Topher Hunt

2011-05-12
Theory of Knowledge
Final paper

The social harm of epistemic recklessness

Social responsibility and moral obligation in the enactment of epistemic attitudes

Introduction

In this essay I will attempt to clearly articulate, rather than deeply flesh out, an argument

for one particular way in which epistemology and morality intersect. Specifically I will argue that

epistemic recklessness, or the failure to cultivate an adequately nuanced personal epistemology,

is immoral due to its diverse and adverse effects on greater society. I will model my arguments to

an extent on Miranda Fricker’s concepts of testimonial and hermeneutic injustice.

First I observe that people regularly treat knowledge using epistemic attitudes which are

inadequate to capture all important sides of a given situation, and which could be improved if the

knower so chose. If we have the ability to learn better ways of dealing with knowledge, to fail to

do so is epistemically reckless because our epistemology, like any skill, impacts how we deal

with the world. I then argue that because epistemic attitudes impact how well we resolve social

concerns, and because we encourage the employment of certain attitudes by others every time

that we ourselves employ them in public, any epistemically reckless behavior in a social setting

has subtle, harmful effects on society. Given that we have some control over the cultivation of

these attitudes, I argue that epistemic recklessness is socially irresponsible and therefore

immoral. Finally I discuss limitations to moral culpability and attempt to draw a line of
expectation for epistemic responsibility, entailing a reasonable commitment to continually

cultivating one's skill at handling knowledge.

The sorry state of epistemic practices in the general public

For a reader nominally familiar with the discipline of epistemology, I don't think I need to

dwell on the claim that people throughout our society treat the concept of knowledge more

abusively than they should. On a daily basis we see politicians citing statistics which they

couldn't support if asked; we see sloppy marketing claims which mind a legal sensibility more

than a rational one. A neighbor passes on an urban myth without reflecting on its truthfulness.

Many of these instances, in the form which reveals the fallacy most obviously, do not seem

particularly insidious. Rather, it is perhaps the subtler appearances of the same epistemic habits

-- for example the unwillingness, in the heat of an argument, to consider that your partner may

have a different perspective from yours -- which impact our lives most deeply. The failure to use

nuance in handling knowledge, as with any relevant but underdeveloped skill, will impact our

lives in many small ways, creating misconceptions where none existed and amplifying those

which did.

People typically do not spend much time reflecting on the epistemic practices with which

they do their knowing. Yet generally these could be improved. I argue that epistemic virtue is not

a coincidence of personality nor a static outcome of intelligence or early upbringing, but a skill

which can be developed over time and experience. The issue of doxastic voluntarism (in this

case, perhaps better called epistemic voluntarism) is a tricky one: clearly we cannot expect

people to choose certain ways of believing all the time, any more than we can expect them to
choose their beliefs directly. There is a passive component to one’s epistemic attitude, as to one’s

belief. As Alston (1988:260) notes, people may not have much control over their beliefs, but they

do have “a rather weak degree of ‘long range’ voluntary control” over the ways in which they

form future beliefs. To an extent, whether one’s epistemic attitudes and practices can be willfully

improved is an empirical question. We know that one’s epistemological stance develops over

time and experience, generally towards more sophistication, becoming more adequate to handle

more diverse knowledge tasks (Perry 1970). Multiple theorists, often from the Piagetian

structuralist tradition of developmental psychology, have framed the capacity they call

“Reflective Judgment” as a constructed skill rather than as a fixed trait (Dewey 1933, Kitchener

& King 2004). Furthermore, we know that this skill can be intentionally practiced and improved

(Kuhn & Crowell, in press). We can comfortably say that at least to an extent, people are not

forever confined to the epistemic attitudes they currently hold; they have the ability to cultivate

their epistemic and reflective habits.

Epistemic recklessness I define as the failure to do so when this is needed. It involves

continuing to employ maladaptive epistemic practices and enact the corresponding epistemic

attitudes, that is to say, failing to attend to and develop more adequate skills of epistemic

reasoning, when one has available the cognitive, material, and social resources prerequisite for

that development, and when one’s current epistemic attitudes are inadequate to the task of

making full sense of important experiences or situations in one’s life. Following my observations

above, such recklessness runs rampant in contemporary society. And as I will argue next, this has

dangerous consequences for our collective ability to think straight and know well.
Inadequate epistemologies propagate through our every social interaction

Some epistemic attitudes are better and more desirable than others, in that they are more

adequate to the task of understanding situations with enough nuance to handle them effectively.

We see inadequacy, for example, in the coarse oversimplifications of events offered by a certain

unnamed news station and certain unnamed talk show hosts, hinting at an inappropriately

absolutistic confidence in the certainty and fixedness of their knowledge. We also see it in the

paralyzing relativism of the stereotypical college freshman. On the other end, Perry (1970) was

quick to characterize his ideal of mature epistemology as confident yet introspective, mindful of

the complexities of knowing a thing properly yet not afraid to engage the task anyways -- in

other words, an adequate epistemic attitude strikes a functional balance between the extreme

stances.

While structural-developmental theory frames change in epistemology as an individual’s

continual fumbling towards such a balance, this arguably downplays the social component of

attitude change (as the ur-Structuralist Piaget was wont to do). Epistemology of testimony

theorists have raised awareness of just how interdependent we are on each other’s knowledge

and on how we choose to relay that knowledge. Without the proper but rare failsafes,

systematically mis-known knowledge can propagate like a virus through a community of

listeners, each hearer having a justified but faulty trust in the knowledge of the prior source.

I will take the quasi-paranoia of testimonial epistemologists such as Hardwig (1991) to

the next level by arguing that we similarly trust in, rely on, and emulate the epistemic attitudes

and practices of the trusted sources around us. Imitation of the majority, following the
convention, is a natural and convenient human impulse. Imitation may become an even stronger

tendency with a domain such as epistemology, which we rarely if ever reflect on at a conscious

level. Epistemic practices, like any practice, take time to develop properly, and by adulthood we

have learned implicitly the value of modelling those employed by the people we interact with.

Thus, enacting attitudes and behaviors in a public setting has a subtle effect of encouraging

others to take on similar attitudes and practices. Moreover, the more people regard the speaker as

a trusted authoritative source, the more pronounced this influence will be.

Obviously a single instance of epistemic recklessness will not cause a sea change in

others’ behavior. The social propagation of epistemic attitudes is probably more distributed and

insidious, like the secret to advertisements: while we may readily deconstruct any given

advertisement, we cannot prevent all of them together from changing our implicit brand

preferences. In many commonplace social communicative contexts we have not one sole voice of

irreason, but a multitude of perspectives all employing similarly unsuitable epistemic and

reasoning practices on a topic to suit their diverse purposes -- and we wonder why political

debates never seem to get resolved at any deep level! When enough socially prominent figures

demonstrate that it is acceptable for socially prominent figures to present and understand

knowledge on a topic in oversimplified and incomplete ways, it is no wonder that the rest of us

follow suit even when we have (or could develop) the mental skills to handle information more

responsibly.
The social consequences of epistemic recklessness

Social harm results from epistemic recklessness at multiple levels. First, a direct harm

can result from the knower’s failure to develop a sufficient understanding of a situation, and

consequent failure to handle it wisely. Second, a multitude of indirect harms are possible to the

extent that onlookers or participants in the situation have observed the first knower’s epistemic

attitudes and practices. Again, this harm is likely diffuse, negligible when considered in light of a

single speech act but more substantial when we consider the countless opportunities we have

each day to display our epistemic attitudes for those around us. While the individual effect is

small, in each communicative interaction we must to some extent promote to others our attitudes

around knowledge. We do as much a disservice to others by promoting epistemic attitudes which

will not serve them well when they approach future knowledge situations, as we do to ourselves

by sustaining such inadequate attitudes. And perhaps as significantly, we are also doing a

disservice to those adversely affected by any misguided actions taken by those who are

influenced by our epistemic attitudes. In short, our recklessness does a minor but very broad

disservice to the whole of social welfare.

This broad, vague, and highly indirect epistemic concern runs somewhat in parallel to the

concept of hermeneutic injustice outlined by Miranda Fricker (2007). Hermeneutic injustice

involves the frequently unintentional and unnoticed, systematic denial from marginalized groups,

of tools (or of the resources for developing the tools) for understanding important aspects of their

experience. The favored example is the woman in the 1950s who has been given no opportunity

to develop the concepts necessary to identify or articulate that her vague feelings of unease
around her employer are actually indications of subtle sexual harassment in the workplace.

Fricker argues, I think very rightly, that such exclusion from hermeneutic tools often co-occurs

with and exacerbates economic and political marginalization, creating a clear ethical mandate to

watch for and eliminate such hermeneutical injustices when noticed.

My focus is not on the marginalization and justice implications of epistemic recklessness,

but on the adverse consequences that the abuse of epistemic attitudes can have on collective

society’s overall ability to understand and respond to social challenges. Just as one drop raises

the ocean, individual endorsements of maladaptive epistemic attitudes can have a minutely

corrosive or diluting effect on our aggregate epistemic resources: the attitudes, skills, and tools

we collectively call on to interpret the world. I claim that enough such drops can, over time, turn

the tide to determine how we perceive, approach, understand, and respond to important social

issues.

This damage can also be seen through the lens of the “public sphere” envisioned by

Jurgen Habermas (1991). Habermas has acknowledged that his public sphere cannot come to

exist in our current society as it stands, but would require member individuals to have reached

the social-perspective equivalent of what Lawrence Kohlberg would call a “post-conventional”

level of reasoning in his moral judgment theory. Surely a nuanced epistemology, too, is a

requirement for the sort of mature social dialogue that Habermas dreams of. Whether we see

effective epistemology as a set of meta-hermeneutical tools or resources to be gathered, or as

attitudes to be solidified, if we allow that these tools / attitudes are reinforced in others every

time they are enacted in public, then each act of epistemic recklessness effectively poisons the
public sphere and its chances for becoming a forum for effective discourse. Deanna Kuhn has

argued similarly that our relativistic culture of “live and let live” and “to each his own”

undermines citizens’ dedication to evaluative judgment, and results in a society with dangerously

underdeveloped reasoning skills (Kuhn & Weinstock 2002:138).

Contributing to this social harm is immoral

Fricker’s concepts of testimonial and hermeneutic injustices attach much-needed ethical

implications to our epistemic practices by drawing connections between those practices and the

social injustices which they may cause or perpetuate. Fricker leaves us with the ethical mandate

to be hermeneutically sensitive and testimonially receptive, in order to avoid harming others

through our knowledge judgments. As I have stated, I am not interested specifically in concerns

of injustice and marginalization, so much as in the need to develop a society that is as adaptable

to changing challenges, robust to crises, healthy, just, and sustainable as possible. To my mind,

each individual has a moral obligation to contribute some effort towards general social welfare --

or at the very least, to ensure that their actions do not have negative externalities on broader

society. In a parallel sense to Fricker, I argue that we can hold as morally culpable those who,

having the reasonable freedom to do otherwise, behave or speak in ways that have damaging

effects on general public discourse, and on society’s general ability to understand the world in an

adequate way. This judgment relies on my above argument that epistemic recklessness has

indirect, subtle, and diffuse effects on society: even if an act causes no direct harm, it is adding to

the risk of degrading the quality of epistemic attitudes available to other members of society in
the future. While an individual act of epistemic modelling may be mean little, it still chips away

at the proverbial mountain.

We cannot fault every act which reduces our collective epistemic resources. For one,

obviously, moral judgments can only apply when the agent has an extent of freedom or choice in

the matter. The freedom to reflect and develop more careful ways of treating knowledge is

something of a luxury, requiring the social or experiential feedback to inform you that your way

of handling knowledge could be improved, as well as the cognitive flexibility and reflective

opportunities to make improvements real. Certainly not all social agents can be fairly deemed to

have these freedoms; their culpability is correspondingly smaller. Where moral fault is not

applicable because the agent was not adequately free, we can use Fricker’s concept of “moral

disappointment” instead (Fricker 2007:104).

However, Rush Limbaugh does not have the excuse that he was not free to reflect on how

he treats knowledge; marketers for New-Age pseudoscience merchandise, who are clearly aware

of the importance of nuanced marketing and the effects words have on perception, do not have

this excuse. Those people and institutions in positions of power, whose messages are heard by

millions rather than hundreds, generally cannot be exculpated from any responsibility to reflect

on the effects of their epistemic practices on society. If anything, this responsibility is greater

when the audience is larger. For those voices that matter most, then, our expectations for

epistemic responsibility are correspondingly higher.

The question of how one achieves epistemic responsibility is a deep one which I will not

address here. From one angle, to be epistemically responsible is to avoid being epistemically
reckless: that is, to exercise one’s freedom to consider, reflect on, and improve one’s epistemic

attitudes and practices. Given the above arguments about the social ramifications of one’s

epistemic practices, responsibility additionally entails an awareness and concern for the effects

that one’s attitudes around knowledge may have on others and on society as a whole. But the task

of specifying traits that are epistemically responsible is probably best left, on the one hand, to

developmental psychology to trace what epistemological stances we settle on when we have

become dissatisfied with all others, in effect letting society vote on what epistemic attitudes are

the most mature; and on the other hand, to the virtue epistemologists and deontological

epistemologists to define from a theoretical angle what is good and valuable about an epistemic

attitude. One trait that I think describes the epistemically responsible is a (contained) humility

and tentativeness in one’s treatment of knowledge, or the awareness that one’s way of

understanding on a thing is very likely not complete and could always be improved. I am

reminded of a quote by Scott Peck: “The best decision-makers are those who are willing to suffer

the most over their decisions but still retain the ability to be decisive” (Peck 2002:76). Perhaps

epistemic responsibility does not need specific definition beyond this awareness of

incompleteness of one’s understandings, and a willingness to reflect and improve on them.

Conclusion

In this essay I have tried to articulate intelligibly my intuition that each person has a

moral obligation to reflect on how they know. A moral obligation to what? -- The ends of this

responsibility was perhaps the most difficult for me to make concrete. The obligation is one to

myself, because my handling of the world and my success in life are by-products of my success
at developing my own epistemic attitudes; but because each social interaction is also a social

influence, my obligation is also to the tens of people which I directly speak with on a daily basis,

and the hundreds of people they in turn see, and the thousands after that. In the same way that

my epistemic attitudes impact my welfare and handling of events, my epistemic influences also

weakly influence the understandings, welfare, and actions of others. This effect need not stop

with distance; to my mind, it can merely grow weaker with each link. But added together, all my

moments of epistemic influence are probably far from weak; they are merely invisible and

untraceable by virtue of their diffuse distribution. There is nothing trivial, then, about the moral

implications of epistemic recklessness.

For one who perceives himself to have an above-average reflective tendency, what extra

obligations does this entail? Should I spend my energy sowing the seeds for epistemic attitudes?

How do I balance this with my other perceived moral obligations? Am I morally required to

speak out in places where I might prudently stay silent, in order to ensure that my attitudes

towards knowledge are spread and reinforced in others? I see these questions as koans to be held

in awareness, rather than as problems to be answered definitively.

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