Epistemic inefficacy vs. other epistemic misconducts

“bad news”, in a sense (“information with unfavorable implications”, also called

“preference-inconsistent information”); both are unwilling to assert a conclusion after coming across these news, and would rather go after further information of a certain kind, despite the costs and the odds of lengthening such enterprise. But do these two conducts, epistemic inefficacy and motivated skepticism, amount to the same thing?

Stemming from research carried out in 1970’s on the structure of human reasoning (e.g., Tversky & Kahneman 1973, 1974; Shiffrin & Schneider 1977), a variety of scientific studies have been presented as evidence in support of the claim that information consistent with a preferred conclusion tend to be examined less critically by a person, while information inconsistent with a preferred conclusion tend to be examined with more caution and criticism (see for instance Schwarz 1991). In other words: science shows that one’s preferences have a bearing upon how skeptical her response to evidence turns out to be. Specifically, people tend to be more skeptical when accessing data that goes against what they, for whatever reason, would rather be the case.

So motivated skepticism is basically a variety of confirmation bias, the

“seeking or interpreting of evidence in ways that are partial to existing beliefs, expectations, or a hypothesis in hand” (Nickerson 1998: 175). Here are two important things to take notice about this: first, that this response is understandable, if we think that when a newly accessed information is inconsistent with existing beliefs, expectations, or a hypothesis that a person already has, it will require from that person that she makes certain adjustments in her doxastic mesh, so to speak, and making those adjustments takes cognitive effort. It costs us energy. In order to make sure we’re not spending energy in vain, double-checking the information is useful. So it’s not always, or not necessarily, a bad thing. Second, confirmation biases are sub-personal mechanisms: they’re natural, pervasive, not person-specific (meaning we all have them), not content-specific (meaning they can affect different areas of one’s life); they’re also predictable and mostly unconscious.

Now, if we think of vices as being a matter of habit (as opposed to a product of nature),as being personal (meaning some people have them and others don’t), as being content-specific (meaning specifically tied to certain grounding experiences) and systematically bad (they systematically get in the way of us attaining some epistemic good, like knowledge, understanding, etc.), then vices and sub-personal

mechanisms are two very different things. If motivated skepticism is a variety of cognitive bias, then it’s not the same thing as epistemic inefficacy.

However, as Cassam (2019 Chapter 2) emphasizes, it is often difficult to decide whether a particular phenomena is better accounted for in personal, sub-personal or other terms (for instance, supra-sub-personal, or structural, terms); or which of these factors plays the most prominent role in each particular outcome, if they are indeed different factors. Those can actually be different levels of explanation, or levels of description (as, for instance, in Dennett 1969), as opposed to a whole/part distinction⁶³. In other words, motivated skepticism could be the correspondent sub-personal explanation for the same phenomena I’m trying to explain in sub-personal terms.

I cannot rule this out.

Notwithstanding, I would like to highlight some aspects due to which I believe epistemic inefficacy is not, or at least not necessarily, the exact personal counterpart of sub-personal motivated skepticism, but rather a different thing.

In motivated skepticism, individuals faced with preference-inconsistent information are more motivated⁶⁴ to critically analyse the available data, compared to individuals who are faced with preference-consistent information (Ditto & Lopez 1992: 581). However, the crucial fact about the information at stake in the palaeontologist case (contrary to what we see in the Kubler-Ross’ patient case, as well as in other paradigmatic cases of motivated skepticism) is not that it is preference-inconsistent, but rather that it is ambiguous, or creates ambiguity.

Let’s concede that Bob has a preference for Nanotyrannus being a separate species rather than a juvenile T-rex (because this, if true, would mean he has, say, a scientific accomplishment: he would be the author of the mainstream theory in the field). Accordingly, let’s suppose that the series of studies pertaining the ontogenetic niche partitioning theory indeed presents him with data that is preference-inconsistent. Even so, the critical fact here is that this theory actually creates genuine

63 For an excellent discussion on whether the personal-subpersonal distinction is a level-level distinction or a whole-part distinction see Drayson (2014).

64 It was later suggested by authors such as Friedman (2012) that the cases discussed by Ditto &

Lopez (1992) are cases of selective skepticism not due to genuine motivational bias, but rather due to non-motivational influences, including cognitive bias related to break in expectation. According to Friedman, people tend to be more skeptical when dealing with preference-inconsistent information because it fails to confirm to their prior expectations, not her prior motivations. For the purposes of my discussion, it makes no difference whether the selective skepticism seen in those cases is due to motivational bias, expectational bias or a combination of the two (as proposed by Ditto et. al. 2003).

What matters is that it is a matter of cognitive biasing.

ambiguity and, therefore, genuine dilemma. Before this theory came into play, the fossil examined by Bob and others of its kind were to be acknowledged as Nanotyrannuses right away. It was after this theory entered the stage that those fossils begun to be seen as Nanotyrannuses or juvenile T-rexes. So Bob is responding to something that is, at least initially, a real conundrum: the conundrum represented by the claims p and p’, “The examined skeleton is of a new species” and

“Adult Nanotyrannuses are juvenile Tyranossauruses”, respectively. This is the remarkable difference between Bob’s case and parochial cases of motivated skepticism.

To be sure, there is a loser sense in which every time you face the question of whether p, you are actually facing a dilemma, in a loose sense: the dilemma of whether p or not-p. But it is not the same thing to be faced with the question of whether p and to be faced with an array of evidence that is ambiguous between p and not-p. The diagnosis received by the Kubler-Ross’ patient, for instance, is not ambiguous between “terminal illness” and “non-terminal illness” – the R-rays did not present themselves (or in other words, were not presented to her) as possibly meaning “either terminal illness or something else”. It is the patient who treated them as ambiguous without being entitled to, by setting herself off on an odyssey aimed at uncovering other possible meanings for them. In this sense, the X-rays yield genuine preference-inconsistent information, because the meaning of the X-rays unambiguously and directly counters the patient’s preference for being healthy (p) rather than terminally ill (not-p), in a scenario in which she has no evidence whatsoever in favour of p.

In a similar fashion, in one of Ditto & Lopez experiments, half the subjects received evidence that they had a genetic trait indicative of a high likelihood of developing a pancreatic disorder (Ditto & Lopez 1992: 574-580; see also Ditto et. al.

2003). Here the individuals who received bad news, but not those who received good news, doublechecked the evidence to see whether the trait was indeed correlated with higher likelihood of the disorder. Like the Kubler-Ross’ patient, they treated the bad news as ambiguous, even though it was not.

These subjects act differently from Bob the palaeontologist, who takes advantage of the fact that the information yielded by the ontogenetic niche partitioning theory creates real ambiguity. Bob keeps yearning, or, in a sense, waiting, for the disambiguation to be established, for him to take a stand. The problem is that

he is never willing to concede that the disambiguation has been established. As a result, he waits too long. He keeps waiting even after disambiguation has already been established, because he fails to acknowledge that it has already been established.

It could be objected here that from this moment on (from the moment disambiguation has already been established onwards), Bob falls into motivated skepticism, because there is no more ambiguity, therefore no more reason to keep the quandary open. All there is is the “bad news” for Bob, but yet he keeps refusing to take them at face value. But my point is precisely that Bob fails to acknowledge that this crucial point has come at the time it comes. He transitions from a moment in time in which he indeed cannot close the case (because there is genuine ambiguity, which justifies inquiry being kept open), to a moment in time in which he definitely can and should close it (because there is no more ambiguity). But the transition between these two points in time is soft. Bob does not keep up with the exact moment in which he is not anymore in the first “phase” and has already entered the second.

This is different from what we see in the motivated skeptic, to whom there has never been a first phase, to begin with. The Kluber-Ross patient sees ambiguity where there has never been any. Bob fails to see disambiguation where there previously has been ambiguity. So it makes more sense to think of motivated skepticism as accounting for a component of epistemic inefficacy conducts, rather than that these conducts, broadly understood, are cases of motivated skepticism.

There is also another significant difference. The Kubler-Ross patient is faced with preference-inconsistent information in a scenario where she is entitled to having a preference, contrary to Bob who, as a scientist, is expected to not have this sort of preference. In other words, while it is understandable that people prefer being healthy to being ill, it is not so understandable that scientists prefer certain theories to be true to the detriment of rival theories. Bob should not prefer that the Nanotyrannus was a separate species, because having this sort of preference pushes one into infringing conventional standards of the research community with the aim of arriving at a particular result, and this is the opposite of what science should be (Wilholt 2009).

As such (because this is epistemically harmful in itself), having preferences of this sort could be considered an epistemic vice in its own right. So part of the reason why Bob’s epistemic conduct comes out as blameworthy (certainly more

blameworthy than the Kluber-Ross patient’s) and almost anecdotal has to do with the fact that, if he does have said preference, than his epistemic inefficacy is mixed up with an array of other vices including vanity, wishful thinking and, perhaps, self-righteousness.

I don’t think that it’s always the case that epistemically inefficacious people have preferences. What they do have is residual commitment to some idea, but this is not the same as preferring that idea to be true rather than false. We can be committed to ideas for numerous reasons, including out of habit and out of fear, in which cases it’s not strictly correct to say that we prefer them to be true.

Nevertheless, I do think that people like Bob usually have residual commitment to certain ideas because they have personal preferences, and that this adds up to their vicious pattern. To many of them, the dilemma is personal – something that they hold dear hangs in the line, so the stakes are high, and this is reflected on the proportions of their caution. Perhaps, if Bob, for instance, did not have a preference, it would have been easier for him to be convinced of the ontogenetic niche partitioning theory at some point after being exposed to fair amount of evidence in its favour⁶⁵.

Last in the list of things that allow us to compare epistemic inefficacy to cases of sub-personal mechanisms, it has been pointed to me that Bob’s case also resembles the gambler’s case in the “gambler’s fallacy” discussed by Tversky &

Kahneman (1974). The more bets the gambler has lost, the more he feels a win is now due, even though each new turn is independent of the last. It resembles Bob’s case because Bob, just like the gambler, appears to feel that (or to be reasoning from the assumption that) the more the fossils dig off the ground are of other types of dinosaur, the closer the much wanted fossil that can solve the conundrum for good is to be dug off. His expectation that this fossil is going to be dug doff in the next expedition apparently raises as time goes by, rather than diminish, and that is why he sits on the fence for so long.

The mechanism underlying the gambler’s conduct is described by Tversky &

Kahneman as a garden-variety example of heuristics: resort to shortcuts or rules of thumb that are prone to error, due to limitations either in cognitive ability or in terms of the resources required for reasoning according to probability theory, or simple

65 It is interesting to note that preferences seem to play a role in many cases of practical akrasia. The chocolate cake person, for instance, might have a quite easier time quitting alcohol, cigarettes or other deserts, than she has quitting chocolate cake. This might be at least in part because the person is partial to chocolate cake, i.e., she has a strong preference for this specific treat.

logic. I pose no objection towards this sort of mechanism being a component of epistemic inefficacy or a description of some of what lies “underneath”. But, again, vices and sub-personal mechanisms do not completely coincide, because the former are personal, tied to certain grounding experiences and they systematically produce noxious cognitive effects, whereas heuristics is neither.