After one of
the most off-putting titles I’ve ever conceived, let’s cut to the chase: you
may not stay awake at night pondering what is it that you can “know”, what that
“knowing” consists in and what is it that makes believing a certain proposition
“knowledge” (as opposed to opinion, fancy, or being a classical and unvarnished
asshole). That puts you in the same league than 99.9% of humanity, and probably
you never thought you were in any way worse off because of such lack of
interest in the good ‘ol field of epistemology (which trains you to agonize
over such weighty issues, but would not for the life of it stoop to provide you
with a definite answer, or not one that you could explain to any 15 year old
you crossed your path with, anyhow). Well, sorry to break the sad news to you,
but you were dead wrong. Not being epistemologically literate is an
unforgivable sin on par with having regular sex with animals or (gasp!) not
recycling, and the evil system is taking advantage of your lack of
sophistication in precisely that area. How come? I’ll use the remainder of this
post to try to explain.
To make the
subject easier to grasp, lets start with a simplified, somewhat metaphoric
model. Assume this is all there is to know, aka “the world”:
Not very
impressive, I know, but enough for our current purposes. Our world is a bounded
circle, with some funny shapes in it: a bunch of yellow squares, a rectangle
(also yellow), a reddish triangle, a brownish star and a red sinusoidal line.
What about the birds, and the clouds, and the sea, and continents and stones
and people? We will get to that in a moment, just trust me that our simplified
world is just as complex as it needs to be for explaining what this
epistemology stuff is about, and what we will formulate regarding these simple
shapes will be pretty straightforward to extrapolate to all the other thingies
you may be rightfully thinking about.
Of course,
with just our simple model of a world we wouldn’t get very far, so to start
talking about knowledge, belief, justification, warrant, reliability and
whatnot we need at least one additional element: a conscious subject that can
perceive it. Lets call such subject “A” (Smith would also be fine, but would be
unnecessarily long and not abstract enough, and we occasional epistemologist
like our Martinis shaken, not stirred, and our examples as abstract as possible).
So just by being alive A is aware of her surroundings, and forms a mental
representation of the world, a perceptual map if you wish of what surrounds
her:
Now you may
notice that the image A has in her head of what’s out and about her does not
exactly coincide with what is actually out and about. A number of discrepancies
are unavoidable, given A’s perceptual apparatus (it doesn’t really matter if A
is a human being, a bat, a horse or a starfish, every living being’s sense
organs convey only a limited portion of what surrounds it). There are surely things
too small for A to notice (that may explain that instead of a number of yellow
squares she only sees one), and here may be shapes in colors that reflect the
light in wavelengths her eyes can not respond to (so these colors are, for all
practical purposes, invisible to her), or sounds her ears can not distinguish,
etc.
Unfortunately,
the potential discrepancies between what A perceives and what is “out there”
are not limited to the ones imposed by A’s narrow senses (let’s call that
source of discrepancies the “perceptual
bias”, which is widely shared by each species, so we would expect that,
having roughly the same sense organs, each member of the same species would
perceive the world in a roughly similar way). If A is a self-conscious being,
she will have preferences and tastes that incline her towards certain
experiences, and make her avoid (consciously or not, I do not want to get to
that distinction yet) other experiences. Let’s assume, for the sake of
argument, that she dislikes pointed edges, and irregular polygons (that is,
polygons where not all the sides and all the angles are equal). As far as we
can tell, all self-conscious beings adjust their perceptions to conform as
closely as possible not only to their expectations (unfounded as they may be)
but to their tastes and preferences, so in the case of A she will easily come
to believe the single square she sees is really slightly rounded, and that
something similar happens with the triangle. As for the star, she may just not
pay it much attention; just enough to notice it has five points, and then may
just think it was really a pentagon (less pointed). The rectangle, being
irregular, she is wont to ignore. Let’s call this second source of
discrepancies between the hypothetical external world and A’s perception of it “preference bias” (confirmation bias and
aesthetic bias would be aspects of it).
To complete
the picture, and be able to show why it is important for our everyday life, we
have to add a second complicating element. A world with a single subject is not
the most promising place to discuss about what we can really know and what such
knowledge consists in, so let us add a final element, a second subject which,
unavoidably, we will call “B”:
Now we may
expect B, belonging to the same species as A, to have exactly the same
perceptual bias as her, so their perception of the world if that was the only
source of potential discrepancies would be exactly the same. But having a
different genetic makeup, and a different upbringing, it is more likely than
not that B has different tastes and preferences from A. Let’s say that she
doesn’t have a problem with pointed edges, but she is a resolute “two-dimensionalist”:
she doesn’t believe for a moment that there are one-dimensional shapes, and she thinks that any talk of lines, points or any geometric figure that can not boast a
measurable area is a pie-in-the-sky fable, and only superstition and undignified
refusal to grow up and confront the world as it really is can explain people still talking of lines, curves and whatnot. For B the red line
is but a fiction, she successfully manages not to perceive it, so it is not a
part of her mental map of what is “out there” in any meaningful sense.
But you
surely have noticed that substituting sharp angles for rounded ones is not the
only difference between what B thinks the world consists of and what A thinks.
From B’s point of view, the different yellow squares are not only clearly discernible,
but they occupy a significant portion of the landscape, so much so that she can
perceive them as distinct and overwhelming, partially blocking the view of any
other shape. So we have to introduce a third source of differences of opinion,
that we will call “perspective bias”.
Nobody perceives the world from exactly the same place (or the same time), and
the kind of portions of reality that fill their perceptions will be different
because of such displacements.
From such different elements of experience they
will build different conceptual networks, and give different weight and moral
valences to the concepts that form such networks, but let’s not get too far ahead of ourselves yet. At this point
you are surely wondering “what does all this silly talk of triangles, rectangles
and sinusoidal lines have to do with anything I may care a iota about?” Do not
despair, my impatient reader, ‘cuz I’m just about to explain: start by
substituting “race” for “shape”, and “conservative tendencies” (or more
reputable, less open to knee-jerk reaction terms like respect for tradition,
preference for authority, identification with the history and racial
composition of the group one was brought up into, etc.) for “liking of sharp
angles” and you can see that A is a bleeding heart liberal that is afraid of
the world being taken over by giant corporations and growingly unequal because
of the evil machinations of a cabal of cold-hearted plutocrats and B is an old
lady in an increasingly diverse neighborhood (yup, the –for her- menacing
squares are all those immigrants that occupy a growing portion of her daily
landscape, and that figure in her imagination in a completely different
position than in the idealized and distant PC vision of A) that is in turn
afraid of how the morals and habits of society are being corroded and rendered
invalid by multiculturalism and relativism, and that in turn is causing all
kind of social evils.
Nothing new
here, and a territory well covered by popular books like Predictably Irrational , without having to resort to the
epistemological playbook. Some of those biases are shared and some are not, and
people tend to feel attracted (and to agree) with people that share their
biases, thus driving modern societies, ever more connected thanks to technology
(and the ubiquitous social media it has enabled), towards unheard-of levels of
alacrity and animosity, and a more and more intractable level of polarization.
What the epistemic perspective tells us is that such biases (at least the
preference and perspective ones) are causing people to literally “see”
different worlds, and to react in predictably different ways to such different
realities. Furthermore, it tells us that people not only tends to band with
people that have similar perspective to theirs (specifically share their
preference bias, as for their perspective bias, it is easy to align the point
of view of any two persons with similar preferences and thus eliminate it), but
that such banding has a powerful effect in confirming and reinforcing that the
mostly common view they can share is the “real”, “true” one, is the one that
really reflects how the world “really is”.
And of course
it is a very short step from that reinforcement of the very pleasing idea of
being in the right and having a distinctively well adjusted grasp on reality to
the notion that whoever doesn’t share that grasp is not only wrong (or
deceitful, as they report perceiving something that does not correspond with
reality), but most likely is willfully so, thus not just wrong but evil (the overarching
idea that people can decide what to believe, technically called doxastic voluntarism, is as extended in
popular conscience as opposed by most academics, for reasons that would merit
their own posts and which I am not going to expound here).
In turn, the
existence of those “perception altering fields” created by people with similar
preference bias banding together explains a lot of phenomena that would be
utterly baffling without such epistemic framework, to name but a few:
·
The
rise (and likely winning of the Republican nomination) of Donald Trump. The
likes of Bill Kristol and the whole conservative establishment are throwing the
kitchen sink at him, but his followers barely budge. They are simply perceiving
a completely different world than the pundits and plutocrats that try to sway
their perception with reasons (try to correct their perspective bias), while
what binds them together, and attracts them to the magnate, is a set of shared
tastes (preference bias)
·
The
growing impression in a continent of over 400 million souls that doing the
humane and morally right thing (admitting between us four to six millions of
destitute refugees, it doesn’t matter if they flee war, abject poverty, crushing
lack of opportunity or religious prejudice) is somehow a mortal danger that threatens
to bring down our whole culture and way of life, as most of them are surely
terrorists, sexual predators, child molesters, sexist pigs, religious fundamentalists,
ne’er-do-gooders and slackers that only want to live from the public teat and
never hold a honest job. The (four or five) guys that hold the opposite view
just see an entirely different world from the vast majority of our countrymen,
as both our preference biases and perspective biases are completely out of
whack (and both are, in turn, out of whack with those of the refugees
themselves)
Be that as it
may, the sad consequence is that the traditional ways of aggregating individual
preferences (that presupposed at least shared biases, so the groups trying to
reach an opinion had a common framework, a common perception of the world over
which to build their alternative scenarios and in turn over which to jointly
decide the best course of action) is not working any more, and thus the
political system built on the premise of those ways being optimal may be on its
last ropes, its very viability being legitimately open to question.
But we will
leave out attempt to answer that question to our next post on the subject.
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