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Social Prerequisites for the Proper Function of Individual Reason

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  03 January 2012

Hilary Kornblith
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Extract

Human beings form beliefs by way of a variety of psychological processes. Some of these processes of belief acquisition are innate; others are acquired. A good deal of interesting work has been done in assessing the reliability of these processes. Any such assessment must examine not only features intrinsic to the psychological processes themselves, but also features of the environments in which those processes are exercised; a mechanism which is reliable in one sort of environment may be quite unreliable in others. This is true not only of the physical environment; it is true of the social environment as well. This has important implications for how we should think about the exercise of individual reason, as well as the interpersonal practice of giving and asking for reasons.

Type
Research Article
Information
Episteme , Volume 1 , Issue 3 , February 2005 , pp. 169 - 176
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2005

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References

Notes

2 Born to Rebel: Birth Order, Family Dynamics, and Creative Lives, Pantheon, 1996Google Scholar.

3 Ibid., 39. This figure corrects for the greater number of later-borns in the population.

4 Ibid., 39.

5 Ibid., 53.

6 This oversimplifies somewhat. Sulloway discusses the influence of family size: see, for example, the chart on 99.

7 Again, this oversimplifies somewhat. As Sulloway points out, only children, while conceptually conservative, are not nearly as conservative as firstborns in multi-child families. See Ibid., 22-3.

8 Ibid., 537, n. 43.

9 See, for example, Wason, Peter, “On the Failure to Eliminate Hypotheses in a Conceptual Task,” Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, 12(1960), 129–140CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Lord, C., Ross, L., and Leper, M., “Biased Assimilation and Attitude Polarization: The Effects of Prior Theories on Subsequently Considered Evidence,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 34(1979)Google Scholar; and Nisbett, Richard and Ross, Lee, Human Inference: Strategies and Shortcomings of Social Judgment, Prentice Hall, 1980Google Scholar, chapter 8. For a recent collection of papers on these and related issues, see Gilovich, T., Griffin, D., and Kahneman, D., Heuristics and Biases: The Psychology of Intuitive Judgment, Cambridge University Press, 2002CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

10 I would not want to assume that the sole purpose of the public discussion of ideas is epistemic; it should not be. There are other legitimate interests which the public discussion of ideas may serve. Nevertheless, getting at the truth is one very important function of the public discussion of ideas, and it is worth asking how such discussion should be organized so as to serve that purpose effectively. We can only determine how potentially competing interests may be balanced against one another if we understand the extent to which those interests are advanced or impaired. My interests in this paper are exclusively epistemic. For an extremely interesting discussion of the ways in which epistemic concerns may conflict with others, see Kitcher's “An Argument about Free Inquiry,” and Science, Truth and Democracy, cited in note 1.