[APA Blog] Against Epistemic Arrogance

as luck would have it. We had a mini-discussion about "facts" in another thread, and this essay just popped up.

Against Epistemic Arrogance
June 3, 2019 by Blog Contributor
by Christopher Gregorio

There’s been a whole lot of talk about facts in our public discourse lately. Whether the issue is climate change, poverty, sexism, or racism, we want to know what the facts are. It’s in this context that many of us may have heard the slogan “Facts don’t care about your feelings” tossed around. Popularized by the conservative commentator Ben Shapiro, this phrase expresses a general frustration that people have allowed their intellectual capabilities to be hijacked by their emotions. Shapiro and his followers use it specifically to charge their ideological opponents with being too squeamish to face the cold, hard facts of reality, which indisputably support their position. To undermine an opposing claim, they cite some data points and conclude, “These are facts, and they don’t care about your feelings.”

It would be a mistake to think that this posturing is unique to Shapiro and his supporters. We find this tendency across the political spectrum. In left-leaning circles, for example, it takes the form of charging those with conservative viewpoints with being too “bigoted,” “backward,” or “uneducated” to accept the truth. More generally, a line of thinking taken by people of various political stripes is to say that those who disagree with them have been “indoctrinated” by certain social institutions, such as educational institutions and the media.

This attitude embodies a sort of epistemic arrogance. This is not the same as epistemic confidence. There is nothing epistemically arrogant about thinking that some of us are in better positions to know certain things than others in the same way that it is not arrogant to think that some of us are better cooks than others. Similarly, there is nothing arrogant about a high schooler thinking that she is in a generally better position to know the correct spelling of words than most kindergarteners are.

Epistemic arrogance happens when confidence in one’s knowledge and ability to know becomes excessive. For example, just as my confidence in cooking skills becomes arrogance if it goes beyond what my cooking skills actually are, confidence in my knowledge and ability to know can become arrogance if it isn’t proportionate to my actual knowledge and ability to know. Additionally, confidence in my knowledge becomes arrogance if it leads me to think of myself as a better knower in comparison to other knowers than I actually am.

Those who adopt the “facts don’t care about your feelings” slogan are epistemically arrogant in two main ways. First of all, they take for granted that they are in a privileged position to know what the facts are and what they entail. Second, they tend to unfairly dismiss those who disagree with them as being in a worse position as a knower than they may actually be.

To the first point, judgments of fact are never completely independent of our emotions, interests, and values. These play a fundamental role in our coming to believe that we know something— especially in the case of complex, ethically bound social issues such as racism and sexism. Our interests shape what questions we want to investigate in the first place, as well as what kind of facts we’re after. We are more likely to pursue lines of inquiry about topics that interest us than about ones that don’t.

Second, our interests influence whether we find that a certain fact or set of facts supports or undermines a certain position. This tendency is more pronounced for issues that we have strong convictions about. For example, we are much more hesitant to believe that a certain set of facts supports a conclusion that we strongly disagree with than one that we already strongly agree with. This is especially the case with large-scale, complex, ethically bound social issues like sexism and racism. We can agree with others about what the facts are while still disagreeing with them about what general conclusion we should draw from those facts. In such cases, we aren’t warranted in simply dismissing those who disagree with us as having their ability to know compromised. This would be epistemically arrogant because it not only takes for granted that our position is a correct one, but also that our position is one that that no reasonable knower would disagree with.

We can still be epistemically arrogant even if we are aware of the limits of our knowledge and ability to know. For example, I can be proud of my awareness of my limits as a knower to the point that I think of myself as being much more enlightened than everyone else. This could lead me to dismiss people who disagree with me as being far worse knowers than I am. While I might be hesitant to say that my position on a particular issue is the only correct one, I might still think that it is the only one that any knower would hold if she were reasonable.

Epistemic arrogance has a number of harmful consequences for our civil discourse. First, it can lead to intellectual laziness. Instead of addressing the facts and arguments offered in support of opposing viewpoints, the epistemically arrogant person dismisses them as the products of excessive emotionalism, bigotry, indoctrination, or some other bias. Second, it leads to intellectual dishonesty in our discourse. If we are epistemically arrogant, we take for granted that our position is correct or far more likely to be true. This can lead us to become even more entrenched in our position even when faced with conflicting evidence. With this mindset, we will be eager to dismiss this evidence rather than to take it into account and engage the arguments it supposedly supports. Third, epistemic arrogance can turn potentially fruitful dialogue on divisive issues into rhetorical boxing matches in which disputants attempt to display their moral or intellectual superiority over one another. These exchanges can be entertaining, but they rarely result in any progress on the issue at hand.

Instead of being epistemically arrogant, we should seek to become epistemically humble—that is, we should seek to become humble knowers. This requires having a proper awareness of one’s knowledge and of one’s abilities as a knower. We need to acknowledge that our interests play an important role in our search for knowledge, and that we are subject to the same sorts of influences that others are. Epistemic humility is a kind of disposition by which we see those who disagree with us—even about those issues that we have strong convictions about—in a much more fair and charitable light. While there is still room here to suspect that some people’s ability to know may have been unduly influenced, an epistemically humble person does not take the extra step of dismissing these positions outright. In this respect, it is a much better alternative to epistemic arrogance in enabling fruitful dialogue and debate over complex, divisive issues.

Christopher Gregorio graduated from Marquette University in May 2019 with a BA in philosophy.

Editor’s note: This article received honorable mention in the APA Blog’s first Public Philosophy Award for Undergraduates contest.
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https://blog.apaonline.org/2019/06/...XJoq1YKOvLZixZDNfFwSVt7VfxYd2quIXNWPj06KwUBCM

 

as luck would have it, a newly reposted essay on "Epistemic Learned Helplessness." An excerpt:

A friend recently complained about how many people lack the basic skill of believing arguments. That is, if you have a valid argument for something, then you should accept the conclusion. Even if the conclusion is unpopular, or inconvenient, or you don’t like it. He envisioned an art of rationality that would make people believe something after it had been proven to them.

And I nodded my head, because it sounded reasonable enough, and it wasn’t until a few hours later that I thought about it again and went “Wait, no, that would be a terrible idea.”

I don’t think I’m overselling myself too much to expect that I could argue circles around the average uneducated person. Like I mean that on most topics, I could demolish their position and make them look like an idiot. Reduce them to some form of “Look, everything you say fits together and I can’t explain why you’re wrong, I just know you are!” Or, more plausibly, “Shut up I don’t want to talk about this!”

And there are people who can argue circles around me. Maybe not on every topic, but on topics where they are experts and have spent their whole lives honing their arguments. When I was young I used to read pseudohistory books; Immanuel Velikovsky’s Ages in Chaos is a good example of the best this genre has to offer. I read it and it seemed so obviously correct, so perfect, that I could barely bring myself to bother to search out rebuttals.

And then I read the rebuttals, and they were so obviously correct, so devastating, that I couldn’t believe I had ever been so dumb as to believe Velikovsky.

And then I read the rebuttals to the rebuttals, and they were so obviously correct that I felt silly for ever doubting.

And so on for several more iterations, until the labyrinth of doubt seemed inescapable. What finally broke me out wasn’t so much the lucidity of the consensus view so much as starting to sample different crackpots. Some were almost as bright and rhetorically gifted as Velikovsky, all presented insurmountable evidence for their theories, and all had mutually exclusive ideas. After all, Noah’s Flood couldn’t have been a cultural memory both of the fall of Atlantis and of a change in the Earth’s orbit, let alone of a lost Ice Age civilization or of megatsunamis from a meteor strike. So given that at least some of those arguments are wrong and all seemed practically proven, I am obviously just gullible in the field of ancient history. Given a total lack of independent intellectual steering power and no desire to spend thirty years building an independent knowledge base of Near Eastern history, I choose to just accept the ideas of the prestigious people with professorships in Archaeology, rather than those of the universally reviled crackpots who write books about Venus being a comet.

You could consider this a form of epistemic learned helplessness, where I know any attempt to evaluate the arguments is just going to be a bad idea so I don’t even try. If you have a good argument that the Early Bronze Age worked completely differently from the way mainstream historians believe, I just don’t want to hear about it. If you insist on telling me anyway, I will nod, say that your argument makes complete sense, and then totally refuse to change my mind or admit even the slightest possibility that you might be right.

(This is the correct Bayesian action: if I know that a false argument sounds just as convincing as a true argument, argument convincingness provides no evidence either way. I should ignore it and stick with my prior.)
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more at the link:
https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/06/03/repost-epistemic-learned-helplessness/