Abstract
Mark Alfano claims that the heuristics and biases literature supports inferential cognitive situationism, i.e., the view that most of our inferential beliefs are arrived at and retained by means of unreliable heuristics rather than intellectual virtues. If true, this would present virtue reliabilists with an unpleasant choice: they can either accept inferential skepticism, or modify or abandon reliabilism. Alfano thinks that the latter course of action is most plausible, and several reliabilists seem to agree. I argue that this is not the case. If situationism is true, then inferential non-skepticism is no more plausible than reliabilism. But inferential cognitive situationism is false. The heuristic-based inferences that facilitate successful perception and communication have proven remarkably accurate, and even the psychological research on inductive reasoning does not support Alfano’s situationism. More generally, negative assessments of human reasoning tend to ignore the fact that the research on cognitive biases focuses primarily on the performance of individuals in isolation. Several studies suggest that we reason much more effectively when in critical dialogue with others, which highlights the fact that our epistemic performance depends not only on the inner workings of our cognitive processes, but on the environments in which they operate.
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Notes
Alfano then proceeds to voice his own reservations concerning this reaction to epistemic situationism.
Different forms of radical skepticism concern different domains: while Pyrrhonian skeptics deny the possibility of any knowledge whatsoever, Cartesian skeptics deny knowledge of the external world.
This formulation of inferential skepticism is highly implausible. Given a weak principle of epistemic closure, we can be said to know a tremendous amount inferentially. I know, for example, that because it is the year 2018, it is not the year 2017, 2016, 2015, etc. A more plausible formulation of inferential skepticism, and one in keeping with Alfano’s concerns about our use of heuristics, would exclude these sorts of deductively closed trivial truths. This is a much weaker doctrine than any form of radical skepticism. I am thankful to Jon Marsh for pointing this out to me.
Alternatively, one might want to classify this belief as the result of intuition rather than inference. This re-classification does nothing to address my objection, however, since the heuristics and biases literature that Alfano relies on to make his case for ICS may be used to call the reliability of this intuition into doubt, as I do in the remainder of this paragraph.
For an important collection of papers on stereotype accuracy, see Lee et al. (1995).
This move parallels Gigerenzer’s move to an ecological conception of rationality, which “…refers to the study of how cognitive strategies exploit the representation and structure of information in the environment to make reasonable judgments and decisions” (Gigerenzer 2000, p. 57).
For a clear delineation of the reckoning and response theories of inference, see Siegel (2017, Ch. 5).
In fairness to Alfano and Gould, Kahneman and Tversky themselves drew this conclusion from their early work:
In making predictions and judgments under uncertainty, people do not appear to follow the calculus of chance or the statistical theory of prediction. Instead, they rely on a limited number of heuristics which sometimes yield reasonable judgments and sometimes lead to severe and systematic errors (Kahneman and Tversky 1973, p. 273).
This line of argument constitutes what Carter and Pritchard (2017) call bias-driven skepticism. They find it not only in Alfano’s work on situationism, but in Saul’s claim that “…what we know about implicit biases shows us that we have very good reason to believe that we cannot properly trust our knowledge-seeking faculties” (2013, p. 243).
Two cautionary points are worth emphasizing. First, it remains to be empirically established that confirmation bias is sufficiently ubiquitous to pose a threat to our inferential cognition generally. Second, confirmation bias has a possible upside: while it sometimes prevents us from abandoning false beliefs, it can also decrease our chances of abandoning true beliefs. Thus, the existence of confirmation bias can be used to bolster ICS only if there are independent grounds for thinking that our inferential processes produce a significant number of false beliefs. Even if both of these claims can be established, however, there are reasons to be dubious of the situationist’s pessimistic conclusion, as I will argue below.
‘Superforecasters’ is Tetlock’s term for individuals who outperform the vast majority of forecasters. Tetlock found similar results more generally, i.e. with regular forecasters as well: “At the end of the [first] year, the results were unequivocal: on average, teams were 23% more accurate than individuals” (Tetlock and Gardner 2015, p. 201).
They are also what Morton (2012) calls, more broadly, paradoxical virtues.
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Acknowledgements
I am grateful to an audience at the University of Glasgow for their discussion of an earlier version of this paper. I owe a special note of thanks to Jon Marsh and two of this journal’s referees for their insightful, detailed, and constructive comments.
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Bland, S. Cognitive bias, situationism, and virtue reliabilism. Synthese 198, 471–490 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-018-02031-6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-018-02031-6