We learn socially, so that most of our beliefs come from other people.
This makes the problem of choosing which people to trust the central problem in epistemology.
What Eric Weinstein calls our “sense-making apparatus” can be thought of as a set of prestige hierarchies, at the top of which are the people who are most widely trusted.
Our prestige hierarchies are based largely on credentials: professor at Harvard; writer for the New York Times; public health official.
The incentive systems and selection mechanisms in the credential-based hierarchies have become corrupted over time, allowing people to rise to the top who lack wisdom and intellectual rigor.
I proceeded to expand on these sentences.
In his book The Social Leap, the evolutionary psychologist William von Hippel writes, “a substantial reason we evolved such large brains is to navigate our social world… A great deal of the value that exists in the social world is created by consensus rather than discovered in an objective sense… our cognitive machinery evolved to be only partially constrained by objective reality.” Our social brains process information not only by examining the facts, but also considering the social consequences of what happens to our reputations if we believe something.
Later on,
In her recent book Cognitive Gadgets, the Oxford psychologist Cecilia Hayes writes, “children show prestige bias; they are more likely to copy a model that adults regard as being higher social status- for example, their head-teacher rather than an equally familiar person of the same age and gender.” Hayes cites a 2013 study by Nicola McGuigan who found that five-year-old children are “selective copiers.” Results showed that kids were more likely to imitate their head-teacher rather than an equally familiar person of the same age and gender. Young children are more likely to imitate a person that adults regard as being higher status.
and later,
researchers Ángel V. Jiménez and Alex Mesoudi wrote that assessing competence directly “may be noisy and costly. Instead, social learners can use short-cuts either by making inferences from the appearance, personality, material possessions, etc. of the models.”
In my view, these observations/findings make the philosopher’s approach to epistemology seem wrong-footed. The philosopher wants to ask when I should believe my senses. I want to ask when I should believe Jack, especially when he disagrees with Jill. Or Fauci when he disagrees with Mowshowitz.
I pay attention to social learning because of my reading of Henrich and Laland. This predisposition is reinforced by what I found in the Henderson piece. I had an exchange with Michael Huemer on this after this post. I still think that philosophers ought to pay more attention to the issue of how one decides who is trustworthy.
If you insist on going on about this could you please descend from the level of empty generalities? “[P]hilosophers ought to pay more attention” is too vacuous. The bibliography for “Social Epistemology” at the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy is pretty extensive. Assuming you have familiarized yourself with “the literature” in the course of concluding that philosophers haven’t thought enough about this, could you be more specific about what exactly is wanting in which proposed answers to which questions and what answers you propose instead? I hope your own proposals don’t rely too heavily on foot-stamping insistence that you are “darned sure” something is true, as if this assertion would enlighten your readers.
That’s right*. Nevertheless, I don’t think that’s quite what Arnold is getting at, though I hope he’ll clarify himself.
I’m guessing what Arnold is getting at is that philosophers should pay more attention to the latest insights from social-psychology on the particular mechanisms by which the process occurs and their strength, and especially to the implications if one assumes the ‘individualization’ of such socially-acquired knowledge is an intractable problem. Thus, dealing with the tough issues of this channel of knowledge (what he calls ‘reconciliation’) should more properly be seen as *the* central remaining challenge of epistemology.
The term I use to describe the problem is “epistemological security” (ES).
My view is that we are living in a culture-wide ES crisis, a “Social Failure Mode” which is causing a kind of national nervous breakdown which, because of the influence of the nation involved, spills over into a global nervous breakdown.
Security more generally, or infosec / cybersecurity in particular, is full of words orbiting around the question of trustworthiness: “chain of trust”, “vouching”, “assurance”, “verification”, “integrity”, “credibility” (as in ‘credentials’), “confidence” (as in confidentiality), “authority” (as in “certificate authority”), etc.
I think the analogy between epistemology as a social process and decentralized networked communications runs incredibly deep and, my guess is, at the abstract level the central ‘security problem’ facing both “information transmission in a communication network” and “knowledge transmission in a social network” is the same kind of problem.
It’s worth noticing that in the digital realm the solution to the problem of trust has proven to be, if not demonstrably ‘intractable’, then at least extremely elusive despite enormous amounts of time, money, and brainpower thrown at it, with every attempt suffering from a number of failure modes, vulnerabilities, and “attack surfaces”, even when literally billions of dollars and critical matters of national security are at stake.
Indeed, we should consider the implications of the major recent innovation in this realm being of the manner of a ‘capitulation’ into ‘trust-less’ / ‘zero-trust’ systems like the distributed ledger, maintained at truly enormous costs in computation, hassle, energy, and speed.
Where I work, the efforts to pile on many layers of security has resulted in basic functions being slowed down by an order of magnitude, and indeed, executed even slower than comparable functions two decades ago, because greater than 95% of the work is going into this “security overhead”, which, at any rate, was still severely penetrated as recently as a few months ago.
Big organizations (or widespread coordinations around the voluntary adoption of costly secure conventions as protocols for interaction) can afford to take that hit. But individuals deciding what to believe by the proxy of who they believe can’t afford that level of “radical skepticism”, and so are forced to rely, inescapably, on certain irreducible amounts of prejudice and preconceived notions.
*Philosophers and legal thinkers have pondered these and related questions involving assessing the trustworthiness and reliability of socially communicated claims of testimony, evidence, and expert authority since antiquity.
Critias and his cousin Charmides (Plato’s uncle) discussed the matter with Socrates, using the word ‘wisdom’ similarly to ‘epistemology’ “knowledge of knowledge and ignorance” / “science of science”.
For example, on judging the claims of specialists:
Or on the tests of “social reconciliation”
What is the individualization of socially-acquired knowledge?
The question whether to believe your senses is more basic than the question whether to believe another person. Before dealing with the latter question, you must first believe your senses about what the other person is telling you. Then your decision about which other people to believe will depend on a complex web of more basic empirical beliefs; philosophers can sketch out some principles for you to follow, but most of the work will be specific to your situation of the moment.
That is the standard response to my view.
One way of looking at it is that these are all different instances of a more general “epistemic security problem”, and the most relevant or important instance depends on one’s level of skepticism. At maximum skepticism one questions perceptions and senses. If one is satisfied with or assumes those as tolerably reliable for one’s purposes – for instance if one takes a materialist outlook – then one can move up the hierarchy of priority and different kinds of epistemic security problem become more important. For instance, the difficult problems associated with the social channel of learning, since we learn most of what we know socially, and in ways shaped by our psychology and attitudes about other people being strongly influenced by social cues and observations.
Using the Infosec analogy, one could say that the first priority in building a computer system would be reliable sensing of inputs and transformation into outputs. If you don’t have that, or if you are skeptical on the level of the basic ability to read and write data and of processing it with algorithms, there is no point worrying about other functions or operations.
If you decide you no longer wish to be skeptical at that level, you will move on to different trust problems, and eventually get to issues regarding the security of access and communications, which remain elusive.
Instead of looking for someone in whom to believe, it might be better to make the effort to understand things for oneself. Having seen just how unreliable our supposedly authoritative sources really are, a fact exposed by the new digital information world, one would think a move away from “social learning” was in order.
Arnold, if you don’t know it already, you might like Russell Hardin’s book on this subject: “How do you know? The economics of ordinary knowledge.” As I recall, he does nice job explaining why relational/trust-based heuristics are indispensable in ordinary knowing, and how they work most of the time and backfire sometimes. (That’s my clunky summary, not his.)
https://press.princeton.edu/books/hardcover/9780691137551/how-do-you-know
Because of the motto of this blog, I can’t resist copying this from the Amazon blurb for the book:
“Russell Hardin supposes that people are not usually going to act knowingly against their interests or other purposes. To try to understand how they have come to their knowledge or beliefs is therefore to be charitable in assessing their rationality. Hardin insists on such a charitable stance in the effort to understand others and their sometimes objectively perverse actions.”
Having Scott Alexander go down right as COVID part 2 was picking up made me feel like I was missing a sense. There was this mind somewhere else in the world that I had basically outsourced my thinking to for a lot of health-type questions that I didn’t have a good feel for.
Although he’s still dead wrong about low carb diets. The only people I’ve ever met in real life that have lost a lot of weight have done it using low carb diets.