Invincible Philosophical Ignorance And The Mystery Of Philosophers

Why aren't philosophers more confused?

People are often confused by other people’s startling propensity to make errors in reasoning. But this gets it backward; the default is error. We should be surprised when people get things right!

The brilliant Dan Williams (he’s a philosopher, by the way, which will prove relevant later) has an excellent article about this. Ignorance isn’t a mystery, just as poverty, war, and disease aren’t mysteries. They are the default state, the state we are in when we fail to cast off our evolutionary yoke, the state that we remain in absent fantastic feats of ingenuity of the sort that took thousands of years to get right.

Asking why people are ignorant gets the question the wrong way around: it’s like asking why people aren’t billionaires. The human cognitive apparatus is riddled with bias and error—we’ll be wrong unless all the stars align to make us righ. Carefully and impartially considering the evidence is extraordinarily rare.

To take one example, many people are lifelong Christians. This massively affects how they live, who they marry, how they vote, and so on. Many of these people never even consider the arguments for and against Christianity—never carefully considering the belief, but instead take it as the default because that’s how they were raised. Even though I believe in God, and have a credence in Christianity in the low double-digits, I agree with Bryan Caplan (a first!) when he says:

the way that people form religious beliefs is so intellectually irresponsible that their conclusions are almost guaranteed to be false.  People:

• accept their religious beliefs with little or no evidence

• accept religious beliefs that are contrary to the evidence

• accept religious beliefs without studying competing views

• are certain about religious beliefs that are dubious at best, and

• accept their religious beliefs not because they are intellectually compelling, but because they are emotionally comforting. 

The same thing is true in reverse. Talking about God with an atheist—even an atheist of the sort who is confident enough in their views to want to talk about it with anyone they meet—consistently reveals huge numbers of utterly risible errors. Even in circles full of very intelligent and generally interesting people, like the Rationalism Community, the things they say are so confused that it’s sort of staggering. (Note: I’m not saying that all atheists are bad at reasoning about God. I’m saying that most people reasoning about most things are super confused, including atheists).

I’m going to pick one particular fellow to illustrate the point about profound ignorance. This guy isn’t especially noteworthy in this respect—perhaps distinguished only by his uniquely vast combination of snark and confusion. Here are some representative examples of his arguments:

This guy spends hours a day writing (okay, Tweeting) about atheism. But he still has about the level of understanding of atheism of a particularly precocious preschooler. And he’s not anywhere near atypical!

Simply being exposed to the truth doesn’t clear up one’s false beliefs. This guy is constantly exposed to atheists explaining why he’s wrong about stuff, yet he doesn’t change his mind. The world is filled with people who extensively discuss some topic, yet have no idea what they’re talking about in regards to that topic.

Confusion isn’t the sort of thing that you can be easily talked out of. As someone who has talked to a lot of undergraduates about philosophy, and was quite thoroughly philosophically illiterate a few years ago, I can assure you—people’s confusion survives a rigorous argumentative drubbing.

So now we come to the mystery: why aren’t philosophers more confused?

Oh sure, some think some wild things. Daniel Dennett never seemed to realize that he had thoughts and feelings (note,

Lance S. Bush

this is a joke—no need to write a 5,000-word article about this). David Lewis thought every possible world is concretely real—that’s a pretty staggering error. Philosophers get a lot wrong, with some even affirming—shock!—the dreaded self-sampling assumption.

But on the whole, they’re a pretty non-confused bunch. The sorts of errors that normal people make and can never be talked out of are virtually never made by philosophers. Let me give a particularly dramatic example of this.

Last year, I took a class by Peter Railton. In it, Railton gave a lecture about psychological egoism—the notion that people only act in their self-interest. Before the lecture, he polled the class, and around 50% of people accepted psychological egoism. Then he gave the lecture.

The lecture was absolutely devastating. Railton delivered Mike-Tyson-level body shots to the doctrine of psychological egoism—noting that the main (only) argument for it relied straightforwardly on equivocation, and that it’s a remarkably poor explanation of huge swathes of human behavior, including charitable donation, people making sacrifices for their family, and people dying for their country. At the end of the lecture, he polled the class again.

And there was a change alright. Now about 40% of the class accepted psychological egoism.

Psychological egoism is believed by almost no philosophers. This is for a simple reason: it’s stupendously wrong in obvious ways and supported by nothing. And yet it’s really hard to talk people out of it. If you talk to normal people who accept it, even after you give arguments that completely reduce the view to smithereens, they keep fricking believing it.

So how do philosophers come to stop believing psychological egoism? How is it that, though it’s almost impossible to talk most people out of it, nearly every philosopher comes to reject it? Psychological egoism isn’t remarkable in this regard—there are lots of beliefs that normal people can’t be talked out of, but philosophers uniformly come to reject.

In other words, if our ignorance is so invincible, how do philosophers come not to be ignorant in various common and important ways?

I think there are three main answers to this puzzle.

The first is just that philosophers are generally not the sorts of people to believe these stupid things. Sure, philosophers believe a lot of weird things, but they’re fairly unique in their tendency to wonder deeply about fundamental questions. I’d imagine that, on account of generally being smart and thoughtful, people who go on to become philosophers would be less likely to accept psychological egoism after reflecting on it even as undergraduates. So while ignorance may often be invincible, perhaps philosophers are the sorts of people not to be ignorant about the topics that they’re eventually not confused about. Or perhaps philosophers are the sorts of people who rapidly change their minds after being presented with the overwhelmingly decisive arguments against psychological egoism.

In other words, perhaps the sorts of people like Mr. Darwin to Jesus who are bad at thinking about these subjects simply don’t become philosophers. Maybe if he became a philosopher, he’d remain similarly confused and ignorant, but he simply isn’t the sort of person to become one.

Second, philosophy improves thinking. When I was a wee lad—about four years ago—I was super confused about all sorts of things. I had ridiculous objections to ethical intuitionism and was unable to see that my moral views also rested on intuitions. Many of the things I thought even just two years ago—which you can see in my early articles—were crazy, false, and bizarre. They were ill-formed, muddled, and wrong.

What caused me to stop believing these weird things wasn’t hearing any particular argument against them. It was instead thinking about other things and becoming less confused. As Michael Huemer has noted, when one studies philosophy, they become clearer at thinking, coming to see their previous reasoning much the way one sees weirdness in dreams. You wonder “how did I think that,” just like after a dream you wonder “why wasn’t I surprised when Mrs. Havington grew three new heads and began chasing me around with a thing of shaving cream?” Having the experience of realizing “oh shit, lots of what I thought before was in profound error, I can’t believe I ever thought it was right,” is pretty common among people who study philosophy.

To put it more succinctly: ignorance is not invincible, and often goes away when a person becomes a clearer and better thinker. Philosophy makes people clearer and better thinkers.

Third, a lot of philosophical confusion takes a while to clear up, but can be cleared up with sufficient argument. I bet if Peter Railton had a one-on-one conversation with most of the students who remained egoists, he could eventually convince them of the craziness of their view. But philosophers talk at great length about these sorts of issues, and so they’re argued out of their weird and crazy beliefs.

I’d imagine each of these are part of the story. Philosophers are better at thinking naturally than others, reflect deeply on their beliefs, and through philosophical training come to abandon their confused views.

You might wonder: why did I focus on philosophers here? Don’t other people get talked out of their weird and crazy views? In short, not really. Talk to political scientists about most things, and while they’ll often be quite technically adept and know the pertinent theories, they’ll often be bizarrely poor at thinking—endorsing things like psychological egoism, a bizarre and incoherent jumble of moral views, inchoate opposition to veganism, and weird hyperpartisanship. As

Michael Huemer

says in Knowledge, Reality, and Value:

By the way, it is not just studying in general or being educated in general that is important. The point I’m making is specifically about philosophy, and about a particular style of philosophy at that (what we in the biz call “analytic philosophy”). When I talk to academics from other fields, I often find them confused. That is a very common experience among philosophers. To be clear, academics in other fields, obviously, know their subject much better than people outside their field know that subject. That is, they know the facts that have been discovered, and the methods used to discover them, which outsiders, including philosophers, do not. But they’re still confused when they think about big questions, including questions about the larger implications of the discoveries in their own fields. Whereas, when philosophers think about other fields, we tend to merely be ignorant, not confused.

A philosopher friend of mine recounted a funny story that took place when he was at a history lecture. One of the historians rather pompously said “see, as historians, we’re not so naive as to believe in eternal truths.” My friend pointed out that that belief itself is an eternal truth—did eternal truths previously exist but then stop existing? Did the fact that, say, there are infinite prime numbers, at least one proposition is true, and that married bachelors are impossible, begin in the last hundred years?

But non-philosophers constantly say stuff like this. They just don’t seem to get it. Of course, this is not universal—lots of non-philosophers are pretty good at thinking and lots of philosophers (mostly the continentals) are bad at thinking. But philosophy does seem to have a unique ability to improve the quality of one’s thinking.

For this reason, I think the second explanation—that philosophy improves thinking—is the main reason that philosophers overcome the sort of confusion common among undergraduates and normal people. Philosophy really does have a profound ability to dissolve conceptual error.