Epistemic Stubbornness & The Problem Of Akrasia

I am not sure how good this book When Bad Thinking Happens to Good People: How Philosophy Can Save Us from Ourselves by Steven Nadler and Lawrence Shapiro is but this beautiful review Ryan M. Brown is full of insights. 

This is a one of those standard books which got written post anti-vaccine movement and other right wing lunacy. Similar books had been published during Iraq war. These books signals the brilliance of left wing thinking and stupidity of right wing. 

Daniel Kahneman's famous lines of "we are blind to our own blindness" goes unheeded by the left. I am sure the book doesn't cover the idiocy of the left when it comes to socialism , woke-ism, or virtue signaling. 

Bottom-line, this epistemic stubbornness is neither right or left wing trait but many sapiens have this trait outside of politics. 

I can bet that Ryan M. Brown's review is better than the book because he stresses on the importance of Consilience - Unity of Knowledge (thank you E.O.Wilson) to see reality better.

This kind of bad thinking is instead a kind of “epistemic stubbornness,” a refusal to give up one’s beliefs in the face of countervailing evidence. The epistemically stubborn are guilty of confirmation bias: they ignore any evidence that doesn’t help their case and glom on to any information that does—or seems to. Epistemically stubborn people may be intellectually gifted. They may understand the “canons of good reason” but refuse to abide by them. The key words in this analysis are “stubborn,” “ignore,” and “refuse.” While epistemically stubborn people are making intellectual mistakes when they uphold beliefs contrary to readily accessible evidence—beliefs that are often based on nothing more than hearsay and that conflict with other truths the stubborn thinker holds—they are also making moral mistakes. And not only because epistemic stubbornness can lead to morally bankrupt action. According to Nadler and Shapiro, epistemic stubbornness is morally fraught even when it doesn’t produce harmful consequences. Whatever its practical effect, it is a “character flaw deserving of blame.” Luckily, they tell us, “bad thinking is always avoidable.”

The cure for the “virus” of bad thinking lies in a humanistic education, especially one that teaches us the “canons of good reasoning” as made available through philosophy. More broadly, the “antidote” is the examination of life promoted by Socrates, which seeks to cultivate a deep intellectual humility: I must come to recognize what I do and do not know, and I must never act as if I know when I do not know. If the conspiratorial, epistemically stubborn person can come to recognize what counts as good reasoning (valid deduction, statistically sound induction) and then begin asking herself, “Why do I believe this? Do I really have good and compelling evidence to support this claim?” then she can set forth on the road to recovery. When she learns to approach each of her beliefs with the same humility and demand for sound reasoning and evidence, then she will become wise.

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The real problem is that they think of philosophy too restrictively. As a result, their description of the epidemic doesn’t go deep enough and their solution to it isn’t expansive enough. What’s missing is something else we can learn from Socrates.

In Book VII of Plato’s Republic (the “Allegory of the Cave”), Socrates tells his conversation partners that “education is not what the professions of certain men assert it to be. They presumably assert that they put into the soul knowledge that isn’t in it, as though they were putting sight into blind eyes.” Socrates’s account of education, by contrast,

indicates that this power [reason] is in the soul of each, and that the instrument with which each learns—just as an eye is not able to turn toward the light from the dark without the whole body—must be turned around from that which is coming into being together with the whole soul until it is able to endure looking at that which is and the brightest part of that which is. And we affirm that this is the good, don’t we?

Shortly before making this claim, Socrates tries to direct his interlocutors’ attention to what he calls the “good beyond being,” which is the transcendent, lovable cause of all existence and knowledge. (Early Christian intellectuals reading this text would say “this is what we mean by ‘God.’”) According to Socrates, education is not about fixing a broken faculty or pouring information into an empty mind. Instead, it is about redirecting an already functioning capacity for thinking so that it’s looking at what really matters. Reason, however, can’t be turned toward the True, the Good, and the Beautiful until everything else in the soul, including our desires and emotions, has been redirected—just as your eyes can’t be directed toward what’s behind you until you move the rest of your body to face the same direction.

If Socrates is right, then the “cure” for bad thinking must be much more radical and holistic than Nadler and Shapiro think it is. They believe the problem lies mostly in the form of one’s thinking (does one abide by the “canons of good reasoning”?) rather than the content (what one thinks about). They want us to hold opinions based on evidence and believe that merely developing the logical tools of reasoning will suffice. This makes it hard for them to answer an important question: Why do even professional philosophers—those most conversant with the rules of logic and the standards of evidence—fall into bad thinking? Of course, many who are susceptible to conspiracy theories and junk science would benefit from the kind of education in logic and scientific reasoning that Nadler and Shapiro promote, but such an education is clearly insufficient. As Socrates argues, the epistemically stubborn need to be redirected from their deficient orientation to reality. One can’t correct wishful thinking without correcting the non-rational part of us that does the wishing. Reason can’t be properly directed until the sub-rational aspects of the human soul are likewise directed toward what’s genuinely true and good. To their credit, the authors do discuss the problem of akrasia—when we know what’s right and yet can’t get ourselves to do it because of the force of some opposed emotion or desire—and they do briefly acknowledge extra-rational motivations in the last few pages of their book. Still, they remain placidly confident that the epistemically stubborn person just needs to start asking herself the right questions.

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Consider, by contrast, Terry Eagleton’s account in Reason, Faith, and Revolution of radical Islamic terrorism in terms of Western imperial aggression and the political and economic conditions that result from that aggression. These conditions prompt the would-be terrorist into precisely the kind of bad thinking Nadler and Shapiro are talking about. Or consider Michael Sandel’s recent evaluation in The Tyranny of Merit of Trumpist populism in terms of the failures of Reaganite political economy to afford economic security and social esteem to working-class white voters. Eagleton and Sandel both recognize that we don’t think in a vacuum; if we want to understand why people fall for crazy, debunked ideas, we have to understand the material conditions from which their reasoning emerges. And if we want to combat those ideas, we have to address those conditions. That means our approach to the problem must be informed by history, politics, and economics, not just logic and epistemology—important as these are. If there is indeed an epidemic of bad thinking in twenty-first-century America, it may be evidence not only of untrained minds, but a defective society.

For starters, I would also add biology, geology, and a healthy lifestyle to the list which will help us all to see reality better. 

Problem of akrasia—when we know what’s right and yet can’t get ourselves to do it because of the force of some opposed emotion or desire. Most people understand they cause immense animal sufferings by choosing to eat dead bodies of animals for their gastrointestinal pleasures. But yet, most people don't stop eating meat. Doesn't that sound like the problem of akrasia?