Psychologist and law professor Dan Kahan and his collaborators have described two phenomena that affect the ways in which people form different beliefs from the same information.
The first is called “identity-protective cognition.” This describes how individuals are motivated to adopt the empirical beliefs of groups they identify with in order to signal that they belong.
The second is “cultural cognition”: people tend to say that a behavior has a greater risk of harm if they disapprove of the behavior for other reasons – handgun regulation and nuclear waste disposal, for example.
These effects are not reduced by intelligence, access to information, or education. Indeed, greater scientific literacy and mathematical ability have been shown to actually increase polarization on scientific issues that have been politicized, such as the cause of climate change or the benefits of gun control. Higher ability in these areas appears to boost people’s ability to interpret the available evidence in favor of their preferred conclusions.
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Beyond these psychological factors, there is another major source of epistemic pluralism. In a society characterized by freedom of conscience and freedom of expression, individuals bear “burdens of judgment,” as the American philosopher John Rawls wrote. Without the government or an official church telling people what to think, we all have to decide for ourselves – and that inevitably leads to a diversity of moral viewpoints.
Although Rawls was focused on pluralism of moral values, the same is true of beliefs about matters of fact.
In the U.S., legal rules and social norms attempt to ensure that the state cannot constrain an individual’s freedom of belief, whether that be about moral values or empirical facts.
This intellectual freedom contributes to epistemic pluralism. So do factors such as educational inequalities, the proliferation of information from untrustworthy sources online, and misinformation campaigns. All together, they provide ample opportunity for people’s shared sense of reality to fragment.
Another contributor to epistemic pluralism is just how specialized human knowledge has become. No one person could hope to acquire the sum total of all knowledge in a single lifetime. This brings us to the second relevant concept: epistemic dependence.
Knowledge is almost never acquired firsthand, but transmitted by some trusted source.
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There’s nothing wrong with this; everyone gets most knowledge that way. There’s simply too much knowledge for anyone to verify independently all the facts on which we routinely rely.
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However, this raises a tricky problem: Who has sufficient epistemic authority to qualify as an expert on a particular topic? Much of the erosion of our shared reality in recent years seems to be driven by disagreement about whom to believe.
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The problem in these and other cases is that most people are unable to determine the truth of these matters on their own, yet they are also unable to agree on which experts to trust.
Source: The Conversation (March 2, 2023)
Subjects: Education | Scholarship, Ethics | Integrity | Morality, Excerpts, Intelligence | Knowledge, Life & Society, Politics & Public Policy, Psychology | Behavior, Thought | Inquiry
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