22 February 2010

The Representation of Stereotypes

Adam Kotsko has an interesting post up at An und für sich about what stereotypes "are". Kotsko argues that we run into difficulties if we try to treat beliefs about stereotypes as being "in the head", and so we should instead treat them as being in the environmental conditions which give rise to their instances (or something along those lines -- his post is clearer than my one-sentence summary of it). I think that this moves a bit fast; a more "traditional" way of accounting for racist beliefs seems to me to work perfectly well: they are (often unconscious) beliefs about what blacks or asians (etc.) are like, and are not different qua belief from beliefs about whether milk builds strong bones or dogs return to their own vomit.

"Indeed, when pressed even people who seem to be hardened racists will most often admit that of course not all black people are like that, etc. — calling into question whether racists, as stereotype-believers par excellence, really “believe” in stereotypes in some straightforward way."

Here I think the problem isn't with the idea that racists believe racist things, but with how those racist contents are conceived. I think this is best handled by treating statements about stereotypical Xs as what Michael Thompson calls "Aristotelian Categoricals" in "The Representation of Life". (Paper available at his webspace.)

Aristotelian Categoricals are not universally quantified statements ("If anything is an X, then it is like this"), so the fact that any given racist will admit that not all Xs ɸ (for some given class X and some stereotypical behavior ɸ) does not mean that the racist doesn't really believe the stereotypical claim "Xs ɸ" is true. They don't even have to believe that (as a statistical matter) if you took a pole of all currently existing Xs, it would turn out that a majority of them ɸ. They just have to believe that the Xs which ɸ are more typical of Xs generally (albeit maybe not at the moment), or are more authentically X-ish, or something like that. The stereotype has normative force for how (stereotypically) black a given racist thinks a given black person is.

Aristotelian Categoricals strike me as very useful for thinking about this sort of thing. Nothing else seems to get the logical contours of the stereotype-claims quite right, as Thompson argues in the parallel case of claims like "Bobcats mate for life". Some bobcats never mate, or are impotent etc., but that doesn't contradict the Aristotelian Categorical claim (think of it as something you hear in a National Geographic documentary). Healthy bobcats in bobcat-friendly environments mate for life. (Thompson has further arguments for why we can't treat this as a disguised universally quantified statement about "healthy bobcats in bobcat-friendly environments", namely that making sense of things like "health" and "bobcat-friendliness" is dependent on making sense of the Aristotelian Categoricals, and not vice-versa.)

I also don't think that the fact that stereotypes can be incoherent (Kotsko's example being that Mexicans are lazy and yet desperate to work) is problematic; it just shows that racists have weird beliefs about Mexicans. They think that both sloth and being a hard worker make one a "really Mexican" Mexican. There's not even an incoherence in this example, if you treat the beliefs as Aristotelian categoricals rather than universally quantified statements. The two extremes could both be typical of Mexicans, whereas the middle-ground would not be. There's no commitment on the part of the racists to thinking that there are some Mexicans who are both lazy and desperate to work. (Compare to "Pecans grow into pecan trees" and "Pecans are baked into pecan pies", and contrast to "Pecans grow into pecan trees" and "Pecans grow into rose bushes").

Given this, I don't see any problem with treating stereotypical beliefs as being "in the head" (which of course doesn't conflict with their showing themselves in our practices, or with being unconscious some of the time; those are both normal for things "in the head" -- the outer is inner as inner, as Hegel said).

"[This] points toward the idea that black people just naturally enjoy cheaper food (not beef, but chicken; not fruit juice, but Kool-Aid) and therefore that the dominance of fast food outlets and convenience stores (rather than good restaurants and grocery stores) in black neighborhoods simply reflects the way black people are and is therefore “okay” — and so you don’t see the mayor of Chicago trying to get more grocery stores into black neighborhoods, for instance."

This strikes me as a paradigm case of unconscious stereotypical beliefs at work. The mayor of Chicago would surely deny that black people liked cheap food as such, if you asked him; he does not consciously believe that. But he probably does (at least unconsciously) believe that black people are poorer than non-blacks. And he probably believes (likely consciously) that poor people have less money to spend on food, and so prefer purchasing cheaper food. So it seems appropriate to the mayor that black neighborhoods mostly have cheap places to buy food, since black[/poor] people prefer shopping at those sorts of places. So it's easy to explain the mayor's behavior as issuing from a combination of conscious and unconscious beliefs on his part; there's no need to posit beliefs in city blocks or anything like that. Surely the fact that many black people are poor helps to reinforce the unconscious belief, but the belief isn't anywhere special.

7 comments:

Ben W said...

"pecans are baked into pecan pies" is not an aristotelian categorical descriptive of the life form of pecan trees, though; it's a broader generic statement along the lines of "bricks are baked in kilns". It involves human purposes in a way that "pecans grow into pecan trees" doesn't (or isn't taken to); it's not just about pecans.

Of course, it's not as if the racist about Mexicans thinks that Mexicans have a different species from people.

By Thompson, "The S is F" and "The S is G" imply "The S is F and G", so you'd better not have "lazy" and "desperate to work" as both being aristotelian categoricals. Not, of course, because you would then be committed to the existence of a particular lazy-yet-desperate-for-work Mexican, but because your very idea of Mexican-ness threatens not to make much sense.

Daniel Lindquist said...

I may be stretching Thompson a bit; I think the "logical form" of Aristotelian Categoricals applies beyond the life-form stuff he applies it to. "Pecans are baked into pies" strikes me as a fine thing to say about pecans the foodstuff, for instance. (I'm not sure quite what Thompson would think of extending his "logical" analysis to different cases like this; I don't remember if it comes up in "The Representation of Life." The "Science of Logic" reference makes me think he'd be open to extending the analysis (since Hegel does just that), but Foot wants to treat ethics as just being about the human life-form, and Thompson doesn't seem to have much critical to say about Footianism, so perhaps Thompson is an anti-Hegelian here.)

Of course, quite a lot of racists *do* think that their racial categories equate to species-distinctions, so even if Thompson's "Aristotelian Categoricals" only apply to life-forms, I think this is still a promising way of capturing the racists' thought-patterns.

"By Thompson, "The S is F" and "The S is G" imply "The S is F and G", so you'd better not have "lazy" and "desperate to work" as both being aristotelian categoricals. Not, of course, because you would then be committed to the existence of a particular lazy-yet-desperate-for-work Mexican, but because your very idea of Mexican-ness threatens not to make much sense."

This actually seems okay to me. It could just mean that the racist believes Mexicans shift between one extreme and the other, like I said in the post. Mexicans then come off being thought of as bipolar, roughly.

Or the racists could just have an incoherent conception of what Mexicans are like; this also seems plausible to me. The racist believes some things about Mexicans which he would be unable to continue believing if he was really clear on what all he thought about Mexicans. Reflection destroying racist "knowledge" seems unobjectionable. (He could also have the incoherent beliefs less than fully consciously, in which case the principle of charity case against him gets even weaker; incoherence among beliefs is one of the things motivating a belief in unconscious states in the first place.)

J said...
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J said...

There's not even an incoherence in this example, if you treat the beliefs as Aristotelian categoricals rather than universally quantified statements.

That would be part of the the extension of the term "mexican" (at least from Kotzko's superficial schema)--the class of all possible attributes denoted by "mexican". Not really an essencia--are all possible/ostensive extensions like essences? Nyet.

And how many people have this view? (ie most likely, usual AK straw man). Which is correct? You want to rewrite the dictionary ("Mexican":n. a lazy or slothful person from area south of US, usually desperate for work).

You like most of the babyosophers around (benji!) sound like an ordinary language dude, nearly S-dan

Tony said...

Hi Daniel, how is your grad application? I have been reading your blog for a while, and I really hope you could get a decent admission. I share similar interests with you, and I applied for the entry of fall 2010 as well. Got in Irvine, UCL, Warwick, waitlisted by CUNY and Indiana. Hope to meet you someday in the U.S. or U.K.!

Daniel Lindquist said...

Congratulations on all three of those. I only got accepted at the University of Miami, out of the 15 I applied to. I did at least get a pretty generous funding offer there. I visit Miami next week.

I am also waitlisted at Indiana, as it happens. Also waitlisted at the University of Illinois at Chicago and the University of Wisconsin at Madison. (I'm curious how long Indiana's waitlist is, now; I now know three names on it.) Hoping at least one of those leads to an offer being made; even if I do end up going to Miami, I would prefer to have had a choice in the matter.

J said...
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