Prejudice and the Unfinished Task

If only we could all meet over dinner! The problem with peer commentary-excellent and sobering as it is-is the lack of immediate feedback, the inability to put to rest at once the misgivings or the misreadings, the long delay between comment and response. Perhaps computer networking will someday substitute for commensal conversation: It will be almost as fast, but not nearly as much fun. But let me start by observing that as a relative outsider to the world of social psychology (although I did study it in the old Social Relations Department at Harvard in the late 1950s), I was delighted to meet all these (mostly new) colleagues and to acknowledge my delight in their incisive but fair criticism, tolerance of eccenticity, and general good humor. I think the content of my stereotype of social psychologists has been changed for the better by this encounter. (I won't elaborate on what that content was; I think they can probably guess.) One problem is, however, raised by the very fact that the respondents are-all but one-social psychologists. Naturally they tend to deal with what they know best; but this leaves three quarters of the paper uncommented on, except obliquely or briefly. Thus, practically everyone has a go at the Kahneman and Tversky base-rate versus individuation issue, but no one tackles the equally important part on Strawson's moral philosophy, and only Masters, himself a political philosopher, treats at all with Hume-with what I consider the central part of the argument. And even though I thought it was quite an important part of my demonstration, no one tackled my one empirical example of Charles Lamb-except again very obliquely. Thus, we have a somewhat lopsided set of comments here that do not, I think, come to grips with the totality of the paper. I gather philosophers were invited but did not respond (except for Masters). Given the way the academic game is played (no payoff for them in contributing to a psychology journal), this is understandable, if a little depressing; but it is also a pity because I could have ditched the whole Kahneman and Tversky example (or substituted another) without any great loss to the argument. But Hume, Strawson, and Lamb I feel I need. I don't need Star Trek either. Obviously this was popped in there because the article began as a lecture to a general university audience and I wanted some point of contact with people-particularly students-who might not be in the behavioral sciences or philosophy at all. But equally obviously, this example touched a nerve, both at the lecture and with some of the commentators. This is in itself very interesting as a phenomenon, and confirms this Trekker's (not Trekkie's, please) belief in the power of the Star Trek paradigm (or whatever). So for the present I just have to deal with the truncated commentary and do my best with it, while perhaps reminding the contributors, from time to time, that I am not so much concerned with the social psychology of stereotyping as with the more general philosophical/psychological issue: What happens when we think, and why does it happen the way it does? (I like this formulation better than How does the mind work? which perhaps begs too many questions.) This in turn leads to the question: What does this tell us about the nature of human reasoning? This question intrigues me because reason (usually equated with logical reasoning) is so often cited as the crucial feature distinguishing us from the beasts; We are, after all, Homo sapiens sapiens. Here once again, Hume's skepticism sets the agenda for the modern way into that question. The issues of stereotyping/ categorizing are themselves ways into Hume's question, and Kahneman and Tversky offered a way into these issues. I chose Kahneman and Tversky deliberately because of their bemoaning of the parlous state of human reasoning, and therefore their implicit acceptance of an ideal of reasoning that equated it with the perfectly logical-the finishedmind: the Spock syndrome, if you like. This was really a way to draw psychologists into the fundamental problem as stated by Hume, and elaborated on by Strawson, and ultimately into my notion that Hume had in fact proposed the correct solution to his problem without realizing it. In that solution lay the answer to those basic questions about thought and reason: the Darwinian answer, the adaptational answer, or however you want to phrase it (except as the sociobiological answer: more on this later). Since the idea of stereotyping is inextricably linked to that of prejudice, I felt obliged to try to make the link as I saw it. The first version of the essay in fact did not do this and stuck to the philosophical issues as such. Its title was Reason and the Unfinished Mind or something such; it is long since erased. But when it came to be rewritten as a public lecture, Felix Browder suggested that I expand it to cover the prejudice issue, and so I dug up Charles Lamb, Paul Robeson, Berrnhard Goetz, Rudyard Kipling, and a few other things to try to help make the link. I obviously disturbed a hornet's nest in the process. I fear that, like the unhappy Queen Gertrude, the author doth protest too much. But I thought this little explanation might help to clear the decks concerning my intentions in the