: it might take an enormously selfless act of sacrifice on the part of the free Christian for the legalist to believe that the Bible has nothing to do with Dos and Don’ts. Hopefully it won’t take you and me that much to face the biases in our own lives.