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Debunking creedal beliefs

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Abstract

Following Anthony Downs’s classic economic analysis of democracy, it has been widely noted that most voters lack the incentive to be well-informed. Recent empirical work, however, suggests further that political partisans can display selectively lazy or biased reasoning. Unfortunately, political knowledge seems to exacerbate, rather than mitigate, these tendencies. In this paper, I build on these observations to construct a more general skeptical challenge which affects what I call creedal beliefs. Such beliefs share three features: (i) the costs to the individual of being wrong are negligible, (ii) the beliefs are subject to social scrutiny, and (iii) the evidential landscape relevant to the beliefs is sufficiently complex so as to make easy verification difficult. Some philosophers and social scientists have recently argued that under such conditions, beliefs are likely to play a signaling, as opposed to a navigational role, and that our ability to hold beliefs in this way is adaptive. However, if this is right, I argue there is at least a partial debunker for such beliefs. Moreover, this offers, I suggest, one way to develop the skeptical challenge based on etiological explanation that John Stuart Mill presents in On Liberty when he claims that the same causes which lead someone to be a devout Christian in London would have made them a Confucian in Peking. Finally, I contend that this skeptical challenge is appropriately circumscribed so that it does not over-extend in an implausible way.

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Notes

  1. For a description of this case and its epistemic import, see for instance Elga (2013) and Schoenfield (2018). For an extended discussion of how epistemic principles might provide useful guidance and how we might use heuristics such as the one proposed in this paper, see Ballantyne (2019), particularly Chapters 3 and 4.

  2. For more recent discussions of this idea, see for example: Achen and Bartels (2017), Brennan (2016), Caplan (2008), and Somin (2013).

  3. For a recent discussion and defense of the general phenomenon of motivated ignorance, see Williams (2021a). Relatedly, standpoint epistemologists and critical theorists have argued that members of dominant social groups are willfully ignorant of certain features of their position even where such information is easily available. For a classic discussion of this idea, see Mills (2007), and more recently, Kinney and Bright (2021) and Woomer (2017).

  4. For more on this distinction between instrumental and epistemic rationality, see Kelly (2003). See also Feldman (2000).

  5. For further discussion on how such biased evidence gathering and processing mechanisms can operate in the political case, see Huemer (2016).

  6. Of course, this distinction is a rough one, and there are bound to be cases that are vague. Furthermore, it’s plausible that because of the different kinds of media and internet content that partisans consume, they are likely to be ignorant of basic and easily verifiable facts that might serve to challenge their worldviews—for example, facts about the prevalence of abortion, the relative amounts of defense versus social welfare spending, etc., depending on the case. However, it seems to me that even on such points, disagreement is typically unlikely to persist once the relevant facts are interpersonally verified. Yet such claims usually function as rationalizations for more complex political claims that are more central to partisan ideology. A committed partisan, even when he is made aware of and acknowledges a piece of conflicting evidence might nonetheless move to other bits of (putative) evidence that he sees as supporting his position.

  7. This premise is in part supported by the extensive literature within social psychology and political science, discussed above. The sorts of evidence-processing tendencies documented in Kahan et al. (2017), for instance, are plausibly not robustly truth-tracking. Moreover, insofar as we have the disposition to form socially adaptive beliefs—i.e. adopt the beliefs of the groups important to our success, on creedal issues—such beliefs are not plausibly products of truth-tracking processes either. What causally matters in these cases is where the social incentives lie, not where the truth lies. The argument of this paper thus has a structure similar to more familiar debunking arguments within philosophy. Analogously, for example, evolutionary debunking arguments against moral realism rely on the premise that the selection processes which causally explain our having the evaluative tendencies that we do are not truth-tracking, if robust moral realism is true (Joyce 2016; Kahane 2011; Street 2006). For a helpful recent overview of the extensive literature on debunking arguments in a variety of domains besides morality, see Korman (2019).

  8. Relatedly, some recent work finds that cognitive rigidity in general is a good predictor of ideological extremism (Zmigrod et al., 2019). For a recent discussion of the lengths to which various factions went in the twentieth century to enforce ideological conformity, see Cherniss (2021).

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Acknowledgements

I would like to thank the two anonymous reviewers at Synthese for extremely helpful comments on this paper. Thanks also to Michael Hannon, Max Hayward, Yoaav Isaacs, Brandon Warmke, and participants at the Truth and Politics workshop in Bamberg, Germany, for feedback on earlier versions.

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  1. Bowling Green State University, 306 Shatzel Hall, Bowling Green, OH, 43403, USA

    Hrishikesh Joshi

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Joshi, H. Debunking creedal beliefs. Synthese 200, 514 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-022-03991-6

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