Prejudices are not like hinges

Abstract In a recent essay, Anna Boncompagni (2024) argues that prejudices are hinges that play a normative role of evidential significance. This is meant to account for why prejudices are resistant to counterevidence and difficult to overcome, while clarifying their epistemic role in undermining testimonial justification. I argue that prejudices are not like hinges and motivate my own view of the epistemic role of prejudices. In §2, I discuss the view that prejudices comprise generic generalizations and illustrate two key features of prejudices: resistance to counterevidence and accommodation of counterevidence. In §3, I reiterate two virtues of the hinge account but then show that it suffers from explanatory redundancy. To explain why prejudices are resistant to counterevidence, either we accept that prejudices play a hinge-like normative role of evidential significance, or we appeal to the generic content of prejudices. To avoid explanatory redundancy and account for evidential accommodation, I argue that we should reject the thesis that prejudices play a normative role of evidential significance. In §4, I present my view that prejudices (as generic generalizations) are misleading evidence about properties of the relevant target group, while defending it against some objections. In §5, I present a distinct argument about the rational evaluability and epistemic criticizability of prejudices, to show that local de facto hinges and prejudices differ epistemically. The essay ends with some suggestions for applying the hinge framework to social phenomena.