How I learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bias

In a little while, I’m going to be giving a couple of lectures to my undergrads on a person with whose views I disagree; indeed, I would count myself as an opponent of the whole tradition from which he comes.  It’s quite a fun lecture to give, because the subject is quite straightforward.  It also lends itself to some fun digressions, and the occasional half-decent joke.  So in that sense, I’m quite looking forward to it.  (In the sense that it’s at 9am, I’m not.  But that’s a different matter.)

But there is a niggling doubt about whether I’ll be doing justice to the topic.  Granted that it’s desirable to be disinterested when giving a lecture, will it be possible to present the arguments in a dispassionate way?  I’m not sure it will; and this generates a problem about whether the lecture will be as disinterested as we’d intuitively want it to be.

Yet one other thing occurs to me: that it might be no bad thing to drop the aspiration to disinterest altogether.  If we do that, the problem vanishes.

The thought goes something like this.  A person who spends time thinking about a topic will, likely as not, come to hold a position.  We’d like to think that that position would be reached by means of a dispassionate examination of the evidence; but that’s unlikely always to be the case, not least because what counts as evidence, and how powerful that evidence is, will depend on the intellectual and theoretical commitments that one has.  At the same time, the sources and arguments being scrutinised may well impact on one’s general commitments over time.  This means that it’s often hard to tell whether one holds the positions one does because the arguments are powerful, or whether the arguments are perceived to be powerful because of the commitments that one has.

Lest we think that this is a problem confined to the humanities, it probably isn’t. 
Any discipline has disputes that are essentially conceptual.  Some statisticians think that Bayesianism is the way to go; others think that it’s fundamentally misguided.  Anyone giving a lecture on statistical methodology is likely to have to take a position on that, consciously or unconsciously, and will present the merits and demerits of each set of claims accordingly.  Ditto biologists arguing about whether evolution proceeds by a series of punctuated equilibria, or is much “smoother”; ditto fundamental physicists arguing about string theory; ditto… oh, you get the picture.  For as long as there’s a debate about concepts, there’s going to be this kind of problem about what amounts to proselytisation.  Neither is it the kind of thing that can be settled by an appeal to evidence, since what counts as evidence is often going to be at the core of the dispute.

This makes a difference to teaching.  In a standard lecture on some topic, a lecturer will present the arguments, for sure; but this will come part-and-parcel with an assessment of their strengths and weaknesses.  That assessment will be coloured by the lecturer’s own sympathies.  For example, if Smith is giving a lecture on – say – Jones’ philosophy of mind, and thinks that Jones and Jonesians are fundamentally wrong, then the way that the arguments will be presented will likely as not be influenced by that.  More, the arguments that Smith thinks it worth mentioning at all will be influenced in the same sort of way.

If this is right, then the idea that teaching is and ought to be neutral is in trouble.  Or, rather, it's at the very best a possibly unattainably lofty ideal.  It looks as though the lectures are going to turn out to be slanted – to be biased.  “Bias” in this sense doesn’t mean positively pushing a particular party line; it means simply that the way that matters are presented will be sympathetic to some positions and unsympathetic to others.  That might strike us as a problem – and might strike the students as such, too.

One possible solution to the problem is to make conscious note that one is going to be arguing from a position, and trying to correct for that.  But there’s a few problems that one would face here.  One is that it’s not always clear what one’s own position is.  Another is that if the bias is unconscious, one might think that one is not biased, and see no need to correct for it.  A third is that, in correcting for one’s biases, one might overcompensate.  (To give a hyperbolic example: a cosmologist may be aware that he’s assuming that the Universe is expanding, and, in a desire to be fair to steady-state theorists, give the impression that their position yields a viable account of reality.)

Maybe, though, we should stop worrying.  It’s tempting to go down a Heideggerian rabbit-hole and say that all truth is biai anyway, but that’s not what I mean.

Rather, what I mean is that since some bias is inevitable, there’s no point trying to deny it.  Moreover, the founding myth of what I do in the classroom is that it’s research-led teaching; but another founding myth is that all students are, once they register, members of the community of scholars.  That is, there’s no fundamental difference between an undergraduate and the professoriate, save one of time and experience – teaching is a matter of nurturing scholarly skills, rather than importing facts.  That being so, a lecture can be seen as having elements of the research paper about it.  (That’s not the whole story, of course; but it’s some of it.)  As such, students should be aware that what they’re being told in a lecture is the jumping-off point for thought, rather than the sum total of it.  If that’s correct, then that the lecture comes from a particular position oughtn’t to be a problem – or, at most, it’s a problem for the students more than it’s a problem with the teacher.

So maybe I should just be upfront with the students, and say something like this:

OK, guys: there’s no getting around the fact that I have no sympathy for this tradition, and that that influences how I approach it in my analysis, which feeds back on to my sympathies, which makes a difference to my teaching.
But tough.  That’s inescapable, and even if it’s a bad thing, you know what's what now.  Surely it's better that you know that I'm coming from somewhere, and can assess the content of the lecture on that basis, than that you assume I'm coming from nowhere, and that there's nothing that needs assessing?

I await the complaints...