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The Social Origins of Folk Epistemology

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Abstract

Because reasoning allows us to justify our beliefs and evaluate these justifications it is central to folk epistemology. Following Sperber, and contrary to classical views, it will be argued that reasoning evolved not to complement individual cognition but as an argumentative device. This hypothesis is more consistent with the prevalence of the confirmation and disconfirmation biases. It will be suggested that these biases render the individual use of reasoning hazardous, but that when reasoning is used in its natural, argumentative, context they can represent a smart way to divide labor without loosing epistemic value.

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Notes

  1. What is called here, following Sperber, intuitive mechanisms is also known as system 1 processes, or heuristic system. I prefer the term intuitive because: (i) it is more explicit than ‘system 1’, (ii) reasoning also has a very heuristic nature (in fact more so than most intuitive processes) and, (iii) it corresponds quite well with the naïve notion of intuition—something we feel is right without knowing the reasons.

  2. By specialized mechanism I mean ‘module’, but not so much as the word is often used in the cognitive sciences (following Fodor), but in the more general sense of a mechanism whose inner workings are mostly independent from other mechanisms.

  3. That is, provided that the other participants propose other non normative answers. The case in which one of the participants has the normatively correct answer and the good explanation for it hasn’t been tested, but given the results mentioned above and the fact that it is quite easy to demonstrate the correct answer, she should win the argument.

  4. Again, this is assuming that no participant is aware of the normative answer and the normative explanation. When this is the case, reasoning decreases the sunk costs fallacy (Simonson and Nye 1992).

  5. The benefits of information pooling have been well demonstrated in other animals, who seem to be using a form of the Condorcet Jury Theorem (Conradt and Roper 2003, 2005; List 2004). However, debate has features that render it quite different from other forms of opinion aggregation (such as voting—as in the CJT—or bargaining). There is no space here to discuss these issues further, but see Elster (1998) for an opinion that would be closed to the one that would be defended here.

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Acknowledgments

Dan Sperber’s work and his support have been instrumental in the writing of this article. I also wish to thank two anonymous reviewers and an editor for their comments and suggestions.

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  1. Philosophy, Politics and Economics Program, University of Pennsylvania, 313 Cohen Hall, 249 South 36th Street, Philadelphia, PA, 19104, USA

    Hugo Mercier

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Mercier, H. The Social Origins of Folk Epistemology. Rev.Phil.Psych. 1, 499–514 (2010). https://doi.org/10.1007/s13164-010-0021-4

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