What In The World Were They Thinking?

Why have so many academics believed such insane things?

Edit 8/11: I think this was a pretty bad post, and though it doesn’t have nothing important to say, I overlooked the most important explanation which is that a lot of the views I discussed have a lot more to be said for them than I implied.

Academics have believed a lot of ridiculous, false, and ridiculously false things.

Throughout the 70s, it was widely thought that other animals, including dogs, were not conscious. Until 1989, veterinarians were taught to ignore animal pain entirely. People even doubted that newborn babies were conscious! Behaviorism, the belief that conscious states were identical to certain kinds of behavior, was widespread—meaning that being in pain is the same thing as grimacing, crying out, and so on.

Logical positivism ran rampant for quite a while in academic philosophy. The logical positivists thought that the only claims that were meaningful were those that you might empirically verify or those true by definition. This meant that claims like “murder is wrong,” “the universe is billions of years old, rather than five minutes old with fake memories,” and “logical positivism is true,” are completely meaningless. Logical positivism had quite significant ascendance for decades—now, it is rejected by every single philosopher.

For a while, a sizeable chunk of linguists thought that language strictly dictated thought. Belief in the moral correctness of Eugenics—and not the benign kind that favors voluntary gene-editing—was similarly widespread. And, of course, this is just the tip of the iceberg. There have been a great many very implausible things believed by lots of academics.

Now, it would be one thing if the academics simply failed to believe things supported by evidence. But what’s particularly bizarre is that many academics seemed to believe things that were obviously ridiculous on their face. They doubted infants and dogs were conscious. One wonders if such people had ever met an infant or dog. That dogs are conscious is just about the most obvious thing in the world. Similarly, logical positivism is on its face completely ridiculous—it is, by its own lights, literally meaningless.

And it isn’t as if these views, at the time, were supported by some extremely powerful evidence that was later overturned. As far as I can tell, most of these were largely unexamined dogma, with little being said in their favor. Despite the views seeming obviously insane, and having nothing very compelling to be said for them, they were widespread.

So what the hell is going on? Why have so many academics believed such nonsense?

I think this is a genuine mystery. I don’t have any single complete answer, but I have some suggestions that might make this phenomenon a bit less puzzling.

A first thing to note is simply: lots of people believe lots of things that don’t make sense. Almost everyone seems to think that animal cruelty is wrong, yet people find the notion that it’s wrong to pay for meat produced from a factory farm to be completely absurd—at least once you tell them that’s where their meat comes from.

Billions of Muslims around the world think that Muhammad acted rightly in having sex with a nine-year-old. Billions of Christians around the world think that God acts rightly in tormenting people in a pit of fire for all of eternity (for clarification, I’m talking about the Christians who believe in a full-on fire and brimstone view of hell, rather than the softened C.S. Lewis-style view, which I think is still wrong, but not quite as diabolical).

Even crazier superstition has been common historically. Belief in the blood libel, the real existence of witches, and so on has been ubiquitous. As Dan Williams notes, the puzzling thing isn’t people having false beliefs but people having true ones. A priori, we shouldn’t be shocked that academics have crazy beliefs—so does everyone else!

(And don’t even get me started on the craziness of most people’s views on shrimp!)

The views of academics aren’t any crazier than the views of ordinary people, most of whom can’t understand thought experiments. They’re just different. And it’s no surprise that distinct groups would have distinct dogmas. Find me any group, and I’ll find you an unquestioned dogma it has.

Second, most of these false beliefs of academics have been in service of some ideology. Throughout the 20th century, there was an increasing sense that science was unraveling superstition and that nothing outside of the purview of science was legitimate. This sense that science had somehow overturned obvious—and distinctly non-scientific—notions was well captured in the line from Crime and Punishment “Compassion is forbidden nowadays by science itself.”

Never underestimate the absurdities that a person can talk themselves into believing if they have some vague sense that those absurdities are supported by The Science. I’ve had a number of experiences of trying to talk people out of utterly absurd views that they believe for little reason other than that a vaguely sciencey YouTube video asserted the view (for example, that science has shown that something can come from nothing).

Take the example of logical positivism. Now, it wasn’t supported by science—it was not as if some experimental result had uncovered that only empirical predictions or truisms are meaningful. But it had a vaguely sciencey ethos to it, being based on the idea that certain kinds of distinctly nonscientific claims were nonsense. It’s quite a lot easier to get people to believe insane things if you claim that science, and otherwise new and fashionable ideas, rule them out.

A similar thing was true of Behaviorism. For a while, talk about consciousness was seen as unscientific. Science, it was thought, was about stuff you could measure. If you can’t measure experience, then it might as well not exist. This was a big part of the motivation for Behaviorism—it was supported to make the domain of consciousness studies purely scientific (of course, it did that by ignoring the phenomenon that was supposed to be explained: consciousness! This is rather like claiming that one can make the science of rabbits more scientific by ignoring that rabbits exist!)

Behaviorism was also largely responsible for the denial of infant consciousness. Behaviorists had the idea that consciousness was only brought about by modulated reward and punishment in response to stimuli. Because babies hadn’t yet had that, it was thought they didn’t have experiences. Before Chomsky took that idea to the woodshed, it was widely assumed, almost taken to be self-evident.

Science is perfectly good when it stays in its lane. But when people try to infer non-scientific claims—about morality, meaningful utterances, and so on—from methodological scientific constraints, that is a recipe for some rather extreme falsehoods.

Third, there are all sorts of ideological forces that make academics believe similar things.¹ They often are trained by similar people. Academics take their reputations seriously, and don’t like when their colleagues snicker at them (especially if their colleagues take them to be unthinking rubes who don’t understand Truths Science Has Revealed).

This results in academics herding to adopt similar ideas. And because there’s no direct feedback from reality when academics make claims that aren’t scientific, often they remain entrenched in their error.

Many of the examples of error come from conflating some scientific fact with some non-scientific fact. Eugenics conflated facts about how populations change over time with ethical claims about what we should do. Behaviorism conflated the scientific methodological constraint that science should focus on behavior with a metaphysical principle—that there’s nothing to consciousness beyond behavior. Logical positivism conflated the notion that science is concerned with observable phenomena with the semantic and metaphysical theses, that only observable phenomena are coherent and can be discussed.

Science has direct feedback when it malfunctions in its own domain. But when it makes non-scientific claims the situation is quite different—and note, I mean non-scientific as in not concerned with scientific, rather than unscientific, as in conflicting with science. When one tries to infer false metaphysical theses from science, this doesn’t show up in the lab!

There’s a common objection to dualism, moral realism, and the like that goes like this; in the beginning we believed in a large number of things that were outside the range of science. Rather than believing in physical laws, we believed in powerful entities that carted the sun around and transformed into dolphins to rape women. Over time, we came to believe in fewer and fewer unscientific things. Given this inductive trend where over and over again we’ve mistakenly thought that something non-scientific, not governed by natural laws, existed, we should be wary of similar claims. Broadly, the argument goes, we should be naturalists, because historically when we’ve believed in non-natural things, we’ve consistently been wrong.

Now, this inductive argument has some force. But there’s another inductive argument running in the opposite direction. There’s also an ample historical record of people mistakenly trying to excise various bits of our ontology because they seemed spooky and unscientific. If physicalists claim dualists are analogous to Vitalists—those who believed in some irreducible special life force—then it should be noted that physicalists are like Behaviorists and logical positivists. If they’re in error, their error is likely similar.

I don’t think either of these arguments are super decisive. Things could turn out either way. Every instance of wrongness has a historical analogue, and every instance of rightness has an apparent historical analogue where the people behaving similarly were wrong. But at least I think this shows that there isn’t a clean inductive argument in either direction—the overall picture is quite a bit more messy.

Now, I think a lot of people will take away from the discussion so far that we simply shouldn’t trust academics that much. I have a young Earth creationist friend who doesn’t believe the scientific consensus on an old Earth in part because he thinks academics often go badly wrong—or as he put it colorfully, he doesn’t really trust a consensus of people who mostly support murder of babies in the womb!

But I think this takeaway is much too quick. First of all, these persistent historical errors haven’t been in distinctly scientific domains, but instead in domains that weren’t scientific but where people were trying to follow a vaguely scientific vibe. None of these give much reason to distrust, say, geologists.

Second, while academics might be wrong, so might you! It isn’t enough to merely note that academics have thought crazy things as a reason not to defer to them. Most people have thought crazy things too. Those who reject the conclusions of academics also don’t have a sterling track record.

I think there are three main things I take away from the preceding analysis about the crazy things academics believed.

First, if the arguments are good enough, it might be reasonable to believe that academics are being irrational. I think that’s probably true of the procreation asymmetry, for example, which has support from lots of academics despite being undermined by many powerful arguments and having nothing remotely plausible to be said for it. Your bar for this should be high, but not infinitely high.

Second, we should be a bit suspicious of non-scientific claims that are wrapped in the garb of science. This should perhaps lower our credence in moral naturalism, for instance. The track record of those who have thought that science settles various questions that don’t seem scientific—like moral questions—isn’t very good. We should, in other words, be suspicious of philosophy masquerading as science.

Third, many of these historical errors have had to do with consciousness—particularly with underestimating consciousness. This should perhaps raise your credence that consciousness is more widespread than is commonly believed.

The historical record is very clear; academics have believed a lot of nonsense! This is a worrying fact, though as I said, it’s not super clear what we should do after being made aware of that fact.

1. Note: I don’t know if this is the right way of citing it, but I asked this question to GPT-5, and its answers were part of the basis of this section.