What to Believe Now E-Book

David Coady

• Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 410

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2012

Beschreibung

What can we know and what should we believe about today's world? What to Believe Now: Applying Epistemology to Contemporary Issues applies the concerns and techniques of epistemology to a wide variety of contemporary issues. Questions about what we can know-and what we should believe-are first addressed through an explicit consideration of the practicalities of working these issues out at the dawn of the twenty-first century.

Coady calls for an 'applied turn' in epistemology, a process he likens to the applied turn that transformed the study of ethics in the early 1970s. Subjects dealt with include:

• Experts-how can we recognize them? And when should we trust them?
• Rumors-should they ever be believed? And can they, in fact, be a source of knowledge?
• Conspiracy theories-when, if ever, should they be believed, and can they be known to be true?
• The blogosphere-how does it compare with traditional media as a source of knowledge and justified belief?

Timely, thought provoking, and controversial, What to Believe Now offers a wealth of insights into a branch of philosophy of growing importance-and increasing relevance-in the twenty-first century.

Leseprobe

Contents

Preface

1 Introduction

Veritism

Error Avoidance

Proceduralism

Other Values?

Controlling Our Beliefs?

Duties to Believe and Responsibility for Belief

Virtue Epistemology

Applied Epistemology and Social Policy

2 Experts and the Laity

What is an Expert?

Some Reasons for Lay Skepticism of Experts

Expertise and Testimony

Reductionism

Intellectual Autonomy and Information Cascades

Disagreement Among Experts

Moral Expertise

3 Epistemic Democracy

Are Votes Statements?

What Do Votes Say?

The Epistemic Authority of Electoral Outcomes

Knowledgeable Voters

Deliberative Democracy

Conclusion

4 Rumors and Rumor-Mongers

The Grapevine

Rumors as Unofficial Communications

Have I Missed Something?

Rumors, Democracy, Urban Legends, and Propaganda

Conclusion

5 Conspiracy Theories and Conspiracy Theorists1

Conspiracies Don't Happen Often

Conspiracies Tend to be Insignificant

Conspiracies Tend to Fail

Governments and Government Agencies of Western Countries Don't Conspire Often, Successfully, or Significantly

Conspiracy Theory and the Open Society

Conspiracy Baiting as Propaganda

So What Should be Done?

Conclusion

6 The Blogosphere and the Conventional Media

Filtering

Journalism as a Profession

The Value of “Balance” in Journalism

Some Conventional Media Filtering Practices

The Blogosphere as a Parasite

Another Analogy

Conclusion

7 Conclusion

Wikipedia and Traditional Encyclopedias

Torture

Institutional Gullibility and Political Skepticism

Postscript

CCTV Cameras

The Real Problem with the Surveillance State

References

Index

For my parents, Margaret and Tony, with love and gratitude

This edition first published 2012© 2012 David Coady

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Coady, David, 1965–What to believe now : applying epistemology to contemporary issues / David Coady. p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-1-4051-9993-3 (hardcover : alk. paper) – ISBN 978-1-4051-9994-0 (pbk. : alk. paper)1. Knowledge, Theory of. 2. Ethics. I. Title. BD176.C63 2012 121–dc23

2011038289

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

This book is published in the following electronic formats: ePDFs 9781444362091; ePub 9781444362107; mobi 9781444362114

He who says “Better to go without belief forever than believe a lie!” merely shows his own preponderant private horror of becoming a dupe. … It is like a general informing his soldiers that it is better to keep out of battle forever than to risk a single wound. Not so are victories either over enemies or over nature gained. Our errors are surely not such awfully solemn things. In a world where we are so certain to incur them in spite of all our caution, a certain lightness of heart seems healthier than this excessive nervousness on their behalf.

William James, “The Will to Believe”

they were afraid to be with him,or to think much about him for fear they might believe him

John Dos Passos, The 42nd Parallel

Preface

In this book, I attempt to show how epistemology, the study of knowledge and justified belief, can be relevant to issues of contemporary concern. I address questions about what we can know and what we are justified in believing, not in the abstract ahistorical way of most traditional epistemology, but through an explicit consideration of the practicalities of working these things out at the beginning of the twenty-first century. I argue that epistemology would benefit from an applied turn, analogous to the applied turn which ethics has undergone in recent decades.

To some extent, this applied turn has already begun, under the banner of “social epistemology.” Although the concerns of this book partly overlap with the concerns of social epistemology, not all social epistemology is particularly applied and not all applied epistemology is particularly social. This book is centrally concerned with practical questions about what we should believe, and how we should pursue knowledge, wisdom, and other epistemic values. Although many of these questions are (in some sense) social questions, not all of them are, any more than all questions in applied ethics are social questions.

Each chapter of this book (after the first) picks up from where the preceding chapter left off. Nonetheless each chapter can be read on its own if the reader is so inclined. The earlier parts of the book tend to be more discursive and expository than the later parts. Readers who are not particularly interested in current philosophical debates about expertise or democracy may choose to skip ahead to Chapters 4 through 6, which are more directly engaged with debates going on outside philosophy departments (and even outside universities). These three chapters are unified by two closely related themes, the importance of free public channels of communication and the dangers of overcredulous deference to formal authority.

There is very little technical language in this book. The main exception is Chapter 2, which includes some discussion of Bayesianism and probability. Again, readers should feel free to skip this if they like.

In preparing the present work, I have made use of previously published materials as follows: Chapter 1 includes some brief passages from Coady (2010); Chapter 2 includes some brief passages from Coady (2006d); Chapter 4 includes some passages from Coady (2006c); Chapter 5 includes some passages from Coady (2007b); and Chapter 6 includes passages from Coady (2011).

I am indebted to many more people than I can think to acknowledge here. I owe a very special intellectual and personal debt to my father, Tony Coady. I am also greatly indebted to Charles Pigden who first got me interested in applied epistemology through his work on conspiracy theories. Both men have taught me that that passion and good humor are compatible with good reasoning, and that good philosophy can promote good causes. I would like to thank Alvin Goldman for his uncanny ability to ask the right questions. Nothing remotely like this book could exist without him. I would also like to thank my wife Diana Barnes, my mother Margaret Coady, my brother Ben Coady, and my colleagues at the University of Tasmania – James Chase, Lucy Tatman, and especially Richard Corry for his invaluable feedback and support over the last few years. I would also like to thank Andrew Alexandra, Wayne Christensen, Steve Clarke, Brian Keeley, Neil Levy, and Julie Barnes. Thanks also to Tiffany Mok, Jeff Dean, and the people of Wiley-Blackwell for their patient assistance. And thanks also to Jenny Roberts for all her help.

1

Introduction

Epistemology has always been, at least in part, a normative discipline. It is in the business of prescription, not mere description. It characterizes certain states and practices as good, bad, or indifferent. Not content to say how the world is, it aims to say how it should be. The normative dimensions of epistemology are a consequence of the two concepts which are standardly used to define the subject, knowledge and justified belief.

Aristotle famously said that “all men by nature desire to know” (Metaphysics, 1.980a). He recognized that knowledge seeking is a pervasive feature of human life. Knowledge is desirable for instrumental reasons (i.e., as a means to other goods), but it also seems to be, at least sometimes, an intrinsic good as well (i.e., something that is good whether or not it leads to further goods). Accordingly, one of the central tasks of epistemology has been to investigate how we should go about acquiring this good.

The normative implications of the concept of justified belief are equally clear. To call a belief justified is, at the very least, to give a consideration in favor of that belief. I will be adopting and defending a stronger position in this book, sometimes called “the guidance conception of justification” (Pollock, 1986, p. 10), according to which to call a belief justified is simply to say that we ought to believe it, and to say that a person is justified in believing something is simply to say that he or she ought to believe it.

Whether epistemology is understood as an investigation into how to acquire knowledge or as an investigation into what we ought to believe, it is natural to compare it to ethics, which has long been the paradigm of a normative discipline within philosophy. It is particularly natural to compare the problem of working out what we ought to believe, to the problem which Plato thought of as the central problem of ethics, that of working out how we ought to live (Republic, Book 1, 352).1

Analogies of this kind have recently led several philosophers to develop epistemological theories that are explicitly inspired by ethical theories. But although epistemology has been willing to turn to ethics for theoretical guidance, it has been much more reluctant to follow the lead of ethics in another way. Whereas the work of philosophers like Peter Singer and Jonathan Glover has transformed the study of ethics in recent decades, by addressing contemporary social and technological issues, the study of epistemology remains quite abstract and ahistorical. It is true that some epistemologists have applied their theorizing to contemporary issues (and a handful have even called that work “applied epistemology”), but applied epistemology, unlike applied ethics, remains an obscure and underdeveloped subject. For many people, including many professional philosophers, “applied philosophy” is virtually synonymous with “applied ethics.”