Put those ideas together and you get, “If something is true, it doesn’t mean you’ll believe it; and if you believe something, that doesn’t mean it is true.” Understand those two points and you understand what it means to talk about the objectivity of truth.
This is also the essence of intellectual humility. You don’t know it all, because the truth is independent of your ego. It is also why both ideas are so important and why they are so hard to achieve. To strive after truth and humility means that we must always be ready to consider new evidence and new experiences, and that we cannot rest content in our convictions. Part of being intellectually humble is treating truth, not just agreement, as a goal of inquiry. And part of the value of humility lies in the antecedent value of truth.
Yet this fact also reminds us of the political value of both concepts. In Orwell’s 1984, the protagonist, Winston Smith, is tortured by the thought policeman O’Brien until he agrees that 2 plus 2 equals 5. The point, O’Brien explains, is to make Smith see that there is no truth other than what the party says is true. What O’Brien knows is that once that premise is accepted, dissent, even critical thought, becomes literally impossible. You can’t speak truth to power if power speaks truth by definition.
This very reason is why it is crucial to slow down the spread of tribal arrogance—especially among those of us convinced we wear the armor of righteousness. It is also why we should not give up on truth and humility, and why neither information pollution nor polarization should make us abandon them. When we own what we don’t know and remain open to what others do, we exemplify a basic respect for our fellow citizens that is demanded by democracy. We may never completely realize the ideal of respect—the ideal of living in a society that treats people equally, that achieves social justice, that values truth and reasons, and that rejects arrogance and dogmatism. But these are goals worth striving for, and it would be perverse to give up on them just when they are under threat. It is precisely then that democratic ideals matter most.
Acknowledgments
FEW things bring home the realization that you don’t know very much than the act of writing a book. The writing of this book was no exception. I benefited from the comments, advice, and support of a great number of people and institutions.
Work on the book was supported by a generous grant from the John Templeton Foundation, and by the University of Connecticut and the whole team at Humility & Conviction in Public Life, a multidisciplinary research and engagement project at UConn.
Many of these ideas were first voiced as talks at the College de France, the Norwegian Academy of Sciences and Letters, the Free University of Amsterdam, Oxford University, the University of Copenhagen, the Institute of Philosophy in London, the Episteme Conference, Mount Aloysius College, Franklin & Marshall College, Cardiff University, Georgetown University, Harvard University, and the University of Pennsylvania. I benefited greatly from comments given by each of these audiences. Portions of Chapter 1 are based on work that appeared as “Arrogance, Truth and Public Discourse” in Episteme in 2018. The first section of Chapter 2 leans on research done for “Can We Be Reasonable?” coauthored with Teresa Allen; work with Hanna Gunn informed portions of the same chapter.
Over the last few years I’ve learned a considerable amount from Jason Baehr, Donald Baxter, Paul Bloom, Paul Bloomfield, Alexis Boylan, Pascal Engel, Manuela Fabiani, Anke Finger, Brandon Fitelson, Thomas Foley, Karen Frost-Arnold, Sandy Goldberg, Matthew Guariglia, Hanna Gunn, Casey Rebecca Johnson, Brendan Kane, Jason Kawall, Frank Keil, Nathan Kellen, Junyeol Kim, Jennifer Lackey, Tracy Llanara, Dana Miranda, Duncan Pritchard, Nathan Sheff, Steve Sloman, and Lynne Tirell. I’d also like to acknowledge the work of Quassim Cassam, whose book on parallel themes alas came out too late to discuss in these pages.
Teresa Allen, James Beebe, Jason Kawall, and Toby Napoletano provided feedback on very early drafts of several chapters; Terry Berthelot, Paul Bloomfield, and Micki McElya provided much-needed help with later versions. Heather Battaly and Alessandra Tanesini taught me much about virtues and attitudes (although they may not think I learned enough). Of particular help were my writing mentors Patty Lynch and Kent Stephens; my agent, Peter Matson; my terrific copy editor, Stephanie Hiebert; and my editor, Robert Weil, who saved me from myself.
My last thanks as always are to Terry and Kathleen, who have taught me that life and learning should be acts not only of determination but of joy.
Notes
Preamble: No Ordinary Question
1. Plato 1992, 352d.
2. See, in particular, Pew Research Center 2016 and Pew Research Center 2017.
3. Camus 1956, 239–40.
4. Arendt 2006, 252.
5. Throughout the book, I somewhat reluctantly use the word “tribe” to denote groups whose members share a common set of political convictions in the sense I define below—that is, a shared self-identity. The word is not perfect—it carries the baggage of colonialism—but it does convey that such groups—such as white nationalists, or liberal philosophy professors—are not “mere” groups but people connected by strands of identity.
6. Russell 1935, 11.
Chapter 1: Montaigne’s Warning
1. Montaigne 2003, 557, 543.
2. A recent and comprehensive biography by Philippe Desan stresses these points, and the relationship between Montaigne’s philosophy and his political life. See Desan 2017.
3. Montaigne 2003, 495.
4. Montaigne 2003, 693.
5. Montaigne 2003, 557.
6. See Dunning 2011.
7. See Rozenblit and Keil 2002. Keil’s work on the psychology of knowledge in particular has been groundbreaking.
8. A related and important series of results comes from Steve Sloman and his colleague Phil Fernbach (Sloman and Fernbach 2017). Their results indicate that when there is knowledge out in the community on a given topic—or even if we just think there is—we often blur the line between what’s inside our heads and what’s not. We overestimate how much we individually know because we conflate our individual knowledge with what we believe is common knowledge. We fall into thinking that all that common knowledge is common in our head too. Somebody knows how zippers work, so we must too. See also Keil et al. 2008.
9. Montaigne 2003, 674.
10. Many cognitive scientists working today agree. And while these systems are often now called (following economist Daniel Kahneman) “system 1” and “system 2,” the older terms “intuition” and “reflection” are more descriptive. Kornblith (2012) makes the case that our trust in our individual reflection is often overrated. This is surely correct, but as I argue later, reflective social practices are useful nonetheless.
11. See Kahneman 2011.
12. This tendency to take shortcuts in judgments starts at a very young age: infants compare and contrast new objects (for example, a novel ball) with objects they have experience with (for example, familiar balls), and make assumptions about the new objects on this basis. See Baldwin et al. 1993. For a relevant discussion, see Leslie 2017.
13. Hume 1999, 101.
14. See Banaji 2002, esp. 151–52.
15. For a discussion of all three of these points, see Gendler 2011, 39–40.
16. See Gendler 2011, 38–41.
17. The use of “we” here is deliberate. Regrettably, the stereotypes that influence and infect the way we categorize people are numerous; it is not difficult to think up other similar examples and the data suggests we are all susceptible, whether or not we belong to the group we are categorizing.
18. In one study, subjects, independently of race, identified guns faster, and also misidentified tools as guns more often, when primed by nonwhite faces than they did when primed with white faces. The widely accepted explanation for this result is that the subjects were more likely to associate blackness with danger than they were to associate whiteness with danger. See Payne 2001, 187. For more on attitudes and self-presentational strategies, see Dunton and Fazio 1997; Fazio et al.
1995; and Greenwald et al. 1998.
19. The research on this phenomenon is abundant; see G. L. Cohen 2003, Dana and Loewenstein 2003, Dovidio and Gaertner 1991 and 2004, Epley and Dunning 2000, Heath 1999, Miller and Ratner 1998, Pronin et al. 2007, Robinson et al. 1995, Uhlmann and Cohen 2007, and Vivian and Berkowitz 1992.
20. Hume (1888) 1978, 597.
21. Ricks 2006, 99.
22. This is a point first made in Tanesini 2016a. The present account owes clear debts to Tanesini’s groundbreaking work. Compare also Gordon 2016 (p. 6): “The rule of opinion over truth and evidence is a form of revolt of the soul against reality.”
23. As the preceding discussion in the text has underscored, intellectual arrogance here is not being understood as a trait, although nothing precludes there being traits that cause people to be epistemically arrogant. A trait is a stable dispositional quality of a person—dispositional in the sense that someone can have the trait even when failing to overtly exhibit it, and stable in that one does not typically have a trait on Monday but lack it on Tuesday. A personality trait is part of one’s psychological architecture, so to speak. Attitudes can also be dispositional. One can have the attitude of contempt toward something even if that thing does not always rise to conscious attention. The contempt can be implicit. But unlike traits, attitudes need not be stable across time.
24. Montaigne 2003, 484.
Chapter 2: The Outrage Factory
1. For more on Google-knowing, see Gunn and Lynch 2019, and Lynch 2016.
2. See Fisher et al. 2015.
3. Fisher et al. 2015, 675.
4. See Goldman 2016.
5. See Stanley 2015.
6. As I write this, Facebook has uncovered a coordinated network of fake accounts aimed at election interference. The numbers tell the story of social media’s power to contribute to pollution: while only thirty pages and accounts were flagged for such deception, just under 300,000 people were following them. See Fandos and Roose 2018.
7. I take this point to be a demonstration of Sandy Goldberg’s important argument that the reliability of this inference depends on the epistemic health of the relevant social practices and institutions. See S. Goldberg 2010, 154ff.
8. For an extremely insightful discussion of close-mindedness, see Battaly 2018b.
9. Compare Kidd 2018.
10. See Farhi 2016.
11. Compare Rini (2017), who argues that sharing content online is a form of what she calls “bent testimony.” In the analysis that I provide in the text, I agree that our acts of sharing news stories can constitute acts of testimony, but I argue that testimony is not the primary function of those acts, an idea influenced by the seminal work of Ruth Millikan.
12. Gabielkov et al. 2016.
13. And it may go even further than that, as I once heard a senior Facebook representative (off the record) acknowledge that the company’s own data showed that the problem was actually much greater: as much as 90 percent of the stories shared on that platform may not be clicked through by those sharing them.
14. See C. Dewey 2016.
15. Brady et al. 2017.
16. Crockett 2018. See also Crockett 2017.
17. As earlier, I use “assertion” here as a shorthand for “assertion of something factual or descriptive”; and “endorsement” as an act (possibly of assertion, depending on one’s underlying semantic theory) of normative recommendation, as in, “One ought to rely on this source.” My notion of a “primary function” is derived from Millikan’s (2017) notion of a stabilizing function.
18. I’ve been particularly influenced by Dorit Bar-On’s thoughts on expressivism (Bar-On and Chrisman 2009). See Blackburn 1998, Chrisman 2008, Ridge 2014, and Schroeder 2008 for additional important presentations of expressivism. The version I endorse bears affinities to so-called double-aspect accounts, according to which communicative acts can have both descriptive and expressive aspects to their content.
19. As the philosopher Karen Frost-Arnold says in a forthcoming manuscript (Frost-Arnold 2018), this can, in turn, undermine “the social practices of objectivity.” I will return to this point myself in the coming chapters.
Chapter 3: Where the Spade Turns
1. Wittgenstein 1969, sec. 94.
2. Wittgenstein 1969, sec. 204.
3. Emerson 2000, 264. @realDonaldTrump tweeted the quote on April 10, 2014.
4. The phrase “convictions are the wellsprings of doctrine” is borrowed from Walzer 2006, 114.
5. For related research on the role that conviction plays in political motivation, see Skitka et al. 2005.
6. Despite the importance of conviction for our moral and political lives, there has been surprisingly little direct attention on the topic in the history of philosophy—perhaps because philosophers are often shy around commitment and their semiprofessional role of public skeptics. Independent of some of the examples mentioned in the text, relatively recent work includes Skitka et al. 2005, Pianalto 2011, and some penetrating remarks in Williams 1985.
7. This conception of caring comes from Frankfurt 1988.
8. See Williams 1985, 169.
9. The fact that convictions require this kind of commitment—even when characterized subjunctively, as in the text—means that we aren’t necessarily committed to every proposition logically entailed by our convictions.
10. I owe this point, and much else on this subject, to James Beebe.
11. Flanagan 1996, 67. See also Dennett 2014.
12. MacIntyre 2013, 219.
13. I do not mean, in presenting these cultural narratives in binary terms, to suggest that they capture the full range of intersecting identities that we humans actually inhabit. But I do intend to capture the stifling way in which dominant cultural narratives tend to reinforce those binaries.
14. As the philosopher Bernard Williams once drolly noted, a man might deeply value his membership in MENSA without that constituting his identity; and if it did, we would think him in a bad way. See Williams 1985, 169–70.
15. Hochschild 2018, 135.
16. Wittgenstein 1969, sec. 613.
17. Skitka et al. 2005.
18. Nietzsche 2005, 55.
19. See Dunlap and McCright 2008, and McCright and Dunlap 2011. See also the discussion in Jost 2015.
20. Lynch 2012b.
21. See Kahan 2013, and Kahan et al. 2007 and 2012.
22. Greene 2014, 94.
23. See Kahan 2013, and Kahan et al. 2012.
24. See Menand 2001–2.
Chapter 4: Ideologies of Arrogance and the American Right
1. Arendt 1966, 304.
2. Arendt 1966, 348.
3. See Snyder 2015.
4. Arendt 1966, 360. Indeed, the SS even tried to expunge the word “nation” from the Nazis’ propaganda.
5. Arendt 1966, 324.
6. Arendt 1966, 324.
7. Arendt 1966, 348.
8. Arendt 1966, 349.
9. Arendt 1966, 350.
10. Strang 2017, xiv.
11. Strang 2017, xiv.
12. Strang 2017, xiv.
13. Strang 2017, 174.
14. Strang 2017, 175.
15. Hochschild 2018, 228.
16. Strang 2017, 174.
17. Frank 2016.
18. Clinton’s use of the term “deplorables” has interestingly been stripped of its context by most reporting. Made at an LGBT fundraiser in New York, the remark was embedded in a longer argument for the claim that many Trump supporters had legitimate economic complaints. Ironically, seen in the context of the full transcript (Reilly 2016), the remark can be seen as an apparent attempt to acknowledge what I’m calling both the cultural and the economic explanation.
19. See Mutz 2018.
20. Some conservatives are no doubt fooling themselves on this point, just as many liberals are fooling themselves about their own racism. You never learn much about racial attitudes in America by simply asking people, “Are you racist?” Ascriptions of racism don’t work
that way.
21. Mutz 2018, 3.
22. Mutz 2018, 7.
22. Arendt 1966, 227.
24. See Sharockman 2017.
25. For the former quote, see Reeve 2017; for the latter, see Beavers 2017.
26. See Medina 2012. The foundational text for work on ignorance is Mills 1997. See also Polhaus 2012, and Gordon 1995 and 2000.
27. Stanley 2018, 21–22.
28. Kate Manne stresses the moral delusion at the heart of misogyny and sexism. See Manne 2018, 157–58.
29. Gordon 2000.
30. The comparison with bad faith is due to the seminal account of philosopher Lewis Gordon, who applied the concept to racism: “An important aspect of a person in bad faith is his uncritical attitude toward evidence he favors and his critical attitude toward evidence that displeases him . . . to hear that blacks and Indians are savages is one thing; to accept that as a given truth is another. To continue accepting that they are supposed to be incapable of achieving feats that one regards as high human achievements in light of the countless alternative interpretations available . . . makes the acceptance a downright form of denial” (Gordon 2000, 4). For a full development of this view, see Gordon 1995.
31. Arendt 1966, 382.
32. Such a commitment may, of course, also reflect what an epistemically arrogant person believes to be true. That is, she might be committed to the unimprovability of her epistemic state (or some aspect of it) because she really believes it is unimprovable. But she might not too. In that case, the unwillingness and the accompanying commitment may be due to the arrogant person’s realizing—if only implicitly—that she is vulnerable to criticism. In such a case, she does not believe her view is unimpeachable but still takes the attitude of the know-it-all because of self-defensiveness or insecurity.
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