Abstract
Vice essentialism is the view that epistemic vices have robustly negative effects on our epistemic projects. Essentialists believe that the manifestation of epistemic vices can explain many of our epistemic failures, but few, if any, of our epistemic successes. The purpose of this paper is to argue that vice essentialism is false. In §1, I review the case that some epistemic vices, such as closed-mindedness and extreme epistemic deference, have considerably beneficial effects when manifested in collectivist contexts. In §2, I add that there are putative epistemic vices whose repeated manifestation leads to significant epistemic achievements over time. Epistemic recklessness is one such unstable vice. Though Sosa argues that epistemically reckless judgements cannot constitute knowing full well, the repeated manifestation of epistemic recklessness is essential to our becoming fully well knowledgeable in the long run. Without making incompetent judgements in environments that offer unambiguous, actionable feedback, we could not develop the intuitive and reflective competences and meta-competences required for knowing full well.
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Notes
Morton uses the term ‘paradoxical virtues’ to refer to putative epistemic vices that serve this transcendental function (2012, 59–60). I use the term ‘unstable vices’ instead, partly because there are many contexts in which their manifestations are epistemically harmful and criticisable. In addition, I am not interested in the purely terminological question of what should count as epistemic virtues and vices. Rather, my aim is to show that cognitive dispositions can be epistemically harmful and criticisable without being “…bad for us in just about any context in which we are likely to find ourselves”. Indeed, there are ordinary circumstances in which they can have enormously beneficial effects. This is what makes them unstable.
For an interactionist treatment of the epistemic vices responsible for cognitive biases, see (Bland 2020) and (Bland forthcoming).
Summativism is the opposing view that collective epistemic behaviour is reducible to the behaviour of individuals. Collectivists attack this position with divergence arguments, i.e., arguments that seek to show that individual and collective behaviour can systematically diverge. Lahroodi (2019) surveys a number of these arguments. Section 1.1 and 1.2 present two further divergence arguments.
For a similar discussion, including a reference to Bernard Mandeville, see (Morton 2014).
See, for example, Kuhn 1977; Kitcher 1990; Popper 2002 [1996]; Strevens 2003; and Zollman 2010.
Battaly distinguishes dogmatism from closed-mindedness more generally, which she characterizes as “…an unwillingness or inability to engage (seriously) with relevant intellectual options” (Battaly 2018, 262). In this section, I focus on dogmatic closed-mindedness specifically.
Mercier and Sperber use ‘confirmation bias’ and ‘myside bias’ interchangeably, though they recognize the terms actually denote distinct phenomena (Mercier & Sperber 2017, 218).
More specifically, for an account of the positive role that myside bias played in the development and defence of the theory of continental drift, see (Solomon 1992).
On the advantages of deference with respect to these problems, see also (Goldstein et al. 2001).
Of course, there may have been practical reasons why this epistemic risk was worth taking, such as: the decision-making time-frame, the acquisition costs of intelligence from other sources, etc.
The well known estimate of 10,000 hours comes from Ericsson et al. (1993). While this number is controversial, researchers agree that the mastery of a skill, and even a basic level of competence, requires sustained deliberate practice.
This is true only in environments that provide unambiguous feedback about the accuracy of our judgements. In other environments, epistemic loss aversion compels us to interpret our judgements as being accurate, even when they’re not, which gives rise to the illusion of skill.
Note that because resolution is a component of the Brier score, participants are encouraged to take epistemic risks.
By contrast, Gigerenzer identifies medicine as a negative error culture where costly errors are denied and covered up as a result of hierarchical power structures and perverse incentives (Gigerenzer 2014, 54). This largely accounts for the fact that preventable medical errors are one of the leading causes of death in the United States (Makary & Daniel 2016).
I am grateful to Mark Alfano, Jon Marsh, and three anonymous referees for their helpful comments on earlier drafts of this paper.
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Bland, S. In defence of epistemic vices. Synthese 200, 59 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-022-03572-7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-022-03572-7