Against ConsensusCrispin Sartwell On Saturday, January 8, 2011, Jared Loughner (allegedly) shot Congresswoman
Gabrielle Giffords and a number of other people in a grocery story parking lot
in Tucson, Arizona. By the next morning and over the next several days many
pundits and politicians on the left connected the shootings - often in a tone
of complete certainty - to the angry rhetoric of the right, in particular to
that of Sarah Palin. The pundits and politicians on the right, as one would
expect, denied these claims vehemently. In this situation, I will argue, and in any situation in which opinions
about a question of fact split along partisan lines, the only rational response
without an independent assessment of the evidence is to regard everyone on both
sides of the debate as having little credibility. Now that was obvious in this
case, in which all the commentators seemed to take a position on the factual
question before any of the relevant evidence emerged, in virtue of their group
membership. But it would be true also in a situation in which there was very
rich relevant information which was not dispositive, but in which opinions on
the factual question broke down along partisan or many other sorts of social
lines. To mention another example from recent partisan debates: as Giffords
started her recovery, Republican members of Congress pushing for repeal of the
Obama admninistration's healthcare law all claimed in unison that the law would
increase the deficit; all the Democrats held that it would decrease the deficit. In the course of examining such cases, I will give something like an a
priori argument that - quite surprisingly, I believe - gives us reason to
suppose that people who disagree with the consensus of their own group - for
example, their political party or portion of ideological spectrum - on any
matter of fact, are likelier to be right than those who constitute the
consensus. One reason that the results of the argument that follows are surprising is
that it might seem obvious that, in the absence of further information, a
position that is a consensus among your own group is just as likely to be be
based on evidence as its negation. Indeed I suspect that most people adopt the
working epistemic strategy that they ought to accord a consensus of the people around
them or like them considerable weight, or roughly that a factual proposition
most people believe is likelier to be true or likelier to be better justified
than its negation. This may be an important source of social unity, but it is
exactly the wrong way to figure out whom to believe and hence how to find the
truth. You might think that it would be a great good thing if we were all
united in the same beliefs, if we could forge a real consensus and hence a real
unity. Well, that might be desirable for many reasons, but it would be the end
of the human quest for truth. The more we approach the condition of unity of
belief, all things being equal (hereafter abbreviated as 'atbe,') the less
likely it is that our beliefs are based on evidence. I. Using 'belief' in the sense of the cognitive state of
a particular person rather than the content of what is believed, I will term a
belief that is generated at least partly in response to an assessment of the
evidence an evidence-sensitive belief. We might also require for a
belief to be evidence-sensitive that it would be revised or dropped if enough
evidence were developed suggesting that it was false. And let us speak of
beliefs that arise entirely independently of evidence or entirely from causes
other than an assessment of the evidence evidence-arbitrary
beliefs. An evidence-arbitrary
belief, like any belief, can be dropped or revised, though one would say
typically not because the evidence stacks up against it. Myriad ambiguities
arise with regard to these ideas, but rough notions are all I need for present
purposes. Or so I hope. I
think it is a pretty good cognitive rule of thumb (if not a matter of
definition) that evidence-sensitive beliefs are likelier to be true than
evidence-arbitrary beliefs. Actual evidence for a claim must tend to show that
the claim is true, atbe; it must bear positively on an assessment of truth.
(Indeed, I would construe 'evidence for p' as picking out all and only the
material that tends to show that p is true.) This is why we value evidence, or
demand it when the claim being made is important and doubtful: because we are
trying to establish whether or not the claim is true.Consider some assertion of fact, and stipulate that
with regard to the available evidence it is as likely to be true as untrue, or
that the evidence is equally split. It could be 'The health care bill will add
to the deficit' or it could be 'There is extra-terrestrial intelligent life' or
whatever you like. Now if people formed opinions on such matters based on the
state of factual evidence, we would expect the people who agreed and people who
disagreed to be relatively evenly distributed across some sorts of groups:
those groups membership in which is random with regard to access to the
evidence.For example,
education level would not be random as to access to evidence (it would not be evidence-random) if more
highly-educated people had access to more or better evidence bearing on a
particular issue. Ph.D.s in mathematics have more credibility on the question
of whether some theorem has been proven, for example, than members of the group
of non-Ph.Ds, because many of the former are in a position to assess proposed
proofs, and many of the latter are not. That is, in relation to a question like
that, the group 'Ph.D.s in mathematics' is not evidence-random. Members of a
group whose members have experience that is relevant to a question have more
credibility, atbe, than not: ex-prisoners on prison conditions, for instance,
or guitarists about how hard that solo is.On the other hand, it would surprise us if a much
higher percentage of green-eyed people than non-green-eyed people, or gardeners
than non-gardeners, or people who lived within 1,237 yards of a major river
than people who didn't, or dog-owners than cat-owners, believed that Palin
influenced Loughner or that there is extra-terrestrial intelligent life or that
Fermat's last theorem has been proven. Membership in such groups would seem to
be random with respect to access to the evidence on these matters. It might
turn out that people near rivers actually do have access to information that
others lack. But there is no reason to think so now. If it were true that most green-eyed people believed
that Palin influenced Loughner and most non-green-eyed people did not, that
wouldn't show of any particular person in either group that her belief was
evidence-arbitrary. But the differences between the groups cannot be accounted
for by differential access to the evidence, because eye color is random with
respect to access to the evidence. (Or seems so, as far as we can tell; let us
suppose that as good an examination of the question as we can accomplish turns
up no reasons to think that 'green-eyed people' is anything but an
evidence-random group.) That your eyes are green doesn't itself give you access
to information on this matter that non-green-eyed people lack. Indeed this
might and ought to make you wonder whether the contrasting distribution of
opinions among non-green-eyed people is also responsive to factors that somehow
have more to do with their eye-color than with the evidence. One might
speculate that there is some biological or genetic difference that correlates
with eye color that explains the difference of opinions, for example, or that
people with differently colored eyes are somehow treated differently socially
in a way that at least partly causes them to believe as they do, or that the
green-eyed people are disproportionately clustered in blue states or Ph.D
programs in mathematics for whatever reason.Now imagine a situation in which all the leftists
think that there is extra-terrestrial intelligent life and all the rightists
think there is not. We would find that odd. The groups 'leftists' and
'rightists' seem obviously random with respect to access to evidence for
extra-terrestrial intelligent life. There's nothing keeping the most hidebound
reactionary Republican from seeing the aliens, if any. For purposes of this thought experiment, let us
suppose that a good assessment of the evidence for extra-terrestrial
intelligent life makes the probabilities .5 either way, that the evidence is
exquisitely balanced at 50/50. If everyone's belief were evidence-sensitive,
and since the political groups are arbitrary with respect to access to
evidence, we'd expect a 50/50 split within each group among people forming an
opinion. And so we can provisionally estimate, in terms of probabilities,
before asking anyone anything about why they believe what they believe, the
evidence-arbitrariness of the beliefs generated within each group by the
distance from this 50/50 split. In this case, we should infer that there's at
least a .5 probability, with regard to any person in either group, that that
person believes what she believes because of factors other than the evidence, or
that her belief is evidence-arbitrary. This entails that with regard to any
particular person you are talking to on either side of the issue (and, as
always, atbe) there is at least a 50% chance that that person is applying ways
of deciding what to believe to which the evidence is irrelevant.Let's formulate this as a rule for assessing people's
credibility. I'll call it the Point Five Principle: Atbe, if the evidence is
split, there is at most a .5 probability that a belief about a factual matter
of someone who agrees with a consensus of any evidence-random group to which
she belongs is evidence-sensitive.If the initial probability that your position on a
single factual issue is responsive to the evidence is at most .5, then that
probability multiplies when the issues are multiplied. That is, if your belief
that the healthcare bill will reduce the deficit correlates with that of your
friends or your demographic segment or your political party, and so does your
belief that Palin influenced Loughner, then provisionally we should infer that
the chance that your belief that the healthcare bill will add to the deficit and that Palin
influenced Loughner is evidence-based is at most .25. Add, for example, the
view that climate change will put New York City underwater by 2025, and you're
at .125 and so on. (I am supposing
that the evidence is perfectly equivocal in all these cases. Obviously it is
not, necessarily, but this assumption will be discharged in a moment.) At the
conjunction of ten shared beliefs, the probability that the conjunction of the
beliefs is evidence-sensitive is less than .0005. With regard to the next
specific belief we are trying to assess, the probability remains .5, of course.
But if we are assessing a personšs credibility in terms of whether their
belief-system is evidence-sensitive, or whether the evidence has anything to do
with how that person forms beliefs, you very quickly get to the point at which
that is vanishingly unlikely.Now
let me acknowledge that this way of accumulating probabilities will be
controversial. But very roughly - since in the real world this is far rougher
than in the thought experiment - if we are in the realm of assessing a person's
credibility, every such agreement of the person's belief with that of her evidence-arbitrary
group must bring further into doubt the evidence-sensitivity of the techniques
by which that person generates beliefs. If each such belief were responsive to
evidence, every additional case would appear to be another coincidence, and
after a number of such cases, the coincidence is stunning. An important additional limitation on the Point Five
Principle as it accumulates across a person's belief-set is that we should say
it does so only in the case of evidentially autonomous beliefs. So
for example people have webs of evidence wherein the justifications would be
inter-dependent or otherwise networked. That the average temperature of the
earth will rise by five degrees this century and that billions will be
devastated may well be hooked together in a series of mutually dependent
beliefs, perhaps with many others. But according to our real practices for
assessing relevance, those beliefs are sealed off more or less entirely from
the evidence for whether Palin influenced Loughner. Bring one body of beliefs
to bear on the other and you are free associating or experimenting in the power
of non sequitur.A premise of the
argument is that one's political affiliation is random with
respect to access to the evidence for the factual claim that Palin influenced
Loughner or that the health care bill will add to the deficit. But that is
obvious. The situation is precisely the same with political parties as it is
with green-eyed people or gardeners. Such political commitments as 'we ought to
help the poor by government redistribution of wealth' or 'supply-side economics
is true' or even 'political discourse should be more civil' really do not bear
on whether Palin influenced Loughner. If every other doctrine of American
conservatism were true, that would provide not an iota of evidence that Palin
did not influence Loughner, and if every other doctrine of American
progressivism were true, that is no evidence that she did. What counts on the question of whether Palin
influenced Loughner would be items like this: Loughner had Palin's crosshairs
map tacked up on his wall, or habitually Tivoed Sarah Palin's Alaska, or left a
note saying "I did it because I was trying to do what Sarah Palin wanted
me to do." That illegal immigrants should have a path to citizenship, or that
climate change is a crisis, is neither here nor there. What counts on
healthcare is the best available stististical information. That the Second
Amendment creates an individual right of gun ownership or that America is a
Christian nation is entirely irrelevant.The factual claim can only be rationally assessed
independently of the whole of your own political position, like the claim that
there is extra-terrestrial intelligent life; your political commitments simply
do not bear. The people who think that an assessment of the truth of the claim
that Palin influenced Loughner or that the healthcare bill will add to the
deficit should be connected to their position on tax policy or immigration or
gay rights are not only not using evidence-sensitive belief-generating
standards; they are explicitly endorsing evidence-arbitrary standards, as is
anyone who thinks that the consensus of those around him is usually a good
guide for what to believe about the actual world. I take it that the latter
claim has now been entirely exploded.And though it is an important epistemic principle that
we would like to have a coherent belief set, it is also important even within a
particular web of linked beliefs to examine them as autonomously from one
another as possible, insofar as it is possible to have a coherent set of
beliefs that is false. One does not want to be lured into ever-greater
mistakes. Even in such cases one might particularly want to press critically on
beliefs that are shared as a network among members of your own groups.If most people share many of the consensus beliefs
about factual matters among their evidence-random groups, then most people have
negligible credibility on factual matters. To the extent that a rightist or
leftist, a kindergarten teacher or a philosophy professor's beliefs correlates
with that of people in their own evidence-random group on factual matters, they
ought to be regarded as having little credibility, where we are not in a
position to assess the evidence independently. Their views are extremely
unlikely to have been generated by examination of the evidence, whatever they
may claim. II.The principle can be adjusted or elaborated to cases where the evidence
stacks up one way or another. In proportion as it does, there is a better chance,
atbe, that the belief of a particular member of the group
that reaches consensus on the belief that has the weight of the evidence is
evidence-sensitive. Of course, one thing that is at stake in at least some of
the arguments between such differing factions is precisely whether the evidence
does make one way or the other. That is itself a factual claim on which the
consensus of evidence-random groups has a curtailed credibility. When the evidence is in fact overwhelming (a political
case might be the claim that Obama is an American citizen), of course, the
inference from group membership to evidence-arbitrariness does not go through
with regard to the portion of the political spectrum that believes it. And
obviously the members of the other group are overwhelmingly likely to have an
evidence-arbitrary beliefs and thus to be, to that extent, on average
irrational. If the evidence is preponderant in one direction, then the
provisional inference to evidence-sensitivity is preponderant in the same
proportion with regard to the members of the group that takes the more probable
position.If the evidence
was split 70/30, then we ought to expect that split
within evidence-random groups. Here we really ought to depart from the
mathematical style, which in any case is only a device for making the basic
point clear. We would expect evidence-sensitive people to have access to
different portions of the evidence or to weigh it in different ways. Such
things really depend on what evidence is actually available to whom, how it is
presented, and so on. But the style of inference would go through even if it
wouldn't be as devastating if you were on the side with the side that has the
preponderance of the evidence. Nevertheless, as more cases where you agree with
your evidence-random group accumulate, you'd get very small very quickly even
in cases like this. Similar
adjustments could be made to deal with non-unanimous groups, for example a case
where 85% of the leftists think there is intelligent extra-terrestrial life and
78% of the rightists think not.Even with such caveats, it follows from the Point Five Principle that the
most partisan voices - the most consistent advocates of the consensus factual
positions of their political or social group - ought to be regarded as the
voices with the least actual credibility. Even without the argument, this is
intuitively obvious. A spokesman for a political party, or a professional
advocate of left-wing or right-wing causes, for example, has little credibility
because one could predict from his group membership and role - that is,
independently of the evidence - what he thinks about global warming, or Palin,
or guns, or whatever it may be. His opinion - or at least his advocacy - is a
social strategy rather than an attempt to say what the world is actually like. No factual claim made by a spokesman for a political
faction and which comports with a consensus of her own group should be taken
seriously. The probability that the spokesman is credible is infinitesimal,
with each claim he makes doubling it down to a lower infinitesimality. So one good result of a universal awareness of the
Point Five Principle is that we would all stop listening to such people on
factual matters. That a factional spokesman - even or precisely a spokesman for
one's own faction - says it should cause no truth-seeker to think it's any more
likely to be true, or to give it any more credence. However, the Point Five
Principle should also provisionally undermine the credibility of many of the
ordinary beliefs of sincere people. Factual beliefs shared among members or
income groups, or racial groups, or cliques, or neighborhoods, or professions
(for example, the group 'professors'), where membership in such groups provides
no special access to evidence, should be regarded with great suspicion. One
useful task for the principle would be to let it make you doubt that there is
good evidence for those of your own beliefs on which there is a consensus among
the evidence-random groups to which you belong. In general, people are almost
unbelievably bad at doing that. III.Now we could try to get in and measure each person's credibility
independently, to really try to see why they believe what they believe, and
that might contradict the initial assessment that the belief is
evidence-arbitrary. It is
compatible with the Point Five Principle that some particular political
spokesman believes what he believes because he is responsive to evidence. But
if we don't have the time or means to try to make such an independent assessment
- as most of us do not on most such questions - it may be a key part of our
epistemic lives to assess the credibility of various people, or to choose whom
to regard as an authority, as someone who's likelier to be right than wrong. But in the absence of an independent assessment of the
evidence, the only sensible initial approach to a population - of pundits or
political consultants, for example - in which all the leftists, more or less,
think that the health care bill will add to the deficit, and all the rightists
think not, is to believe that for each such person there is at least an even
chance that her belief is not responsive to evidence but to factors irrelevant
to the truth of the assertion. A few more conventional declarations, and it is
entirely obvious that the commitment is not to the evidence. But there are many
non-politicians in many arenas who more than deserve the same treatment. Atbe,
you should regard as credible people whose positions do not crystallize the
consensus of their groups, but those who question or negate that consensus.This result will stand, I think, almost no matter what
your views about truth are, short of the pitiful view that truth just is
whatever people like you think it is. Indeed, let us consider a position which
holds that such concepts as evidenceš and truthš are social formations, or
linguistic practices. But our own actual practices entail the Point Five
Principle. So, for example, if a judge convicts someone of murder, and it turns
out that the cause of his belief that the defendant was guilty was his own
political position or the fact that he is a gardener and the defendant is not,
for example, we would hold that the the judge has not done what he has sworn to
do and has not decided the case on the evidence, which is what our legal
practices demand. A person who
thinks that Obama is not an American citizen because he heard it on Rush
Limbaugh, and he likes Rush's position on healthcare, is failing in the same
way. That this demand can be very hard to meet or that it is violated in very
many actual cases does not mean that it is not actually entailed by our real
practices with regard to concepts like truthš and evidence.š This is equally
true of each of us in cases where we have a sincere desire to arrive at the
truth, though of course on some matters or occasions that may not be the goal.
The Point Five Principle follows from our actual practices for deciding what to
believe about factual matters, the norms we actually do deploy right now in our
very own culture for determining what to believe about matters of fact. People
who believe because they are leftists that the healthcare bill will add to the
deficit are failing miserably by the standards of their very own culture. Now many leftists claim that their procedures are more
rational or evidence-based than the right's, or perhaps that their political
opinions are more informed. In fact, liberalism does correlate to some extent
with education levels. But then the question is whether education levels
themselves correlate with access to information that does bear on this
particular matter. That would not be the case with Palin and Loughner, a case
in which the facts, thin as they were, were presented in all media
simultaneously to the whole population. In the case of the healthcare, numeracy
and other skills would be necessary for people who really wanted to try to
examine the evidence directly or independently, so that the grouping might not
be evidence-random. But in order to show correlation between educational level
and credibility, it would be important to show that the primary relevant effect
of education with regard to such issues is real access to real evidence and
not, for example, the re-enforcement of group affiliation. The socializing
function of education compromises its claims to be concerned with truth. And
educational level is potentially relevant only to those who really do go out
and try to crunch the numbers, or who form a belief by an actual attempt to
assess the evidence independently, rather than by deciding whom to believe.
Very few people other than specialists actually do this on a question like
that, and for very good reasons: it would be a time-consuming, laborious
process, and many such factual questions arise constantly.The technique actually being applied by the vast
majority of people who form an opinion on such matters, whatever their
education level, is to try to figure out who speaks credibly: who knows or is
more likely to be speaking the truth. Listening to or believing what people say
is an indispensable part of our epistemic lives, a central strategy for our
conduct as believing creatures. If we ourselves have any commitment to
believing what is true rather than not or to being ourselves credible in
communication with others on a particular matter, then we need to assess
people's credibility sincerely, as best we can. What I am suggesting is that a
very sensible first step would be to spitball the a priori probabilities, and
that, surprising as it may sound, we certainly can, in many actual cases. IV.In general the term 'credibility' refers to the factors that get people to
trust someone epistemically or ordinarily to regard the fact that that person
endorses some proposition as a reason to believe it themselves. It is often a
matter of such things as the way one dresses, one's eminence in one's line of
work, one's educational attainments, awards, publications. In some situations,
the people with credibility are the white people or the men or the rich people,
for example, and actual social dominance partly consists in credibility or
entails it. But the notion of credibility I am working with here is a matter of
evidence: the credibility of a given person in the sense I am using the term is
the extent to which what that person believes is evidence-sensitive. Because
evidence must be truth-relevant, the beliefs of a credible person in this sense
are likelier to be true, atbe, than those of a non-credible person. This can
often be a matter of experience, and someone who has experienced poverty has
more credibility on the question of what it's like to be poor than someone who
has not. A person who has been a teacher has more credibility on certain
questions or aspects of education, and so on. Let me note that people have other desires than to be
rational, as well they should. It is redundant to condemn a person as
irrational who declares that she has no reasons for her belief and wants none,
or that her belief radically exceeds her evidence or contradicts it, but that
she intends to go right on believing it anyway. This, I think, is a legitimate
conscious irrationalism, and not really subject to logical or epistemological
critique. And if one wants to believe what onešs friends or colleagues believe
and one is not particularly interested in truth as it may exist externally to
that context, or if in matters of factual belief one is more interested in
group solidarity than having good reasons, I would not regard that as
illegitimate. But then I would strongly suggest that one should stop claiming
that one believes because of the evidence or that onešs position is more
rational than that of onešs opponents, or that it should have the effect of
convincing others. That is, it would help to have a clear sense of how and why
one comes to believe, or to express that as reflectively and honestly as
possible. It might seem
that the .5 hit that a consensus opinion takes at the outset shouldn't be a
matter of concern to those who find themselves under that cloud. Maybe all they
need is .51, a tiny weight of evidence which might easily be established in
particular cases to which the Point Five Principle applies. But in fact it is
devastating. Anti-consensus opinions face no such a priori handicap: before
looking into the context or even the actual evidence, you should assume that
there's at least a 50% chance that the opinion of any particular person who
takes up the consensus opinion of his evidence-random group is not
evidence-sensitive. The Point Five Principle is an extremely destructive
credibility bomb. The person who speaks for the conventional factual views of
an evidence-random group to which she belongs, even with regard to a single
issue, starts out handicapped with regard to credibility, as though she were
competing in the Olympics with one arm and one leg tied behind her back, or
after having had a stroke and losing control of the left side of her body.Now of course, actually dealing with an individual
from either group, or reading her work, or finding out the actual way she
wields evidence, you might revise these estimates and accord her much more
credibility. If the examination comes out right, you should accord her
more credibility, if your own beliefs are evidence-sensitive. But before or in
the absence of such an examination, the only rational thing to do is cock an
eyebrow. V.Groups are rarely entirely unanimous. The correlation between peoples'
political positions and the belief that Palin influenced Loughner was not
perfect. There were, one hopes, a few leftists who thought not, and a few
rightists who thought so (as well as some on both sides, and many more on
neither, who suspended judgment until more facts came in). In the absence of
independent empirical evidence bearing on the matter, it is sensible to regard
such outliers with regard to their own group as having more initial credibility
than anyone else in the population. The outlying beliefs are not undermined by
this argument, or indeed by any similar strategy that I can see, whereas the
consensus position starts out undermined by at least half.
Putting it mildly, this is a substantial initial advantage for anti-consensus
positions, or more precisely for the credibility of the people who take them.It does not of course follow from the fact that they
deny the consensus position of their own group that the outliers are actually
applying an evidence-sensitive procedure rather than hallucinating or
expressing their resentment toward other people in their group, for example.
But what you couldn't do with the outliers is apply the Point Five Principle.
That is, people who disagree with the factual consensus of their own
evidence-arbitrary group do not face disqualification on these grounds, or
on any similar a priori grounds that I can think of, though of course they
might on others.For example, it
might be the case that most people who take anti-consensus positions do it out
of social perversity, a kind of knee-jerk rejectionism. Beliefs generated by
such a procedure seem entirely evidence-arbitrary. But the claim that that is
how the outlying beliefs were in fact usually generated would have to be shown
empirically, by actually going and finding out, and I imagine that many factors
cause people to run counter to consensus (including sensitivity to the
evidence!). That does nothing to bolster the credibility of people who take the
consensus view. However,
even an almost sheer social perversity could be evidence-sensitive in the sort
of case where the socially perverse believer intuits that the members of the
group, whatever they may say, do not believe in virtue of evidence, but in
virtue of the value they place in group membership and the fact they use
factual belief as a criterion of group membership. A person who disagrees or
starts out skeptical with regard to the beliefs of his own group very likely
thinks that the fact that all these people believe it is not itself a reason to
believe it. In that sense, a slightly thoughtful sheer perversity is
evidence-sensitive in a way that the beliefs of someone who informally believes
that the fact that the people around him believe something is a reason to
believe it is not.We
should conclude from all this that the people with the most initial credibility
on any assertion of fact are people who believe the reverse of what most of the
people in their profession or political party, or even most of their friends
and neighbors, believe, if those groups are evidence-random with regard to the
question. The best first move in a case where you have not formed an opinion or
on which the evidence is equivocal is always to
critically examine and provisionally regard as irrational an opinion that is a
consensus among people like yourself. That people usually do precisely the
opposite - that they seek for the consensus opinion in their group and adopt it
- is a demonstration of our profound irrationality. Thinkers sometimes talk
about 'the social production of knowledge.' They ought also, or rather first,
to talk about the social destruction of knowledge and the anti-social
production of knowledge. VI.Let me acknowledge that the actual situation on the ground is much, much
more complicated than the simplified situations I have been considering. One
set of complications arises from the fact that each person has multiple group
memberships. So for example, the leftist economist who asserts that the
healthcare bill will not add to the deficit belongs to a group that is not
evidence-random with regard to question, and to one that is. In fact, since I
have not really tried to restrict what counts as a group, everyone belongs to
many groups or even infinitely many groups. So I belong to the philosophy
professors, the residents or Pennsylvania, the people who live east of Wyoming,
and the people who either live east of Wyoming or on Mars. With regard to what
group should we assess the credibility of a given individual?Now this is difficult to come to grips with in a
purely theoretical way. But I think that, at a first stab, we should focus on
socially salient group memberships and groups with which the agent consciously
identifies. 'Socially salient' here means that when people in the social world
of the agent sort people into groups, they commonly do so on the basis of those
categories. Evidence for the social salience of the group might include the way
organizations poll, for example. So when Gallup wants to know what people are
thinking, they often give us information as to the opinions of people who fall
into different political factions, races, genders, income levels, regions,
ages, religions. Those are some of the socially salient groups, and with regard
to such groups each person of course has multiple memberships. These are
important, but I also think it is important and plausible to apply the Point
Five Principle with regard to much smaller groups: cliques, knots of friends,
families, professional colleagues. I am certainly not denying that membership in such
groups does give access to certain kinds of evidence on certain kinds of
matters. I am not saying that people should ignore their own experiences and
the collective group wisdom that reflects that experience. For example, I think
there are many truths about American racism that are known by many black people
and few white people, or even that there are facts about American racism that
cannot be known by white people in that they lack the experiences that
constitute the evidence for those views. There are things women know that men
donšt, and perhaps vice versa. Membership in various demographic cohorts can be
profoundly likely to make people sensitive to different sorts of evidence. That
is why group membership is indeed epistemically important. But of course there
are also matters on which your racial or gender identity obviously has no
bearing. It is not likely that the black people in general have evidence of
extraterrestrial life or global warming or Palinšs influence which is not
available to white people. On such matters, these group identities are
irrelevant, and epistemic loyalty to the group is distorting.The reason we might want to focus on the groups with
which the agent does identify is because membership in such groups is likelier
than membership in others to have epistemological effects on the agent. For
example, it is likely that a Democrat wants to agree with most other Democrats
and accords Democratic spokesmen more credibility than Republican spokesmen.If there is a factual consensus with which the agent
agrees within any socially salient, evidence-random group to
which the agent belongs, the Point Five Principle applies. One reason for this
is that even experts often distort or misinterpret evidence to support the
consensus of some group with which they strongly identify. So let's say, for
example, that there is a consensus among wealthy economists that that the most
efficient means of distribution is free market capitalism, and a consensus
among impoverished economists that a dictatorship of the proletariat is, where
they could both accept the same concept of efficiency,š which of course they
might not. (If they do not, then there is nothing they clearly disagree about
when they disagree about whether a certain means of distribution is efficient.)
But then suppose that they have contrasting views about what the current
distribution actually is (perhaps the wealthy economists represent the current
distribution as more equal than do the impoversished economists). Atbe, the
group 'economists' is not evidence-random with regard to the facts on the
ground about the actual distribution, but income groups are. In such a case we
must strongly suspect that the membership of these people in their
evidence-random groups has distorted their views, and ought to suspect it just
as strongly as we do with regard to people taking up the consensus of their
political group with regard to whether Palin influenced Loughner.A related problem is that if a Democrat, for example,
consistently takes up anti-consensus positions with regard to Democrats, he has
become a Republican. That is, in certain cases, and especially with regard to
doctrines that are seen by members of the group as central to their group
identity, you almost by definition cannot dissent and remain within the group.
So if you see someone (a "conservative Democrat," e.g.) consistently
taking anti-consensus positions, at a certain point he is no longer a Democrat,
as many actual cases (Joe Lieberman, for example) show. In this case he's no
longer an outlier among the Democrats, but an endorser of the consensus of
Republicans. However, recall that the Point Five Principle applies only to
questions of fact. So for example it does not apply with regard to doctrines
such as that government should redistribute wealth by progressive taxation, a
normative claim. But if the Democratic party were to start using as criteria
for membership particular positions on factual matters, then of course you
should wonder with regard to each Democrat whether their assessment of the
factual situation was evidence-sensitive or simply enforced upon her as a
condition of membership or taken up by her to underscore her membership. At any rate, the ideal epistemic position of a
passionately Democratic person would be this: she accepts most or even all the
normative claims characteristic of her group. She thinks gay marriage should be
legal, for example. She is strongly committed to economic justice. But this
bears not at all on her factual beliefs, which will be random with respect to
the consensus of the Democratic party. Atbe, she would be no more likely to
agree with her group that Palin influenced Loughner than to believe she did not.
That is really the only sort of Democrat to which we should attribute any
credibility on factual matters without actually examining how the beliefs were
in fact generated.Obviously
I am not going to be able to defend here in any elaborate way the claim that
there is indeed a fundamental difference between factual and normative claims,
or elucidate the various relations between them. I do think there is a
fundamental difference, and one way to try to show this is to point out that
different sorts of evidence bear on factual than bear on normative claims. What
I want to point out is that your commitment to social justice just does not
bear on whether Palin influenced Lougher or whether the healthcare bill will
add to the deficit.The
most credible people within a given evidence-random group that takes up moral
or political issues, that is, are people who accept the normative orientation
of the group, but who do not permit that to affect their beliefs on factual
matters. So again, look for someone who believes in the redistribution of
wealth and gay rights and internationalism but who thinks that Palin didn't
influence Loughner or that climate change isn't going to be the big disaster
all her friends think it will be. That does not establish that her beliefs are
evidence-sensitive or that those of her friends aren't. But in terms of an
examination merely of the distributions of opinions among groups, those are the
only people who are capable of establishing a provisional credibility. The most
credible people on matters of fact, atbe, are people whose position on factual
matters are entirely unpredictable from their membership in evidence-random
groups, who are as likely to disagree as to agree. There seem to be precious
few such people. VII.Consider two epistemic principles: (1) that a proposition on which there is
a consensus among your group is, atbe, likelier to be true, or likelier to be
supported by the evidence, than one that is not. (2) that the negation of that
proposition, atbe, is likelier to be true or supported by the evidence. It is
plausible that most people believe (1), or at least adopt it as a working
assumption. That is, (1) is itself the consensus position. Virtually any group of people aside from
professional philosophers is evidence-random with regard to epistemic
principles. That means that we should provisionally assess the probability that
(1) is evidence-based as at most .5. (2) does not face this devastating
handicap. So until someone produces some independent empirical evidence that consensus
positions are likelier to be evidence-sensitive, atbe, than anti-consensus
positions, we should assume that (1) is false. The fact that (2) is itself an
anti-consensus position (a claim which I have substantiated informally by
asking people such as members of my family and my students) gives it much
greater provisional plausibility. That is, the Point Five Principle discredits
its opponent and hence substantiates itself. Since we have seen independent
reason to regard that principle as plausible, we ought provisionally to accept
(2) on that basis. VII.Very imprecisely, the opposite of what most people like you believe is more
likely to be true than what they do believe, because it is initially more
plausible that it is based on evidence. This is a remarkable conclusion! Now
let me state it more precisely. That a position on a factual claim, when the
evidence for it is equivocal, is a consensus position among a particular
evidence-random group, tends to show that, within that group, the belief is based
on factors other than the evidence. Atbe, this dramatically undermines the
credibility of all the people in that group who take the consensus position. To
the extent that evidence-sensitive beliefs are more likely to be true than
evidence-arbitrary beliefs, this bears indirectly on the truth of the
proposition in question. This argument should make you re-assess the credibility of a lot of people,
including yourself. In particular, it ought to make you doubt the
credibility on factual matters of anyone with conventional factual opinions
among the groups to which they belong, including political parties or advocacy
groups. On the other hand, this argument ought to give everyone a renewed
respect for skeptics, dissenters, and, in particular, people whose positions
make them traitors to their own parties or social groups. The epistemic theory of a dictator or the king who
surrounds himself with yes-men and flatterers is implicitly that if all the
people around you are saying it, then it's likely to be true. And that is the
same theory which the average person who is not living in a dictatorship seems
to hold. The strategy helps all the people who seek and participate in a
consensus of factual belief in a evidence-random group find the truth just as
effectively as it does the dictator. The informal epistemic constraints of
social groups, as well as the tendency of people to subordinate themselves
epistemically to such groups even when they are obviously evidence-random, are
barriers to the credibility of all concerned, and to the possibility of members
of our species reaching truth.We might point out that to the extent a group is in consensus on a given
question, its members tend to regard the question as settled, and hence to
ignore all further evidence. That is, a group in consensus, even if it starts
out being extremely evidence-sensitive, tends to atrophy into one that is
evidence-arbitrary or even evidence-averse. Its members are confused as between
their solidarity and the truth.If I were to give an informal account of why people usually operate in
precisely the opposite way than the Point Five Principle suggests, I might say
this: people replace the world with each other. They engage in an infinite
round of epistemic backslapping in which the agreement of the people around
them bolsters their confidence in their own beliefs and their sense of their
own sagacity. This might enhance their self-esteem, but it cannot in the long
run be anything but a continual source of unanimous error. With regard to most
subject-matters, and whatever you might think about the Point Five Principle,
this procedure is utterly detached from any actual examination of evidence. It
is our great epistemological handicap, the greatest barrier between us and
truth aside from our sheer finitude.If it is impossible to achieve social unity without a
consensus of factual belief, then we are in a position of having to choose
between unity and truth. But of course various forms of unity do not presuppose
unanimity; one can love someone with whom one disagrees politically, for
example. So I would make a plea for doxastically open groups, groups to which
people can belong even if they disagree with consensus opinions and not be held
to be monsters or idiots, or even to be obviously wrong. There could even be
groups - there have been groups - in which dissidents are valued or are heard
rather than ignored, ostracized, or executed. That's a very good idea, because
a dissident, atbe, is more likely to be right. If we hope to find the truth about
anything, we need social formations with much less epistemological peer
pressure and much more tolerance for or even enthusiasm for anti-consensus
thinking among the members than is now typical.
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