All Talked Out: Naturalism and the Future of Philosophy 0190686804, 9780190686802

Citation preview

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ALL TALKED OU T

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THE ROMANELL LECTURES

The Romanell-​Phi Beta Kappa Professorship, first awarded in 1983, was established by an endowment from Patrick and Edna Romanell. Patrick Romanell, a Phi Beta Kappa member from Brooklyn College, was H. Y. Benedict Professor of Philosophy at the University of Texas, El Paso. The Phi Beta Kappa Society administers the Professorship, which takes the form of three lectures given each year by a distinguished philosopher, at his or her home institution, on a topic important to an audience beyond professional philosophers. The intent of this series is to publish the results of those lectures in affordable and accessible editions.

Also published in the series What Do Philosophers Do? Skepticism and the Practice of Philosophy Penelope Maddy Tragic Failures How and Why We Are Harmed by Toxic Chemicals Carl F. Cranor

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ALL TALKED OU T Naturalism and the Future of Philosophy

J.D. Trout

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1 Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide. Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press in the UK and certain other countries. Published in the United States of America by Oxford University Press 198 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016, United States of America. © Oxford University Press 2018 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted by law, by license, or under terms agreed with the appropriate reproduction rights organization. Inquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above. You must not circulate this work in any other form and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer. CIP data is on file at the Library of Congress ISBN 978–0–19–068680–2 1 3 5 7 9 8 6 4 2 Printed by Sheridan Books, Inc., United States of America

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To Norma Brandt Reichling for her magical presence

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CONTENTS

Preface 

I. Introduction: The Shape of Evidence-​Based Epistemology  1.  Where We Are: An Overview  2.  Naturalism as a Hypothesis  3.  How Did We Get Here?  4.  A Better Alternative: Strategic Reliabilism?  5. Ameliorative Psychology and Better Reasoning  6. Conclusion  II. Good Reasoning and Evidence-​Based Epistemology  1.  The Limits of Reasoning  2. Standard Analytic Epistemology and Professional Philosophy 

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3.  The Failure of Constructive Philosophy  4. The Department of Things I Find Really Cool to Think About  5.  Strategic Reliabilism: Philosophy as Coach  6. Conclusion 

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III. The Natural Limits of Explanation  67 1.  Owning Up to Human Limitations  67 2.  The Delicate Feeling of Explaining  72 3.  Understanding and the “Aha!” Moment  85 4.  The Romanticized View of Insight  87 5. Creepy Truths and Estrangement: Fluency, Narrative Coherence, and Explanation  91 6. Conclusion  101 IV. Taking People as We Find Them: Philosophy and Evidence-​Based Policy  1. Introduction  2. Do Inheritors Deserve Their Bequests? Inheritance and the Luck Subsidy  3. The Science of Happiness and a Utilitarian Argument for Redistribution  4. A Modest Proposal: Getting Rid of the House Committee on Science, Space, and Technology 

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5. Outside Strategies and the Dangers of Complicated Rules: The Index of Honesty  6. Conclusion  Notes  References  Index 

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PREFACE

The Romanell-Phi Beta Kappa Professorship has a special interest in applied philosophy, to select scholars who have made a “contribution to public understanding of philosophy.” I hope the chapters that follow honor that charge. For me, that trust carries both an obligation and a prohibition. The obligation is to make approachable some current ideas in epistemology, in the philosophy of science (on explanation), and in ethics and social and political philosophy. The prohibition is on diving too deeply into forbidding, arcane technical issues in a philosophical specialization. In order to honor this prohibition, I made judgments about which narrowly philosophical disputes and issues could be safely ignored, either because they have been adequately answered even when journals have kept them alive, or because the distribution of currently live topics in professional philosophy reflects

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undue comfort with an unpromising way of addressing intellectual and practical problems. The obligation, on the other hand, called on me to tie philosophical ideas to the topics of reasoning, the explanatory limits and expanse of cognition, and public policy. The result, I hope, is a kind of “naturalism in action,” looking to science for responsible ways to build out foundational (or as some might say, “philosophical”) theories. In professional philosophy, the naturalism of this approach is a polarizing issue. While not making a centerpiece of the metaphilosophical issues behind the controversies, I routinely explain trenchant defense of First Philosophy in the same ways that sociological or psychological scientists would—as an artifact of institutional inertia, professional isolation, effort justification, or the psychological rationalization that Upton Sinclair ties to one’s paycheck. There are many reasons that grim projections about the future of philosophy are not most honestly discussed in the orthodox organs of philosophy. If my occasional critical observations about professional philosophy seem delivered without argument, it is often because I am not proposing to argue at length about the intellectual credibility of professional philosophy. Others have done that before me. Instead, I am impatient to move on to positive theory-building in reasoning, explanation, and public policy, using methods that are evidence-based. My version of naturalism does not aim to debunk philosophy, still less the humanities generally. My attachment to other fields in the humanities has a long history. In addition to many dissertation committees in philosophy, I have also served in xii

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English and Theology. And though I am a philosopher of science, I have sat most often on ethics dissertation committees. The aim of my naturalism is similarly positive. My approach in this book provides evidence of the power of science in philosophical projects for philosophers genuinely open to it. Indeed, in some quarters, disputes about naturalism have faded because some strong version of the doctrine is taken for granted. Organizations like Society for Philosophy and Psychology (SPP) now provide a forum for philosophers interested in the relevance of psychological work, and psychologists interested in foundational/philosophical issues. SPP conferences teem with graduate students and young faculty in psychology, philosophy, and neuroscience, and the vibe is vital and enterprising. But before the days of institutional and collegial support that organizations like SPP offer, philosophers interested in psychological research had to depend on the kindness of strangers. And, I received more than my share of that kindness. In fact, my hope for a kind of practical naturalism in philosophy comes in part from experiences I have had in psychology, experiences that might hold out the same hope for others. For example, when issues in my philosophy dissertation led to experiments I hoped would build out psychological theories, I had questions about the promise of various experimental avenues. Familiar with the speech perception research of Robert Remez and Philip Rubin, I simply contacted them to discuss some of the more challenging theoretical issues in spoken language perception. We were all going to an Acoustical Society conference in Honolulu, and they happily offered to meet for lunch. At the xiii

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time, they didn’t know me from Adam. I was in a Philosophy Department. They couldn’t possibly benefit by talking to a young philosopher, I thought; they were already quite accomplished and respected. (Years later, Philip became President of Haskins Labs in New Haven, CT, and then Assistant Director for Science at the Office of Science and Technology Policy in the Obama Administration.) With Philip, Robert Remez pioneered sinewave synthesis and advanced a durable and influential account of perceptual organization. Robert holds a Chair in the Barnard/Columbia Psychology Department, and his Speech Perception Lab at Barnard has been a training site for more than a generation of students. But Robert has always been interested in the deepest puzzles of psychological processing. He graciously turned his attention to the topic in a theoretical article we co-authored on reductionist research strategies in speech perception. It was my good luck to have run into such supportive and genuine thinkers, motivated only by the joy of ideas. This is precisely the sort of kindness, patience, and intellectual curiosity I found in exchanges with other psychologists—Roger Shepard, Reid Hastie, Nick Epley, Adam Galinsky, Robyn Dawes, David Pisoni—all of them very willing to talk, and all of them taking foundational issues generally, and philosophy specifically, very seriously. Among Experimental Philosophers, the importance of community is not news. They have crafted a setting in which progress no longer depends on having a thick skin or being pushy. Turf disputes will receive less focus when institutions make it xiv

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even easier to collaborate (as SPP has). Institutional structures can support those collaborative efforts. I benefited from one such arrangement early on. When I arrived at the Sage School of Philosophy at Cornell as a fresh, young, grad student, there were no university-wide requirements for the PhD. That made it much easier to pursue graduate coursework in different fields. The philosophers I most wanted to study with—Richard Boyd, Robert Stalnaker, and Sydney Shoemaker—all went along with my plan to take lots of Psychology courses, in addition to the Philosophy curriculum. The Psychology Department that year housed as distinguished visitor Roger Shepard, the father of work on the rotation of mental images. I took his graduate seminar on mental representation, and was immediately struck by how intently everyone listened to, and thought about, conceptual points that arose in class and in the readings. I encouraged fellow philosophers to attend this class, and they found the same thing. Those philosophy graduate students also found, to their surprise, they were very good at organizing the concepts they learned, and theorizing about causes in the field. (Perhaps they should not have been surprised that, as philosophers, they were very good at generating and evaluating the deductive consequences of theoretical commitments.) The psychology professors sitting in on the course would hang out after class and talk, and psychology graduate students invited us out for beer. Most striking was the respect they seemed to have for deep, sustained, clear reflection on hard topics they identified at the foundations of the discipline. To me, I was just doing philosophy of mind and philosophy of science. As long xv

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as you knew enough about experimental design and statistics so that the fluency of conversation wasn’t interrupted by uncertainty about technical details, there was no limit to what you could learn from graduate students and faculty in Psychology. And there was no end to the appreciation they had for the conceptual analysis of theoretical notions. Frank Keil, known then for his research on conceptual development in children, and now for a special focus on the psychology of explanation, was tremendously busy. But he had a key property as a potential committee member: He could not say “no” to a graduate student interested in the field. So I took his graduate course in Psycholinguistics, and another one on Concepts and Categories. In the latter, we read Locke on concepts, and on nominal essences, and he, too, ended up on my dissertation committee. Still other psychologists and linguists lent a hand in my research, and their kindness, too, strained credulity. Arty Samuel once indulged a long phone conversation with me on the interpretation of Beta, a measure of response bias in psychophysics. And though he gave no hint of it at the time, I later found out that he was actually headed out the door for vacation. Bill Poser (then a linguist at Stanford) had no idea why a philosophy graduate student was calling him to talk about laboratory phonology, but welcomed me into his Phonetics/Phonology lab at Stanford to pursue an idea of my own for experiments that would later turn into a paper in Language and Speech. And then, I had the good fortune to work at the Parmly Hearing Institute housed at Loyola University in Chicago. Until Loyola closed it down in xvi

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2010, Parmly was a model of basic research, and its faculty and administration supplied me with stimulation and resources for a more than a decade and a half. I remain indebted to Bill Yost, Parmly’s Director, and indeed to everyone there. Despite all of this help and enjoyment, there were many times I found it almost too challenging to keep up in two fields, maintaining a small lab in my office and publishing work in my home field of philosophy. But the challenges never came from colleagues in Psychology, whose labs and time and good will (and often, financial support for research) were open to me without question. Nor did they come from my well-meaning philosophy colleagues, who always made space for ideas. By far, it was the institutional isolation of philosophy from the sciences that created the most important obstacles to research. I have often wondered whether philosophers of literature or art identify the same kind of problematic institutional isolation from departments of literature and art. At any rate, this isolation made it chronically difficult to perform research that was at once foundational and empirically well-informed. Separate departments, separate hiring lines, separate funding sources, separate majors and distinctive degrees. You could observe their activities from a distance, but that organizational separation made it difficult for idea-sharing to occur organically. And so, you establish reading groups or research centers, in the hope that busy scholars with disciplinary and departmental responsibilities will make yet more room in their schedules for another activity. Even when interdisciplinary centers provide a place for researchers from different fields to share ideas, these centers are always struggling xvii

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against (institutionally conservative) strategies of departmental preservation. Disciplines have their own cultural histories, and culture is dynamic. A certain way of doing philosophy, or a preoccupation with a particular set of issues, shouldn’t dominate simply because it has a long tradition and the loyalty of its adherents. After all, so did lots of regrettable movements in history. We should take this observation as an invitation to establish philosophy’s intellectual and practical importance. I have tried to honor the vision of the Romanell Award by remaining true to its aim of intellectual public service. In keeping with the public impulse of the Romanell Award, some of the material in this book has appeared in popular venues. In particular, part of the House Science Committee discussion in Chapter IV found its way into a Salon.com article. The public purpose of applied philosophy has shaped this book in other ways as well. For example, I have resisted the scholarly norm of elaborate citation. By reducing the clutter and abbreviating discussions of the voluminous research in such areas as epistemology, I have tried to honor the historical and contemporary lessons of that work. I am grateful to practitioners in those fields for letting me get on with the job of framing a view and defending it, even when that means I cannot explore its many debts. But I have learned the most about epistemology and naturalism from the work of Hilary Kornblith, Stephen Stich, Paul Churchland, Philip Kitcher, Dick Boyd, and Mike Bishop, and there are many others, like Jonathan Weinberg and Ron Mallon, whose work I admire and respect. And I continue to benefit from the philosophical insights of psychologists like Tania Lombrozo and Deena xviii

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Skolnick Weisberg who, for sheer philosophical skill, could be found in any top Philosophy Department. The same goes for their more senior naturalistic colleagues, Lance Rips and Frank Keil. I want to thank the Phi Beta Kappa chapter at Loyola University, then my home institution, for sponsoring the Romanell Lectures in 2013, entitled “The Lessons of Naturalism.” I also want to thank the audiences there, and my colleague Robert Bucholz for the gracious introduction on that occasion. My family attended that series of lectures, displaying a level of attention to my career that I ordinarily discourage, but it was much appreciated. I am lucky to have kind, bright and accomplished friends, like Kathleen Adams, Mike Bishop, Joe Mendola, David Reichling, and Peter Sanchez, who talk about this material with me. Also lending a hand were Abram Capone, Jay Carlson, Andy Kondrat, and Clinton Neptune. J.D. Trout Wilmette, IL

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Chapter I

Introduction

The Shape of Evidence-​Based Epistemology

1.  WHERE WE ARE: AN OVERVIEW Many fields of human study range over a complicated terrain, a tissue of detail and a network of gnarled causes. Yet when an intellectual enterprise is granted life on the promise of tackling big problems like immortality or perpetual motion, it is natural that it should downplay the severity and frequency of the problems facing them. Sometimes the underestimation is “motivated,” as psychologists say, in that people have the self-​serving inclination to believe the most flattering interpretation of their own behavior, no matter what the real truth. Sometimes it is overconfidence from sheer Enlightenment optimism, as when Rayleigh announced that “our future discoveries must be looked for in the sixth place of decimals.”1 Sometimes it is a bit of both. But whatever the cause of its tone-​deaf treatment of symphonic terrain, there is no doubt that epistemology has faced its intellectual 1

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challenges with uncritical acceptance of anecdotal methods of poorly evaluated merit and crass categories like knowledge and justification that may have a rustic charm for the philosophical population but win no points from scientists on that score. Thinking is hard. So is reasoning. We shouldn’t use methods that will prevent us from appreciating the full complexity of human thought. The naturalistic perspective developed in this book allows us to capture and track that complexity, its unobservable processes, multiple causes, and neural bases—​wherever the evidence leads us. Use the chronically poor methodology of reliance on impressionistic, intuitive or anecdotal concepts, and your theory and evidence are sure to be pinched (as will your vision), reducing you to a tool of documented biases and, as a result, terrible inaccuracy. But use science to identify the handful of causes that matter most, and you will surely outperform human experts and naïve judges. Traditional epistemologists have made their choice. As practiced in the English-​speaking world, epistemology, or the theory of knowledge, began with the Ancient Greeks in their pre-​scientific world. Its preoccupations with knowledge and its relation to belief, opinion, and reasons, marked an early but dignified effort to discover what was special about knowledge. What made knowledge different from mere true belief? What made it different from opinion? Was the difference due to the way that evidence or reasons supported the belief? There was plenty of undisciplined discussion and earnest speculation in the agora, no doubt, and later plenty of medieval thinkers enjoying the patronage, or toiling in the shadows, of church authorities who 2

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had their own ideas about knowledge. And while the 20th century began to see a psychology coming into its own as a scientific enterprise, anecdote was not yet clearly inferior. So philosophy was still in the game. Bite-​sized papers were written containing expressions of intuition, outlandish scenarios to hone a position, and clever counterexamples to argue against another. Young scholars, anxious to carve out their own space in this crowded market, wrote dissertations criticizing the theories of the day and introducing their own unique twists to resuscitate or replace the most recent decade’s dominant account of justification. Their method was utterly formulaic: Present an old judgment about a case of putative knowledge, present a counterexample it can’t capture, and dub a new position that accommodates both. And there begin different accounts of justification and knowledge:  skepticism, contextualism, evidentialism, reliabilism, compatibilism, and various combinations, foundationalism, coherentism, and yes, founderentism. The narrow research program and plentiful publication in philosophy made it look just like the kind of roll science was on, and the endless generation and adjustment of epistemological intuitions had the superficial appearance of the healthy give-​and-​take found in the sciences. Another striking feature about these papers is that they were possible to write even if you didn’t know anything about anything. One major influence that shaped the professional practices of contemporary epistemology was that in the second half of the 20th century, universities and colleges were styling themselves on the scientific model of academic achievement and 3

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technical competence. Papers (with a bias toward short ones) became the gold standard for professional advancement, like tenure, and professional recognition, like being thought well of by other people who write the same kinds of papers. But there was no progress in epistemology itself, whose only success condition was to leave our intuitions unchanged. The papers kept philosophers busy, and continue to do so. Taken together, the cycle of invention and abandonment of vocabulary and problems has the superficial appearance of technical progress. But in the hunt for pearls of wisdom, contemporary epistemologists have scraped off the meat and kept only the shell. In the decades that followed the vintage quotes of the 1970s, there were multiple invitations from epistemologists like Stephen Stich and Hilary Kornblith to join with psychologists and philosophers of science to construct better reasoning strategies. Taking their lead, I wrote a book in 1998 called Measuring the Intentional World which argued that many of the narrative traditions in the social and psychological sciences would be much improved by attention to quantitative features of their subjects, and in order to do this they would need to take more seriously the growing psychological evidence of our cognitive limitations in judgment and decision making. Kornblith proposed that philosophers take a more comparative approach to epistemology, placing humans in the context of nonhuman animal capacities. Stich introduced a generation of young philosophers to psychologists like Tversky, Nisbett, and Kahneman who labored to bring realistic normative proposals to a species of troubled reasoners. In psychology, Robyn Dawes and Paul Meehl entreated 4

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epistemologists to adopt methods from mathematical psychology, and Meehl, in addition, from methods of mathematician Ronald Fisher, philosopher of science Karl Popper, and what Meehl and others called “The Dustbowl Empiricists.” Yet epistemology still exists in its historic form. Even the work of Quine, an early and influential contributor to the naturalistic tradition, was politely ignored or spuriously “refuted” by those keen to return to the analysis of their own intuitions. And thus, the tradition of personal intuitions, of uncalibrated “considered judgments,” continues into the 21st century, another century of autobiography as evidence for this one area of philosophy called epistemology. In the late 1990s, my friend Mike Bishop and I began spinning an epistemological theory called Strategic Reliabilism. This theory, naturalistic both in outline and detail, was designed to fit loosely within a growing movement in cognitive research that we conceived as Ameliorative Psychology. This project recruits psychological findings to improve reasoning strategies. The goal was to become an epistemically excellent reasoner, which means learning to allocate your cognitive resources to robustly reliable reasoning strategies and applying those cognitive resources to problems that were significant. The critical target of our project was clear: Standard Analytic Epistemology. We paid special attention to its reliance on appeals to intuition, a practice that ignores the unreliable cognitive sources of “intuition,” and in any case persistently skirts normal scientific standards. It is for this reason, among others, that many philosophers, especially philosophers of science, find Analytic Epistemology profoundly 5

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antinaturalistic. To establish that this romance with intuition dominated the field, we called out frequent, and often prominent, contributors to contemporary epistemology. We pulled quotes from the standard publications by representative and influential philosophers who announced that their intuitions drive opponents to untenable conclusions, or provide evidence for their own: Dretske, Pappas, Swain, Foley, Armstrong, Lehrer, and Paxon. Intuitions were not the only resource that these philosophers used, but intuitions were the main sources of evidence in these passages. They still are: Hence, we couldn’t explain our intuition that Carl lacks knowledge by saying that he violates a safety-​requirement.2 In other words, I  think the intuition that impermissibility applies in the realm of belief is stronger than the “ought implies can” rule.3

We could have picked many other expressions of intuitions as evidence. A dozen years later, the slim pickins are still easy.

2. NATURALISM AS A HYPOTHESIS The version of naturalism that I will defend is nothing special or fancy. It will be familiar to anyone who has followed the disputes since Quine’s pronouncements in its favor. Naturalism is not the official doctrine of science in the way that Snickers is the official candy bar of the Olympics. Rather, Naturalism is a working 6

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hypothesis, an expectation vindicated by experience, a thesis extracted from contingent facts about the success of science. It is not a separate doctrine that commits its holder to a belief that goes beyond the methods and practices of science. It is a contingent truth, like the truth that the sun will rise tomorrow. What is distinctive about my view is that it rejects the common philosophical dogma that psychology is somehow exiled from the world of normativity. Of course, everyone stops gathering facts at some point and expresses a normative evaluation by selecting an action. You stop gathering information on the candidates and vote. You stop assessing your real estate alternatives and buy the house. You stop gathering post-​graduate information and pick a college. We try to gather the best available evidence and then make the best decision we can given our cognitive limitations, time constraints, and other practical considerations. That is why most theories of good reasoning are what Mike Bishop and I call a “mongrel view,” a mix of epistemic and pragmatic considerations. No matter what the version of naturalism, some philosophers will charge that its defense, or justification, is circular. If we appeal to the results of psychological research for justification of a belief, they might ask, what provides justification for our belief that psychology supplies results reliable enough to vindicate appeal to psychology? Doesn’t that require a philosophical, perhaps armchair, commitment? If so, that would only relocate the problem, endowing philosophical principles with (unproven) justifying power. It is only if you believe that the normativity of epistemology arises from a priori or otherwise 7

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first-​philosophical principles that you would think that it has priority over psychology as a foundation for knowledge. But the necessary a priori principles have not been forthcoming, despite professional and polite patience. If we set aside the understandable conceit of philosophers thinking that their practices were special, philosophers confused the fact that considered action got its traction from a belief whose uncertainty was unimaginable with the idea that it was somehow the business only of philosophers to use in the normative evaluation of other beliefs and actions. But everyone must plant their feet somewhere. The only thing that separates the apparently circular justification of the traditional epistemologist’s appeal to first philosophical principles from the psychologist’s defense of their normative evaluations of reasoning is the quality of their evidence. And on that issue, the quality of evidence is quite clearly on the psychologist’s side. Psychologists are as free and entitled to pursue truth, and pronounce normatively, as philosophers are; philosophers don’t have that market cornered. With these twin entitlements and the empirical evidence beneath their feet, psychologists in the predictive modeling and the judgment and decision-​making tradition insisted that there was a difference between faulty heuristics that people are likely to use given busy lives and normal processing limits on cognition, and the much higher truth ratios yielded by proper linear models that optimize the weights of the countless variables that formal systems can compute but humans can’t. Once psychologists noted that there was a way to boil down elaborate models to handy and accurate heuristics in the form of Statistical Prediction Rules (SPRs) to improve 8

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reasoning, it was hard for anyone to resist the normative conclusion that we ought to use SPRs. In the meantime, in the citadel of traditional epistemology the reigning view was that science was necessarily merely descriptive, that epistemology was essentially normative, and that together these two theses implied that naturalism about knowledge was untenable. It was into this powerful establishment that Michael Bishop and I  stepped when we introduced Strategic Reliabilism in Epistemology and the Psychology of Human Judgment. By all accounts, psychologists really liked the book. It framed epistemological concerns in ways familiar to psychologists and that they found theoretically useful. And uninvested philosophers, by all reports, enjoyed its jaunty style. But there is some evidence that in the chambers of traditional epistemology our view brought less joy. One famous epistemologist found the time and energy to try to prevent us from appearing at other people’s conferences. Another far more collegial but no less famous epistemologist paired his published exposition of our view with the term “philistinism.” All of this is fine, but it was jarring to two philosophers of science who just wanted to write, teach, and play soccer with our children. It was also eye-​opening. After all, at the Philosophy of Science Association meeting in 2000 we had organized a symposium with Robyn Dawes and David Faust who, along with Paul Meehl, were lions in the field of Ameliorative Psychology. Philosophers of science there were unhesitatingly gratified that Statistical Prediction Rules, the progeny of scientific, “big 9

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data” methods based on simple actuarial ones, could serve as reliable reasoning strategies for a wide range of problems of expert and ordinary judgment, from clinical diagnosis to policy formation. Yet at the same time, epistemologists were always telling us philosophers of science that ours is a merely descriptive field—​ certainly science is—​and must defer to epistemology, which is normative. This view, errant in my reckoning, often dismisses philosophy of science as not “real” philosophy. But apparently, phi­loso­phers of science can only take so much. The philosopher of science Paul Feyerabend once lamented the irony that philosophers “who could not explain why a stone falls” nevertheless presume to find fault with science, or philosophy of science. With that in mind, when Mike Bishop and I submitted a grant proposal to the National Science Foundation (NSF) for work that was to become articles and our book, we were braced for traditional epistemology reviewers, invited by NSF in the spirit of openness, to tell us where we had so obviously gone wrong. But two NSF reviewers independently wrote reviews that anticipated scientifically uninformed reviews by traditional epistemologists:4 I think the NSF Panel should completely discount the objections of analytic epistemologists. For several generations now, there has been little contact within analytic philosophy between epistemologists and philosophers of science. The epistemologists have been concerned to analyze the concept of knowledge, which has mostly taken the form of attempting 10

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to provide necessary and sufficient conditions for the truth of a statement of the form:  Subject S knows proposition p. Many philosophers of science, myself included, regard this as a trivial and misguided scholastic exercise. The NSF is in the business of supporting philosophers of science, not analytic epistemologists. (Reviewer One)

Their outspoken criticisms of much of philosophical epistemology will not win them many friends in traditional philosophical quarters. But their work will be well received among philosophers of science and within the broader science studies community. (Reviewer Two)

These NSF referees took exception to common features of contemporary epistemology as traditionally practiced, with its general indifference to the findings of science (particularly about cognition), its reliance on parochial intuition and the conceptual analysis of categories made distinctly philosophical (like “knowledge” and “justification”), and the insistence that normative concerns deliver philosophers from descriptive accuracy (“epistemology is normative, psychology is descriptive”), to name just a few. I am proposing a positive, more science-​based or naturalistic vision. In the next chapter, then, we will not just continue to criticize traditional philosophical practice; we will also examine evidence-​based foundational theories of better reasoning, explanation, and well-​being to which philosophical tradition might be compared. 11

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As part of our positive project of foundational theory-​ building, Mike Bishop and I have continued to publish developments in Ameliorative Psychology and Strategic Reliabilism in psychological, naturalistic, and encyclopedic venues. But this material has not really been engaged by traditional epistemologists, in much the same way an interest in knowledge has not generally led epistemologists to explore with philosophers of science the phenomenon of scientific knowledge. While philosophers of science continue to credential themselves with advanced degrees in the special sciences, traditional epistemologists have continued to use the same tools on problems just different enough from old ones to stay in work.

3. HOW DID WE GET HERE? Philosophers who think about knowledge take strikingly different approaches from one another. Some tie their pursuit to the dignity of Western philosophy’s origins in Plato, treating knowledge as justified true belief. For these practitioners, philosophy should proceed by analyzing the concept of knowledge and its contributing concepts like justification and truth. This approach, still dominant in the English-​speaking world, uses measures that fit with our intuitions or with our considered judgment to determine whether we are justified. These “intuitions” are strongly held feelings, and so-​named, we might suppose, because they mark commitments that are not subject to further critical analysis. In fact, the intuition’s deliverance is so firm that it is counted 12

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as a weakness of an epistemological view that it conflicts with a widely held intuition. Proponents of Standard Analytic Epistemology (SAE) aim to provide an account of knowledge and epistemic justification. One of the main success conditions on such an account is what Michael Bishop and I called the “stasis requirement”: the correct account of knowledge or justification will “leave our epistemic situation largely unchanged. That is to say, it is expected to turn out that according to the criteria of justified belief we come to accept, we know, or are justified in believing, pretty much what we reflectively think we know or are entitled to believe.”5 No matter what our walk of life, demographic group, or ethnic origin, we all have intuitions of one sort or another, commitments that feel basic because we can’t imagine how to divest ourselves of them. But adults at least come to recognize that this is an unreliable urge and an unearned indulgence. Scientists often do the same thing, rejecting views that appear to conflict with a treasured theory. But once you have a decent theory, scientific methodology can act as a healthy corrective. Copernicus himself rejected competing views by announcing that “the mind shudders” at these non-​heliocentric alternatives. His model was roughly right, but not because he had an intuition. But inside of philosophy, nothing really changed. Yet another new generation of epistemologists, and a new wave of epistemic vocabulary, made its way across the occupational landscape. Some were aware that the methods of high analytic epistemology were under attack, and occasionally made the difficult judgment that they were probably right: 13

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As a methodological matter, I think that this is generally the right way to go, both in epistemology and elsewhere: I’m all for giving a great deal of weight to our considered judgments about particular cases.6

Others just continue to float their theories atop of their intuitions: By and large, I consider the reliability of my belief-​producing cognitive processes quite satisfactory. I see no reason, therefore, to think that, from the point of view of structural compatibilism, we must judge that my doxastic attitudes are not free. Nor do I  see any reason to think that, in this regard, I  differ from the norm. It seems to me by far most people enjoy harmony between their second-​order desires and the way they form beliefs, and thus enjoy, according to structural compatibilism, doxastic freedom.7

As the above passage indicates, people tend to identify their own views as within the norm. The inference that others will agree with your views is called the false consensus effect. The only known corrective is to provide people with unambiguous feedback like “Here’s why your belief is false,” and “Here is a belief that is different from yours that is supported by the evidence.” You don’t always have to show that the person is wrong to reduce the false consensus effect; the mere evidence of disagreement can be enough to chasten the wayward reasoner. In one sense, this book represents my effort to correct the conceit 14

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Introduction

of overconfident agreement that is inevitable in the common demographic of philosophers. Unambiguous feedback is confrontational, and those performing this public service are often deemed uncooperative, poorly socialized, boorish, and generally badly behaved. It is of little consolation that you suffer to reduce the structural sources of high-​stakes fallacies and biases. You may live with the truth on your side, but you die alone. Of course, sometimes you don’t have any evidence that people differ from the norm because you didn’t look for any, or perhaps you wouldn’t recognize departures from the norm if there were any. And sometimes when you hypothesize a harmony, it seems that there is a harmony because matches between theory and observation are more salient, and so more prone to “seem” that way when anecdotal methods are used, just as the confirmation bias predicts. And make no mistake about it. Traditional epistemologists appealed to intuitions not just as a place to start an epistemic analysis, but also as a reason for ending it. How does SAE proceed to formulate its normative recommendations? Without scientific evidence of human limits and capacities, and without a tested theory of good reasoning, the dominant strain of analytic philosophy proceeds by using counterfactual or puzzle scenarios to test our intuitions about “what we want to say” in these puzzle cases or fantastical scenarios. One kind of scenario observes that we know that there are barns in the countryside as we pass through. But then it asks us to consider whether our belief still counts as knowledge if we are informed that some of these are just barn facsimiles. These puzzle cases and fantastical scenarios are never-​ending: whether we 15

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have knowledge in the barn facsimile cases, whether it is morally permissible or prohibited to throw the fat man off the bridge if it will stop the train and save a greater number of others, whether people in the state of nature own what they create, and so on. Philip Kitcher notes, Philosophers love to appeal to their “intuitions” about these puzzle cases. They seem to think they have access to little nuggets of wisdom. We’d all be much better off if the phrase “My intuition is  .  .  .” were replaced by “Given my evolved psychological adaptations and my distinctive enculturation, when faced by this perplexing scenario, I find myself, more or less tentatively, inclined to say . . .”8

But (most) philosophers don’t really fuss over whether these intuitions are widely shared, whether that would matter, or any other of the intellectual quadrants that complete cells in a normal research design. Even if people’s intuitions are culturally variable, reflect class entitlement, personal idiosyncrasy—​ whatever—​you press on, reporting the hold that these intuitions have on you, and you suppose, on others. As Kitcher says, If the intuition-​mongering were abandoned, would that be the end of philosophy? It would be the end of a certain style of philosophy—​a style that has cut philosophy off, not only from the humanities but from every other branch of inquiry and culture. (In my view, most of current Anglophone philosophy is quite reasonably seen as an ingrown conversation 16

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Introduction

pursued by very intelligent people with very strange interests.) But it would hardly stop the kinds of investigation that the giants of the past engaged in. In my view, we ought to replace the notion of analytic philosophy by that of synthetic philosophy. Philosophers ought to aspire to know lots of different things and to forge useful synthetic perspectives.9

Knowing lots of things is good, and putting together disparate facts to construct theoretical perspectives is good as well. I would add to Kitcher’s aspiration that it is also good to learn when to defer, just like scientists do—​when models are too complicated for our relevant training, when we are not experts, and when the methods we use in our profession cannot be exported in an informed way to another subject matter—​particularly when you have no idea how successfully those methods perform in their intended domain. Fully naturalistic philosophers swallow humbly before the evidence of science and take their cue from methods and theories of demonstrable and repeatable success.

4. A BETTER ALTERNATIVE:  STRATEGIC RELIABILISM? Strategic Reliabilism is what Michael Bishop and I proposed as an alternative framework to SAE that yields relative epistemic evaluations of belief-​producing cognitive processes. It is a theory of cognitive excellence (rather than, say, of justification), or more colloquially, a theory of reasoning excellence (where 17

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“reasoning” is understood very broadly as any sort of cognitive process for coming to judgments or beliefs). First introduced in our book Epistemology and the Psychology of Human Judgment, the basic idea behind Strategic Reliabilism is that epistemically excellent reasoning is efficient reasoning that leads in a robustly reliable fashion to significant, true beliefs. It differs from most contemporary epistemological theories in two ways. First, it is not a theory of justification or knowledge—​a theory of epistemically worthy belief. Instead, Strategic Reliabilism is a theory of epistemically worthy ways of forming beliefs. And second, Strategic Reliabilism does not attempt to account for an epistemological property that is assumed to be faithfully reflected in the epistemic judgments and intuitions of philosophers. If Strategic Reliabilism makes recommendations that accord with our reflective epistemic judgments and intuitions, great. If not, then so much the worse for our reflective epistemic judgments and intuitions. Strategic Reliabilism has three parts: 1. The core theory, which articulates the standards according to which cognitive processes are evaluated. 2. The theory of the proper formation and revision of cognitive processes. 3. The applied theory, which recommends specific reasoning strategies for particular domains.

Most of our attention is devoted to the core of the theory. Strategic Reliabilism evaluates cognitive processes in terms of the extent 18

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Introduction

to which they are a suitable combination of (a) robustly reliable; (b) appropriate to the reasoner’s resources; and (c) geared toward producing beliefs about topics that are significant for the reasoner. When the information is too complicated, people get the predictions wrong. One way to improve cognitive processes is to exchange intuition and human judgment for statistical prediction rules, or SPRs. SPRs are little predictive tools that tell you what to look for if you want to know what is going to happen. A growth chart is an SPR. Do you want to know how tall you will be? Punch in your mother’s height and your father’s height. Those two numbers, with a little fiddling, will predict your adult height better than folklore or casual observation of family members. Of course, most prediction problems are much more complicated. They involve more than two variables, and information that is much more difficult to come by than height. It is nearly impossible to do justice to the true wealth of SPRs, and the full range of ways they have improved our lives. But a brief interlude should convey the scope. And with evidence of success so robust, using them can provide the basis of a reliable reasoning strategy. There is now considerable evidence for what we call the Golden Rule of Predictive Modeling: When based on the same evidence, the predictions of SPRs are at least as reliable, and are typically more reliable, than the predictions of human experts. The evidence in favor of the Golden Rule is overwhelming.10 Unfortunately, the Golden Rule of Predictive Modeling has been woefully neglected. Perhaps a good way to begin to 19

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undo this state of affairs is to briefly describe a few of its many successes. This will give the reader some idea of the range and robustness of the Golden Rule. Once you decide what you want to predict with the SPR—​ like prostate cancer outcomes or political elections—​you have to look back before looking forward. In particular, you have to ask, What factors in the past best predicted that event? As early as 1941, Wittman reported an SPR that predicted the individual successes of electroshock therapy more accurately than a hospital’s medical and psychological staff members, and it did so by tracking the patient’s marital status, length of psychotic distress, and a rating of the patient’s insight into his or her condition. And on down the line, SPRs proved better than people, distinguishing between neurotics and psychotics better than clinicians, and predicting academic performance better than admissions officers at colleges, grad school, medical school, and law school. SPRs predict loan and credit risk better than bank officers. They predict newborns at risk for sudden infant death syndrome (SIDS) much better than human experts. One SPR better predicts progressive brain dysfunction, and another outperforms experts in predicting the presence, location and cause of brain damage. In the law, an SPR outperforms forensic psychologists who make predictions of the relative likelihood of violence (i.e., who is more prone to violence). The descriptive core of our approach to epistemology consists of the empirical findings of Ameliorative Psychology, including SPRs like those surveyed above. And yet, Ameliorative Psychology is deeply normative in the sense that it makes 20

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Introduction

(implicitly or explicitly) evaluative “ought” claims that are intended to guide people’s reasoning. SPRs, then, can offer guidance on what you should do in a given situation. In addition to providing normative guidance, SPRs have two other features highly prized by those who also seek effective action. First, they are cheap to construct and apply. Second, they are constructed to be simple, usually employing five or fewer variables. But how can reliable reasoning be invented at will—​ for example, when needed by a political or commercial institution, like a hospital? We can find hints in institutional policies done well. One such example is the Apgar score, named for the obstetrical anesthesiologist who created it in 1952, which can quickly assess the clinical condition of a newborn within the first minute of birth. The score consists of five objective criteria, each scored a zero, one, or two: heart rate, respiratory effort, reflex irritability, muscle tone, and color. The higher the score, the better medical condition the newborn is in, and this quick and reliable tool can alert the medical team that it needs to immediately address a potentially life-​threatening issue. No study has ever been done to track how many lives have been saved or improved with this simple tool, but there must be a reason that more than fifty years after its creation, nearly every newborn in the country is given an Apgar score. And yet there is pushback on scoring newborn babies in this manner, with people having a negative reaction to the thought of reducing a new human life to a number by a cold clinical institution. It seems to be ignored that this number protects this 21

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new life that is so valued. Just as music becomes no less loved once we uncover the mathematical properties of harmonies that make a symphony beautiful, we should also love the SPRs that protect our precious babies. Philosophy is not singled out for special scrutiny in the quest to improve reasoning. Naturalistic philosophers are not giddy enthusiasts for psychology, blindly accepting every report of a finding in a journal article. They should critically assess psychology, too, and raise disciplined doubts about the reliability and robustness of its findings. There is a recent movement within psychology to do just that, testing the replicability of many, and sometimes “classic,” psychological findings. Some effects have withered under careful efforts at replication, leaving worries that the finding is fragile or worse. But many have been replicated, and even survive under diverse testing, leaving some to argue that psychology, despite its immaturity, is both difficult and self-​correcting.11 As a modern theory of knowledge finds its way, it will evolve toward a more mongrel epistemology—​a mixture of pragmatic concerns about practicality, and epistemic ones about truth. And even if pragmatic concerns (say, about the good life) have more to do with what will make us happy than with what will lead us to truth, that doesn’t mean that the right way to do epistemology is by intuition. Policy decision making, with or without SPRs, should at least try to imitate SPRs. There is not a window into the many life possibilities in a prisoner’s soul, but even if there were, many of these properties would not accurately predict the risk of their recidivism. But SPRs are based on models that can. 22

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People don’t appreciate the accuracy of SPRs and the brutal inaccuracy of intuitive judgment or common horse sense. Denying both the disease and its remedy, politicians can’t deliver responsible governance, and voters can’t express informed citizenship. Yet any epistemological outlook in the service of human well-​being, as we will see in Chapter IV, will try to turn complicated problems that humans botch into problems tamable by a simple SPR, or an instrument much like it. It is easy to see why humans botch the complex problem:  Humans are cognitively bounded. A congressional committee may craft laws about ocean acidification, global warming, and efficient energy use. But members of the committee can’t really critically assess the arcane evidence for the chemical causes of reef bleaching, the climatic warming cycles over evolutionary time expected by chance, and methods of energy conversion that can be scaled up for commercial and industrial use. They can, however, understand that the most powerful predictor of accuracy about any mature science is the consensus of experts credentialed in the arcane science. Making the decisions in any other way is asking to drown in a sea of causes, when a simple decision procedure is within easy reach. The biggest risk of intuitive judgment—​eliminated in the construction of SPRs—​is that the variables you are considering to justify your decision aren’t even relevant to the outcome you are predicting. The SPRs tell you—​not always, but more often than anecdote and intuitions—​which variables matter, while intuitive judgment enjoys only the conviction of confidence about the causes relied on. 23

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The strains I  have described represent two different approaches to epistemology. The standard approach taken by most analytic philosophers begins with a theory that aims to describe their considered epistemic judgments. From that descriptive core, they infer (normally with scant support) that their favored theory accurately translates epistemic judgments into prescriptions. Though trained epistemologists may argue with one another about which of their theories truly do reflect their considered epistemic judgments, the judgments themselves are rarely questioned. Mike Bishop and I, however, offered a version of Ameliorative Psychology that questions those judgments and asks for new ways to reason about important practical issues. In claiming that parts of psychology can be, in fact, normative, we may shock some people. But we are not the first to have noticed this. The arch-​naturalist Quine made a similar claim, and yet many fans of Standard Analytic Epistemology reject Quine’s naturalism. Initially, he failed to discuss the normative, reason-​guiding potential of psychology. But in some of his later writings, Quine noted the normative force of psychology:  “Naturalization of epistemology does not jettison the normative and settle for the indiscriminate description of ongoing procedures. For me normative epistemology is a branch of engineering. It is the technology of truth-​seeking, or, in a more cautiously epistemological term, prediction.”12 However, Quine clung to behaviorism throughout the Cognitive Revolution, and so the normative role he assigned to a naturalized epistemology could be no more than an 24

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Introduction

instrumental, calculating device that coordinated inputs and outputs, stimuli and behavior. But now that we have better psychology, we can have better answers. And that better psychology is Ameliorative Psychology.13

5. AMELIORATIVE PSYCHOLOGY AND BETTER REASONING Behind our account of Ameliorative Psychology were a few simple ideas. We intellectually engage with the world in many ways. These ways improve our practical standing and help us to navigate the world. But only some of them yield a state of knowledge. For a host of reasons, traditional Anglo-​American epistemology began with the intellectual goal of improving our reasoning. Often, these improvements in reasoning strategies include debiasing strategies as well. When finding ways to improve our reasoning through removing or circumventing cognitive biases, we have found a few key points about the strategies we want to use: 1. The improvement in our reasoning must be real even if suboptimal, or people won’t have any dignified defense of using that reasoning strategy. 2. Applying the reasoning strategy can’t take much effort, or people won’t do it. 3. The reasoning strategy must resist defection. When the reasoning strategy involves debiasing, the fix must make it difficult for you to think you can outguess it. 25

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That is to say, all epistemological debiasing strategies should work like automatic deduction options and social security: simple, streamlined, happen largely out of view, and produce measurable improvements in outcomes (and so, typically, in judgment quality). Not only do accurate judgments go a long way for our individual happiness and health; they are also important requisites for just and effective social institutions. Better judgment can make the difference between freedom and involuntary commitment for some psychiatric patients. Judging potential recidivism in prisoners can lead to a non-​violent former offender being paroled and the state saving money. And following an SPR would allow the United States to set child welfare policy like Sweden. With childhood poverty steadily below 6% (compared to the 22% of the United States), Sweden identified the mother’s employment as the best single predictor of childhood poverty and responded by keeping the mother’s job open for her years after she bears and raises (with paid leave benefits to the partner as well) the child to pre-​school age. So what should drive these judgments? Ameliorative Psychology offers this answer: If you have and can use an SPR, use one. If you don’t, try to reason as much like one as you can. One reason that SPRs fare better than human judgment is that humans fall victim to a host of cognitive biases that skew their decision-​ making abilities. Ameliorative Psychology attempts to mitigate those biases, while Standard Analytic Epistemology tends to, in fact, play into bias. There are several reasons for this fact about SAE. First, there is little about the reliance on intuition that is designed to actually track the truth. This 26

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Introduction

is what makes the co-​opting strategy practiced by philosophers so peculiar. When faced with new evidence of cognitive frailty or improvement—​either one—​epistemologists will often say, “My theory can accommodate those facts.” But their theory neither searched for nor found any such problems. Drawing a path through cognitive biases or improvements so that you can see them as accommodated by your theory is just so much ad hoc-​ ery. In fact, it is eerily like the hindsight bias, with the exception that instead of simply supposing that they had known the results all along, they seem gratified, after the fact, that there might be some way of explaining the phenomenon discovered, and perhaps already had! But about this, philosophers are just delaying the inevitable embarrassment. And they can afford to; they have no money on the table. This may seem a harsh verdict, but it is reserved only for epistemologists who insist that their approach already has the resources to accommodate the psychological findings. Accommodation is light work, and it is telling that these very philosophers, who presumably see the value in accommodating superior reasoning strategies in psychology, aren’t hungrily waiting for the patent to expire, to take over all of the benefits of name-​brand reasoning strategies. They move only when confronted by evidence that, one would have thought, is already widely known and easily accessible. By the same token, there is nothing that philosophers of knowledge do so well that psychologists can’t keep up. Kahneman, Ariely, Heath, Hastie, Dawes, Bazerman—​and here I only protect philosophers from the tedium of an even longer list—​offer reasoning and debiasing strategies that anticipate 27

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philosophical concerns of generality. They offer a taxonomy of contexts to which some strategies apply and others don’t. Frequency formats ought not be used to correct overconfidence, and the “consider-​an-​alternative” strategy ought not be used to correct for biases of planning. Even more foundationally, figures like Dawes and Hastie have examined, in a sustained way, the psychological basis for the human attachment to certain statistical presuppositions, like the tendency for random errors to cancel each other out. The foundational normative role of psychology in assessing reliable reasoning strategies is evident more generally. Notice, for example, that psychologists do not display any similar co-​ opting strategy familiar to SAE; superiority of those newly uncovered methods or findings force psychology to accommodate those methods or findings on pain of accepting that their theory does not have the resources of its competitor. In science, it is a bad strategy, both normatively and descriptively, to persistently embrace a theory that gets routinely blind-​sided by disciplines that outperform it. Yet in the type of philosophy we’re discussing, the normal response to getting blind-​sided is to pretend that you never got hit in the first place. Ignoring validated SPRs has let violent felons back on the streets while keeping unharmful people locked up for life. Medical diagnosis and prognosis suffer, as does quality of life for all sorts of patients, from those with cancer to those suffering with psychiatric issues. Graduate and professional schools reject some potentially excellent students while admitting lower-​ quality applicants. As we will see in Chapter III, people are wired 28

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Introduction

to take a good story for a true story, and the failure to correct that intuition has led parents to believe they are responsible for their child’s autism. Other parents blame their children for not meeting expectations they have set for them: It is hard for children who have performed magnificently to maintain that level of performance. That’s what makes outstanding performances, well, exceptional. So the probability is low that there will be a repeat performance. Because parents fail to understand this naturally occurring regression to the mean, countless children have been unnecessarily punished (and perhaps worse) for failure to meet expectations that they could almost never meet. It seems obvious that these erroneous outcomes weren’t the intention of well-​meaning reasoners. Yet they occur time and time again. And often, we already know how to fix the problem. We just have to want to. Take, for example, the overconfidence bias. The overconfidence bias is a very widely studied frailty of human reason, one that SAE neither systematically studies nor proposes to effectively counteract. But philosophers, like everyone else, display it in spades. According to this frailty, people are inclined to think they are likely to be right far more frequently than they actually are. Using different tasks, it is easy to show in the classroom and at the dinner table that when people are 90% confident that they are correct, they are right anywhere from 40% to 75% of the time. Humans are hobbled by this faulty reasoning in domains far flung. The best strategy for counteracting overconfidence in investing, for example, is stubborn adherence to buying and holding low-​cost index funds and not trying to be an “expert” on 29

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the market. We know this because models that compare passive investing in indexes outperform active management by professionals. After all, those who pride themselves in playing the market are just like those who are sure they’ve figured out how to beat the casino. But the house always wins, and over the long run, overconfident investors also get taken. Anyone that thinks they “know” the market believes that they can respond quickly and with precision to the smallest tremor in their stocks, or even anticipate changes before they happen. But the truth is quite the reverse: The more active they are, the more they lose on average. Instead, the best way to make money in the market has been shown to be something like investing in an index fund (or some other carefully considered collection of stocks) and letting it sit: classic data show that overconfident trading costs the average family a quarter of a million dollars over a lifetime.14 Traditional epistemological approaches might be brought to appreciate that this overconfidence effect is both routine and damaging to ordinary epistemic standards. But a significant weakness of SAE is that it doesn’t anticipate or address such findings. Or consider the hindsight bias. Because we like a good story with narrative coherence, as events in our lives occur, we immediately try to make sense of them in a way that makes it seem like the outcomes are less surprising than they actually were. The hindsight bias refers to this misconception that past events were more predictable than they were prior to the events. This can be measured by asking subjects to predict the likelihood of different possible outcomes of an event prior to its occurring (say, asking before campaigning starts who will win the 30

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next election, or asking prior to the start of the season who will make the playoffs). Then, after the event, ask them to recall what probabilities they had assigned to each potential outcome, and if they can’t remember the probability, to estimate the probability they would have assigned prior to the event. If they picked the right outcome, subjects estimated that their predictions had been more accurate. If they picked the wrong outcome, they estimated that their predictions prior to the event had been less confident than they actually were. Thus, after learning the results of an event, people believe that the outcome was more predictable than it had been. That is to say, once we know something has happened, we rewrite history so that it was always predictable, and perhaps inevitable. Unfortunately, overconfidence and hindsight are but two of the numerous biases that define the limited boundaries of the human mind:  There are also the availability bias, endowment effect, anchoring effect, regression fallacy, base rate fallacy, and more. So what to do? Ameliorative Psychology is a science aimed squarely at correcting these biases before we start making worse judgments. For example, Ameliorative Psychology suggests a consider-​an-​alternative strategy in the case of judgments biased by overconfidence or hindsight. In this strategy, you offer specific hypotheses of how a given event might have turned out differently than it did, and in doing this, you can show someone that their connection between knowing that an event occurred and the sense that it was inevitable isn’t as strong as they thought. They realize just how easily it could have been otherwise. Unfortunately, like many debiasing strategies, the 31

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consider-​an-​alternative method takes work. An alternative scenario that does the trick requires specificity and detail, which in turn require careful attention and focus. Because using the consider-​an-​alternative procedure works to better calibrate judgments that would otherwise be affected by overconfidence or the hindsight bias, adherents to a pure reliabilism would say we should use it whenever those biases threaten our judgments. But overconfidence affects all our judgments about the future and the hindsight bias affects all our judgments about the past, making the consider-​an-​alternative strategy an extremely high-​cost method of debiasing. Frequent checks on these judgments, if undertaken sincerely and systematically, would require that even in everyday conversation we would need to pause discussion to carefully consider how confident we are in a particular claim, think up a specific enough hypothetical alternative, and then revise our judgment given the results of the exercise. That’s a lot of work every time your friend predicts who will win the next game or how good the chosen restaurant will be. Hobbled by constant assessment, your social exchanges grind to a halt, and friendships will be just one area of life that suffers. Thus, Strategic Reliabilism, a mongrel theory rather than a purebred, recommends that debiasing strategies with high costs should be used only when the stakes are high and time isn’t of the essence. This of course raises an important issue of balance between practicality and truth. Strategic Reliabilism seems to be saying that it’s fine to reason in unreliable ways—​ affected by biases—​except for when it’s worth it not to. So, the 32

3

Introduction

question: How much reliabilism is in Strategic Reliabilism, anyway? Is being pragmatic more important than being truthful? But that is the “strategy” of Strategic Reliabilism. If debiasing strategies were always cheap, easy, quick, and effective, then Strategic Reliabilism would agree with the reliabilist: We would always adopt those debiasing strategies. But because we don’t have cheap, easy, quick, and effective debiasing strategies (and in fact only have quite the opposite), Strategic Reliabilism takes up the mantle of the pragmatist and recommends that we often use our less-​than-​ideal reasoning strategies, since they’re better than nothing. We should only employ debiasing strategies when it’s worth it to do so. Otherwise, our biased judgments may be good enough for the situation. Or, we can recognize the limited boundaries of our cognitive faculties in some arcane areas, and leave the reasoning on such technical matters to someone else—​ for the time being.

6. CONCLUSION Still, there may be pockets of promise in existing, untutored assessments that normal humans make—​nothing to build a theory on, either philosophical or scientific—​but a persistent if isolated human talent worth frankly addressing. Philosopher of science Michael Strevens has argued that intuitively we can get a lot right, and not just in simple cases like telling when someone is drunk. For example, Strevens argues that a principle of equidynamics lies beneath John Keegan’s estimation that one 33

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quarter of wounds at the Battle of Sommes not immediately fatal were to the chest and abdomen.15 Keegan assumes, correctly it would seem, that given the physiological limitations on accuracy and skill in marksmanship, the hits should be roughly equally distributed across the parts of the body exposed to fire. The chest and abdomen make up half of the area of the total target, and half of that area is without vital organs. This argument would be difficult to make if we didn’t have some natural, untutored appreciation of statistical notions like variation, sampling, random fluctuation, and representativeness. This is an excellent example of reliable pedestrian intuitions. This is a brilliant discussion, both Keegan’s argument and Strevens’s analysis of it. But these cases have been relatively rare, and we had to brandish statistical methods anyway to identify them. After all, I am not defending the claim that our intuitions are always wrong or that the processes that generate them are always unreliable, but that for routine and important judgments we are chronically mistaken. So for every equidynamic “distribution of wounds” intuition that is reliable, there are many “going out with a wet head gives you a cold” intuitions. In light of the rarity of reliable pedestrian intuitions, I am not holding out for the triumph of untutored cognition over complicated problems, or even over those of the everyday variety. Experimental philosophers have struck a humbler pose, attempting to rescue philosophy’s fading vitality from the clutches of intuition. That project proceeds by conceding that philosophers have perhaps relied too heavily or broadly on intuition, but that it does have a crucial, if narrower, role to play in philosophical 34

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argumentation. This humility is welcome, but it implies that the bouquet will smell better if we simply remove the dead flowers. And it will. But this fix isn’t effective anyway. Philosophy’s reliance on intuition is deep and wide, and it is not clear what is left of modern philosophy if we flagged every evidential claim based on an intuition or an impressionistic judgment that gets a pass because it is deemed “intuitive.” For much of 20th-​and now 21st-​century epistemology, metaphysics, philosophy of language, and philosophy of mind, the unbridled appeal to intuition and impressionistic judgment was the beginning and end of gathering evidence. This chapter has shown that in spite of the pedestal on which most philosophers put epistemology and its ability to understand the human intellect, human use of heuristics licensed by traditional epistemology routinely performs worse than predictive models like SPRs. The human mind is biased by its cognitive boundedness, not to mention by culture and individual differences. We should not be expected, in fact, to make judgments as accurately as some linear models, or even other humans who focus on certain arcane topics where our lack of knowledge is most susceptible to our cognitive limitations and biases. The empirical evidence from psychology shows that philosophy’s reasoning methods, and reliance on intuition, have room for improvement:  We can reason better, and we already have the tools. I  have presented a vision of naturalism in which there is no real distinction between philosophical concerns and the most foundational concerns of scientists. Philosophers must wait for the evidence along with everyone 35

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else. There is no formal alternative that allows us to timelessly determine, once and for all, the credibility of naturalism. With naturalistic philosophers acting so regularly in concert with scientists, the next practical step is to present examples to others of naturalism in action. And this is the preoccupation of the next three chapters. Academic philosophy may be one of the few remaining areas of inquiry in which professionals take a long tradition and the loyalty of adherents as evidence that the profession is valuable, rather than was valued. But this leaves philosophers unprepared for the impending housecleaning at colleges and universities throughout the country. To weather this storm, not to mention to pursue accuracy, philosophy will have to yield to the judicious use of empirical evidence for foundational views about humans’ place in the natural order. Showing such care—​and when before the evidence, deference—​is the responsible thing to do. It is the epistemically right thing to do. And in the end, philosophy has nothing better to offer. So it is also the only thing to do.

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Chapter II

Good Reasoning and Evidence-​Based Epistemology

1. THE LIMITS OF REASONING Some disciplines, and the professions they grow, are built on unattainable goals. Alchemy, for example, had as one of its chief aims to find the elixir of life, the secret to immortality. Alchemy failed in this aim in part because immortality is impossible. Philosophy, too, has aspirations whose ends may very well be impossible, though few have thought to look. For example, philosophers routinely claim to teach people to reason well. Reasoning well depends in part on reasoning about things that matter, and doing it in a way that doesn’t detract from things that, all other things equal, you would want to be reasoning about. Given this, assuming that any step toward crafting a valid argument is a step toward improved reasoning is a little like assuming that, in evolution, getting halfway to vision 37

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is an improvement. The problem is, until you get all the way to being able to see, having the neural structures that would support vision do little good to advance vision’s cause. That is to say, reasoning halfway to a valid argument leaves you without a valid argument. By the time your argument has fallen short of validity, you have invested so much time and attentional resources that you have foregone reasoning about many other important topics, or things you would have otherwise done (like fishing, or reading to your child). So reasoning without evidence of reliability carries opportunity costs that are very difficult to recoup or justify. As much as we might hope that all social and personal decisions regarding well-​being can be made via pure reasoning, without calculators and arcane background knowledge, research on human judgment leaves no doubt about our frailties. If it weren’t for a grotesque brew of arrogance, idleness, and pride, we would have long ago faced these frailties. After all, we are painfully aware of our cognitive limitations even in familiar settings. Paul Meehl puts the point in this way: Surely we all know that the human brain is poor at weighting and computing. When you check out at a supermarket, you don’t eyeball the heap of purchases and say to the clerk, “Well it looks to me as if it’s about $17.00 worth; what do you think?” The clerk adds it up. There are no strong arguments from the armchair or from empirical studies . . . for believing that human beings can assign optimal weights in 38

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equations subjectively or that they apply their own weights consistently.1

If only reasoning and social judgment were based on information so simple. However, these judgments go far beyond just adding up the parts to see the sum. Social judgments are configural, which means that the impact of different inputs affects, and depends on, other inputs. It might be objected that this analogy, offered not probatively but pedagogically, presupposes an additive model that a proponent of configural judgment will not accept. Suppose instead that the supermarket pricing rule were, “Whenever both beef and fresh vegetables are involved, multiply the logarithm of 0.78 of the meat price by the square root of twice the vegetable price”; would the clerk and customer eyeball any better? Worse, almost certainly. When human judges perform poorly at estimating and applying the parameters of a simple or component mathematical function, they should not be expected to do better when required to weigh a complex composite of those variables.2

Unfortunately, the route to many of our goals is no less complex than these homey incalculables. As citizens, we want our children’s economy to be strong, our streets to be safe, our poor and ill cared for. We want a strong educational system, optimism and 39

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real opportunity. We not only want to avoid civil and national strife, we want to reduce the anxiety of their threat. In spite of how difficult it is to reason, and reason well, philosophers have long announced their pedagogical efforts to teach students how to think, and how to think critically. But here, it seems that “critical thinking” means the ability to take down the low-​hanging fruit of punditry and astrology. Few showed any awareness that there was a science, now long established, that evaluated and tracked successful reasoning. Instead, the earliest efforts in epistemology saw philosophers setting standards on how to reason, and on what counts as knowledge. These normative standards were admirable, and still form a core of work in contemporary epistemology. If these efforts continued in this normative direction toward reason, epistemology might follow a different kind of critical thinking, which would have as its base the empirical findings of psychology. The study of epistemology, then, would tackle different issues: reasoning strategies that can help students bolster their retirement savings, or protect their neighborhood from crime, or even increase cooperation in groups. While philosophy continued championing its version of critical thinking, the psychology of reasoning was undergoing a revolution under the influence of Simon, Meehl, Dawes, Tversky, Kahneman, Nisbett, and Ross. These psychologists developed theories of bounded rationality. They developed actuarial methods. They experimentally demonstrated a wide variety of biases whose effects are not reversible by simple awareness or concentration. And these frailties of reason, like anchoring and 40

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overconfidence, were tested in the lab and in the field. In the rare event that the philosophical epistemologist knew of these empirical results, they showed little concern and much disdain. But most of the time they were simply unaware of the empirical research, and so the positive impact such research had on the reliability of personal and professional judgment was minor.

2. STANDARD ANALYTIC EPISTEMOLOGY AND PROFESSIONAL PHILOSOPHY There are numerous examples of bounded rationality and the trouble it can get us into. The results are both jarring and illuminating, and in this work I  will elaborate on several themes Mike Bishop and I discussed in Epistemology and the Psychology of Human Judgment. Improving our decisions about ourselves is desirable, but doing so may require developing even better reasoning strategies than are now available—​and certainly better than those taught in your standard philosophy department. Mike Bishop and I were both trained as philosophers of science and were used to thinking and writing about a subject matter—​modern science—​that represented the clearest examples of methods that generated knowledge as well as theories that consisted of knowledge, like Newtonian theory, evolutionary theory, the germ theory of disease, the genetic theory of heritability, the kinetic theory of heat, visual psychophysics, working memory, and attentional processing. Scientific methods and accurate theoretical commitments created an edifice of stunning knowledge. 41

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On the other hand, twenty-​five centuries of philosophical investigations into the nature of knowledge left us with no such accomplishments. We were having the same disputes that the best minds in philosophy had before aqueducts and the stirrup. It seemed a good time to try a new approach. Of course, we were not the first to try a naturalistic approach to epistemology. But we were the first to advance a sustained attack on orthodox epistemology and also defend a detailed alternative right from journal pages in psychology. The theory came from the psychology of human judgment, from the experimental study of the systematic frailties of human reasoning, and the regression models that formed the basis of successful statistical prediction. Though our theory is a naturalistic alternative to Standard Analytic Epistemology, it does little to immediately try to provide a definition of “naturalism.” Imagine telling the scientist: “Before doing any experiments, before practicing science, before trying to discover things about the world, I’m afraid you’re going to have to state, and clarify to my satisfaction exactly what science is and what your methods are and formulate yet another argument for why I  should think your methods are going to produce a great theory.” Science would never get anywhere. The response couldn’t simply be “the scientific method,” because science languished for hundreds of years after the recording of the scientific method. Likewise, the right way for the naturalist to proceed is to have a rough idea of what you want in a good theory (the usual naturalistic principles, like that it fits with our best scientific theories and explains a wide range of phenomena—​preferably more than just my own intuitions 42

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about cases) and then proceed to try to build such a theory. It’s a trap to try to identify beforehand exactly what evidence a theory has to account for: That’s not what a person who thought philosophy should proceed more like science would ever agree to do. I can tell you what my theory of (say) rational thinking can account for and what it can do. I can argue that it’s more powerful than alternatives. But I can’t tell you, beforehand, what exact evidence a theory of (say) free will or well-​being will capture except to say the more the better, other things being equal. The right response to this tidal wave of analytic metaphilosophy in defense of traditional epistemology, then, is not more analytic metaphilosophy pointed at the question of what “naturalism” is. So a defense of naturalism that starts by trying to get extraordinarily clear about what I  mean by “naturalism” is exactly the wrong way for the naturalist to proceed. That’s the way for a closet a priorist to proceed. Or it’s the way that an a priorist who thinks that his is the only game in town would insist that you, the naturalist, proceed. While the sociological factors that drive professional philosophy deserve comment, my chief goal is to sketch a naturalistic alternative, and I should say that I find many of the forces that have isolated epistemology to be uninteresting philosophically, and disappointing intellectually. They have much more to do with articulating a paradigm and landing a job than making a sustained contribution to human, well, knowledge. That is the beauty of functional explanations. You can explain the persistence of a trait or practice without impugning the motives or character of the often charming and pristine mechanisms—​in 43

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this case, contemporary epistemologists—​ who realize the function. In this world of entrenched norms, even the philosophical firebrands have internalized the conservative view that current philosophical practice deserves the dignity of tender attention. Experimental philosophers, to give philosophy its dignified attention, have run experiments to assess the basic philosophical commitments on the contemporary scene. Some explore philosophical notions like reference, and look at whether the concepts of reference or knowledge deployed by philosophers are the same as those used by lay populations. Others look to see if those used by philosophers are used consistently, or contradict other closely related concepts. In these applications, the background assumption is that the philosophical practice, on its face, is credible enough to warrant sustained examination. But this background assumption, while uncontroversial in the philosophical community, has little more than the force of tradition behind it. Philosophy has nothing like the record of success that science enjoys, if you prefer, nothing like the monolithic consensus about the basic issues in the field. And for this reason, the background assumption of the credibility of philosophical concepts made by experimental philosophy represents a conservative view that is probably undeserved. To make the point bluntly: We would not investigate the concepts deployed by clairvoyants or palm readers to see whether they were the same as those deployed by laypeople. So what do we hope to gain by investigating philosophical concepts? Why is its credibility deserved? 44

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If philosophy is to enjoy this conservative treatment, then it should have achievements that are in some sense distinctively those of philosophy, achievements that could not have been made in another discipline. For the moment, set aside the harshness of the analogy between philosophy and the occult, and instead let’s ask what kinds of special achievements philosophy can claim. In the sciences, there are already many studies to show that expert concepts like momentum differ markedly from lay concepts of motion.3 There, we would never suppose that the lay notion has some special priority, or that the considered judgment of trained philosophers using this lay notion is more reliable than the judgment of physicists, or laypeople deferring to physicists. But in a philosophical culture that prioritizes neither scientific training nor even scientific literacy, traditional epistemologists can do little else but put a sharper edge on the dull tool of lay concepts. And yet philosophy has had a lifetime of favored treatment, receiving far more than equal time in the academy. Throughout the ages, theologians wanted to be them, and doctors wanted to be with them. Even miners in the 16th century reached for the connection: “There are many arts and sciences of which a miner should not be ignorant. First there is Philosophy, that he may discern the origin, cause, and nature of subterranean things.”4 Today, in many universities, philosophy still enjoys many of the barriers to free trade. Jesuit universities often have hefty philosophy requirements, and it is not too uncommon for other universities to make it a structural feature of the curriculum—​ say, allowing a logic course to substitute for a lab science for 45

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business students, as it had been where I  was an undergraduate. Students may ridicule philosophy, but taking philosophy courses is often incentivized more than others, whose benefits may be more palpable. It is true that historically there was little reason to single out philosophy for ridicule when everyone was in the dark about the basics. In Aristotle’s time, no one could even tell you how we drew breath. In a world just emerging from persistent destruction by warring tribes, many moves forward could be achieved by reflection alone. But ever since the rise of Western science, the mockery of philosophy has grown ever more apt. While philosophers of the Enlightenment wouldn’t dream of ignoring the sciences of their time, the modern scientific education is so demanding that modern philosophers typically throw up their hands. The sciences have closed their grip on many of the foundational questions.

3. THE FAILURE OF CONSTRUCTIVE PHILOSOPHY The Rubik’s Cube was a fad in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Each of the six faces of the cube is covered by nine stickers. A  given sticker can be one of six colors:  green, white, yellow, orange, blue, and red. A pivot mechanism enables each face to turn independently, thus mixing up the colors. The cube was made of four panels that pivoted vertically and horizontally. The object was to get all squares on each side the same color. Like 46

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space invaders and later virtual reality games, the Rubik’s Cube was totally absorbing. If it is true in the 1970s that you only saw the bottom half of anyone who owned a Triumph Spitfire (because they were always half-​underneath working on it), you only saw the top of the head of those captivated by the Rubik’s Cube. The mental absorption is pleasant, an escape from the tedium of perfunctory engagements. Modern culture has created many intellectual outlets that are, like the Rubik’s Cube, at once satisfyingly absorbing but otherwise inconsequential. There are crossword puzzles, chess, and Sudoku, just to name a few. There is one thing that all of these endeavors have in common: No one would ever claim that they are an essential component in a college curriculum. Advocates might feel that without them our lives would be diminished, but most wouldn’t. So we should ask ourselves what sorts of activities, described in as specific detail as possible, advance our intellectual aims, described as broadly as possible. The role of philosophy in one’s life is an issue deeply influenced by one’s metaphilosophy. Apart from the hours or pleasure it brings at one sitting, I don’t see any substantial evidence that Constructive Philosophy is an intellectually or practically worthwhile practice. As a metaphilosophical view, Constructive Philosophy holds that philosophy makes progress, often in the way that traditional epistemology supposes its theories of justification represent progress of some sort. What makes this progress distinctively philosophical, say its adherents, is that philosophy is an autonomous discipline not subsumable by science or any other field. It has a distinctive subject matter and a distinct set of 47

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methods with which to investigate that subject matter and generate new theories. Many people wonder whether philosophy, in content or action, is a special subject matter. In their defense, philosophers commonly argue that they use thought experiments, induction, and models, just like scientists. But they apply those techniques to topics and in ways that scientists do not. The credibility of this defense depends on the generality of the description of “subject matter” and “set of methods.” On my use, physics and biology have different subject matters and methods, despite the fact that their subject matters are both made of physical objects and their methods are inductive and experimental. Accordingly, Constructive Philosophy holds that philosophy is different and autonomous from anthropology or history, for example. Analytic metaphysics contains the best examples of theories constructed to address other creations of philosophy. Granted, there isn’t much evidence that it is actually damaging. For that, you would need evidence of other cultures not practicing it that enjoy benefits that can be specifically attributed to practices that replaced Constructive Philosophy. But cultures are too complex to partition a corner and fiddle with it. If your metaphilosophy supposes that philosophy can make progress, the possible sources of evidence of progress is dizzying. Consider the proliferation of metaphilosophical views. Champions of a priori approaches to foundational issues in philosophy react to Experimental Philosophy by insisting that X-​ phi is wrong or irrelevant and that armchair philosophy is fine as it is. Unfortunately, there is little agreement among them about 48

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what exactly armchair philosophy is. And it has been surprisingly difficult to secure that consensus among them. Is it guidance solely by intuition? Treatment of empirical facts as intellectually or rationally irrelevant? The exclusive use of conceptual analysis? Given its current privilege to luxuriate in thought without consequence, such impasses among friends of armchair philosophy are predictable. When your philosophy isn’t restricted by facts, it turns out that “progress” is theoretical diversity, nothing more. This may be an effort to take intellectual refuge in a standard that few want to reject: tolerance for variety and a diversity of views. We now have more and more theories of lots of traditional philosophical notions, of justification, of well-​being, of mereological identity (for example) to answer to lots of different philosophers’ particular intuitions.5 ( Just survey the variable replies to problems of justified false belief, peer disagreement, remote desires among desire satisfaction theorists, the trolley problem, and vagueness, to mention a few.) Well, it turns out it’s the same for metaphilosophy! When not restricted by facts, analytic metaphilosophy develops like rabbits in Australia: diversity with no selection pressure! Philosophy may not make progress, but it does change. And between optimism and advertising, this movement can be misperceived as progress. Certainly very smart people are doing things, they are pursuing projects that require formal skills or imaginative techniques. When a field publishes such creations in the organs of the profession and defines this as progress, then we have progress. But the activities of articulating a paradigm 49

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do not represent progress in the praiseworthy sense. It does not represent a lasting appreciation of truth, or an application of significant knowledge that advances human well-​being or understanding. But it is often nifty. Philosophy is sometimes mentioned together with practical matters that are weighty:  the political theory underlying democracy, the notion of causation underlying quantum effects, moral notions underlying corporate conflicts of interest or hospitals and health-​care facilities dealing with consent and treatment decisions. In all of these cases, philosophical training may help. But philosophers couldn’t really say, because they haven’t compared these cases to those in which quantum theory developed independently of philosophy, political institutions independent of philosophical analysis, and respectful and reciprocal social arrangements independent of moral theories, or at least moral commitments. Philosophers might use this as an ironic point about my criticisms, and this would be doubly ironic. The problem here is the same as any historical claim about the importance of some factor in the generation of another. In domains that are well-​enough behaved, we can run experiments to nail down this influence. To say that philosophical work itself made these accounts different is to say that without philosophy they would not have the character they do. But philosophers can’t know that without comparing an existing view with one in the same initial position but without philosophical influence. This is a point about the comparisons that philosophers haven’t carried out. 50

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4. THE DEPARTMENT OF THINGS I FIND REALLY COOL TO THINK ABOUT The creation of intellectual culture starts early. When I was fifteen, I came upon Hobbes’s Leviathan. It was immediately readable, and I was totally captivated by the idea of a social contract that placed limits on a king. I  liked thinking about the logical consequences of having a contract that essentially dissolved if the more powerful party violated it (in this case, by commanding self-​harm). Raised Catholic, I would look for logical loopholes in doctrine. According to the Catholic Church, suicide is a mortal sin, and dying with a mortal sin on your soul—​unabsolved without confession—​will land you in hell (or at least keep you out of heaven). Now, suppose you have a painful terminal illness. You don’t want to suffer through it but you don’t want to commit suicide (because you want to go to heaven and suicide is a mortal sin). Could you select an appropriate means of suicide in the confessional, so that you could express your contrition to the priest before you die and so be absolved? Well, you would have to be genuinely contrite. But you know yourself, and could predict that, having committed an act with irreversible consequences so dire, you would be deeply regretful. But if you could predict this, then your contrition in the moment was merely orchestrated by an earlier choice. You see the point. So how much should your reported contrition count? These may be the amateurish musings of a teenager, but they brought a sense of escape like that delivered by the Rubik’s Cube. And it did something else: it tied me to the sense of the 51

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eternal. And I  bet any philosopher has a similar story to tell. Sadly, people are not entitled to jobs that match their passions. Instead, philosophy jobs get their justification by a market that calls for philosophical training and course work in undergraduate and graduate education. Philosophy is vulnerable to reassignment because it has not been enterprising in pursuing opportunities. It has more frequently defended turf and turned away benefactors. Professional philosophy is a very unique skill and, like most other PhD training, four to six years of studies leaves most graduates unfit for anything but teaching, research, and service at a college or university. To make the job crunch worse, for the last thirty years the number of candidates have far outstripped the number of jobs. So here you have a population of intelligent individuals, driven by a passion that makes them desperate to stay in philosophy, and the only way to do that is to secure a precious position at a college. Once ensconced in that position, a person is not about to accept arguments, no matter how careful or well documented, that philosophy is marginal to intellectual culture, let alone that it is the modern version of alchemy. Instead, it is easier to defer awareness of the profession’s deterioration by arguing that it hasn’t been shown that good Constructive Philosophy is impossible, or that the intuitions driving First Philosophy are necessarily false. If Constructive Philosophy is the faculty’s Rubik’s Cube—​ vexing and absorbing—​philosophy departments have become the university’s Pet Rock. Every university has to have one, and every university is challenged to say why. In the case of 52

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philosophy, there is tradition. The demand for philosophers is caused by norms that place a value on philosophy. But this demand is fragile, suspended only by its association with a dignified intellectual history. There is no state mechanism that advises departments about how many philosophy PhDs need to be trained to satisfy a need, although there may be a state-​ sanctioned quota of clinical psychology students communicated to graduate from psychology programs so as to maintain licensing revenue or expected (demographic) need. I doubt the wisdom of any assumption that we should have as many graduate programs in philosophy as applicant streams can support. As a profession protected by the slow evolution of higher education and sustained by its affiliation with weighty names like Aristotle and great traditions like the Enlightenment, philosophy can hang on. But as a constructive endeavor, philosophy long ago entered an epoch of unprincipled oscillation between the generation of new controversies and their disappearance without any detectable resolution. Philosophy has lost its way. You don’t often get this sense from philosophers, who, focused on their projects, defend the sanctity and importance of the discipline. It is important to remember that this kind of loyalty to profession is familiar: Any alchemist would respond in the same way. You learn this lesson from a more historical view of the field and can recognize philosophy’s unwillingness to see itself as part of a dynamic culture. It is, in fact, a tired sociological observation that as soon as a radical culture is accepted, it becomes conservative and abandons the principles of radical change it once embraced. So 53

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philosophers forget that culture is dynamic, and that there is no shame, though some personal risk, in yielding to the creeping influence of pedagogical or theoretical co-​option by other fields. Now, occasionally a philosopher, her back against the wall, will say that is not what philosophy is about. Philosophy is not about success but edification. It lives not for the product but in the ongoing conversation. But they don’t really believe that. Most people, philosophers included, do not celebrate the abandonment of their selected intellectual standards as “alternative conversations.” My argument has clearly defined limits, and my conclusions depend on very specific evidence. This will not silence individuals who feel most threatened by my conclusions. In fact, even the suggestion that philosophy is a less than essential discipline can induce apoplexy among loyalists. This kind of passion can blind. Philosophers begin to feel—​as anyone would—​that their salary is now subject to question, their intellectual credentials are in doubt, their pedigree is meaningless, their philosophical joys are counterfeit, their publications are like gossip at the water cooler. Such dizzying assaults on people’s livelihood do not clear the head. In this respect, philosophers are no different from any other professionals. The same response of outrage from assaults on livelihood would occur at the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers hall, on the Senate floor, at an American Bar Association meeting, as it would at psychoanalysis conferences, astrology seminars, and similar gatherings. People want to believe they serve a vital function. Only some of them are right. 54

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Having enjoyed many conversations with many philosophical friends over the decades, I am acutely aware that there are many rhetorical strategies available to those who feel under siege. For readers of this book, the most important trait is patience. There is little point in even reading this book if every mention of a philosopher’s insight or every allusion to a scientist’s superficiality brings decisive satisfaction to the defender of contemporary Constructive Philosophy, as if to say: “You could not have developed that view without philosophy, so everything is just fine” or “This is why having philosophy departments is justified.” When the very existence of a love object is threatened, even the most critical mind is prone to premature relaxation. Philosophers make their defense easier by treating their abstract thinking as an exercise in theory-​building. But there is a difference between theorizing and higher-​order noodling (e.g., the number of free parameters, and the connection to scientifically taxonomic dimensions). The philosophers I  know are very smart. They are honest and hard-​working. They care about their students. And they are committed to helping their profession in all of the familiar ways:  refereeing papers and books, sponsoring and attending conferences, reading drafts of others’ works, acting as reviewers in promotion and tenure cases. They are in it for the same reasons I am: The work is enjoyable and satisfying. I have worked with many philosophers, coauthoring articles, books, chapters, book reviews, and encyclopedia articles, with them. And yet, I  know that I  am not entitled to a position in a Department of Things I Find Really Cool to Think About, any 55

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more than I am entitled that there be any such department. Other contemporary philosophers know this as well, but we have blind spots just like everyone else. We are all prone to flights of high-​ minded self-​description, to exaggerate the importance of our discipline, and to place our practices at the center of civilization. There are a few reasons that philosophers get high-​minded about the dignity of their pursuits. Some feel rightly protective of the feeling of elevation they get from insight, some are swept away by philosophy’s affiliation with the grand traditions of the Ancient Greeks and the European Enlightenment, and still others swell at the great scale of history. Philosophers often mention that no one else can do what a philosopher does—​it is a distinctive skill. When the water recedes in the other fields, there is real knowledge left behind. Cognitive psychology will leave behind more than a decade of research focused closely on stereotyping. But it will also leave a floodplain of real effects that advanced the field. Can philosophy say that? In a world where universities are on the lookout to cut departments, criticizing professional academic philosophy may seem like a dangerous and irresponsible game. But culture is dynamic. Departments come and go, and professional philosophy has evolved since Kant. Why shouldn’t this evolution continue? So if treating contemporary academic philosophy in some respects as ineffectual is like throwing a match on dry tinder, my advice is the same as the Department of Forestry’s:  You can avoid conflagration with a controlled burn. For much of environmental history, forest hygiene took care of itself. Periodic fires 56

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in prehistory cleared the forest floor of tinder, starving future fires of fuel that, in greater abundance, would destroy a forest. Now that human intervention prevents those fires, we need to set controlled fires. Like forest eco-​culture, human culture too is dynamic. Philosophy departments now are different from what they were seventy years ago, and very different from what they were 140 years ago, where they existed at all. There is no reason to think that current resources at universities are distributed optimally nor that the current curriculum does no harm. We should be open to considering the evidence, free from the motives of effort justification, protection against psychic injury, lack of imagination (about how life would go without their familiar departmental arrangement, etc.), all impulses that seem to drive many heated arguments against naturalistic movements. In the university of the future, once the evidence is considered and resources redistributed, psychologists may assume the mantle of epistemologist as well. Institutional battles will rage. It won’t be necessary for philosophers to actually organize against the creeping influence of science into their territory. The conservative power of philosophical tradition means that philosophy won’t welcome well-​ trained psychologists with foundational interests widely recognized as philosophical. This will be enough to continue traditional philosophy’s ordinary standard of care: trading intuitions and doing conceptual analysis with similarly trained philosophers in the English-​speaking world. So perhaps it is worth trying to reform rather than displace epistemology. We should take epistemology seriously because the judgments we make, and what we believe, have very 57

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real repercussions on how we act in the world. If you choose to trust the intuition of philosophers over the recommendations of Ameliorative Psychology, you’re risking benefit to yourself and others.

5. STRATEGIC RELIABILISM: PHILOSOPHY AS COACH Humans can only think and do so much. Perhaps that is why people commonly complain that epistemology gives impractical or useless advice:  Try to make sure all of your beliefs are justified, or that all of your beliefs are true. Sweeping aside such earthly matters, philosophers often explain that this protest is no objection to traditional epistemology. After all, epistemology is normative. It is concerned with what ought to be the case rather than what is the case. Epistemology focuses on how people ought to reason and what they ought to believe. Of course, you can only obligate people to do what they are capable of doing. Ought implies can. So trouble looms for an epistemology that ignores or is insensitive to our natural limitations. We can take refreshingly different perspectives, and decency may require it. A person making normative judgments can do so from the perspective of a judge or a coach. If you’re a judge, you seek to assign responsibility. You seek to praise or blame. The judge’s stance is by nature judgmental. It is naturally connected to reactive attitudes, such as anger, resentment, guilt, shame, pride, or gratitude. 58

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If you’re a coach, you seek to improve an agent’s performance. The coach’s stance is essentially ameliorative. It seeks to help a person get better at something. There is, obviously and inevitably, a judgment implicit in a coach’s advice—​that the agent’s performance is somehow imperfect (otherwise there couldn’t be room for improvement). So even if one were to try interpreting scientists’ behavior in a purely descriptive way, it wouldn’t be an honest portrayal if scientists didn’t make implicit evaluative judgments in their scientific advice. And it is in this way that people at the foundations of the sciences are doing normative work. It is obvious as it is inevitable. But the point of the coach’s judgment is not to assign responsibility nor to assign praise or blame, nor to evoke guilt or pride. The point of the coach’s judgment is to identify flaws in a person’s performance in order to correct them. There are times when it is appropriate to be a judge, and times when it is better to be a coach. It is easy to say, for example, that parents who refuse to vaccinate their children and thus put them at risk can be judged on some moral or epistemic grounds. But often, it is not enough to merely be a judge. If we fail to attempt to correct the unjustified beliefs in others, we are left with an epistemology that recognizes but does not ameliorate those beliefs. In that this epistemology sees but does not try to diminish the suffering that comes along with it, those that hold to it are complicit in that suffering. And, as coaches, we should attempt to correct them. It is true that not all epistemology is ameliorative, or normative. Plenty of questions regarding the nature of knowledge don’t pretend to give guidance on how or 59

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what to think. However, those epistemologists who do disperse normative advice and yet still ignore ameliorative issues are, in essence, claiming that they know more than psychologists about the cognitive boundedness of the human mind. Strategic Reliabilism can be considered a normative mongrel. It views rationality as a mixture of the purely epistemological and the purely prudential, evaluating reasoning strategies both in terms of their reliability and their cost-​effectiveness. As such, it leaves itself open to criticism from all flanks by normative purists. The epistemologists wonder why we would taint their reliabilism with pragmatics, when rational reasoning is reliable reasoning, the costs of doing so be damned. The pragmatists ask the opposite: why are we trying to take reasoning that works and tarnishing it with reliabilist considerations? Mike Bishop and I give the same answer to normative purists of all stripes: If we’re looking for ways to become better epistemological coaches, Strategic Reliabilism has the right mix of normative elements. Precisely because of its mongrel nature, it’s an epistemology that can be successfully used by real people. Pure theories, in all their glory, aren’t as useful as Strategic Reliabilism in practice. In this regard, this epistemic mongrel is similar to those in the animal kingdom: they’re tougher and more robust than the purebred. Pure reliabilists are likely to offer impractical advice if they ignore pragmatic concerns like the costs and benefits, in both time and limited mental capacity, of reasoning. Their recommendations either cannot be put to use or aren’t worth implementing, rendering the recommendations useless. No good coach would want to do that. 60

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It should come as no surprise that people using frequencies are able to reason better than people using probabilities. For example, if you tell someone that twenty-​seven out of thirty-​two people who test positive for a given disease will turn out to actually have it, she can use that information to make more accurate decisions about her prognosis than if you tell her that the test has a .15625 false positive rate. If at this point the pure reliabilist argues that the frequency format works on “pure” reliabilist grounds because its ease of use makes it more reliable than probability formats, then the pure reliabilist has already conceded to the epistemic mongrel. That is to say, in stating that ease of use is a factor in what makes something more or less reliable, the pure reliabilist has smuggled pragmatic considerations into the epistemic evaluation. Once we’ve dealt with the pure reliabilist, it’s not surprising that the pragmatist will arrive and co-​sign on the statement that good epistemic evaluation demands pragmatism. However, she’ll go a step further and ask why we need reliabilist considerations to begin with. To answer her, we would note that if we disallow reliability as a standard for good reasoning, the pragmatist might be left in a worse spot than the pure reliabilist and end up with no useful advice at all. In the above example regarding frequency and probability formats, Strategic Reliabilism can provide specific and explicit advice to use the frequency format. The pragmatist, however, can only say that we should reason in a way that expected utility is maximized. But clearly, this is not enough. To be a good coach, you cannot just tell people to succeed, but how to do so. 61

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As we have seen, not all epistemologies can be used by real people in real situations. By taking into account the resources and interests of any agent, however, the mongrel epistemology of Strategic Reliabilism can not only be used by real people but by institutions as well. Institutions make judgments all the time:  staffing decisions, projected revenue, market strategies, and so on. Even something as small as whether your credit card purchase is approved or declined is based on a type of mongrel epistemology that individuals would be unable to compute on their own. Consider a banking database that contains customers’ credit information—​income, buying history, and other demographic information on tens of thousands of credit card customers. Suppose that this database gets updated every week with information on every client and potential client. Your job is to use this database to determine which people now applying for a credit card are most likely to pay their monthly minimum but defer the balance, based on the characteristics of the clients in the database who have already carried the balance. With weekly updates and clients in the tens of thousands, one way to improve the accuracy of your predictions, even if in tiny increments, is to update the database daily, then hourly, then by the minute. In short, more frequent updates are more likely to approach optimal accuracy. Because the operations applied to the database originate from a computer and the process is already built, the costs of constant updating are likely to be infinitesimal. And the bank might well find the benefits of constant updating (greater accuracy) well worth the (minuscule) costs. But in humans, this would be a poor recommendation. Relentless updating would 62

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draw effort and attention away from sustained, enjoyable, and absorbing activities that make a life worth living. As we have just seen, institutions are potentially better situated to incorporate this mongrel epistemology into their judgments, and sometimes institutions need this epistemology to overcome the judgments (and cognitive biases) of individuals. For example, jurors can easily confuse hindsight with predictability—​once you can see how something turned out, it’s easy to overestimate how probable that outcome was or should have been. And this misunderstanding can lead to huge, potentially illegitimate, awards. One particular case highlights the need for good debiasing strategies. A  radiograph of a patient showed a 3 cm tumor, which the reviewing radiologist did not see. Over three years later, the patient presented with a malignant thymoma, which proved fatal. The family of the patient sued the radiologist for malpractice, claiming that missing the tumor originally led to the patient’s death. The defense pointed to the hindsight bias as driving the lawsuit: the plaintiff ’s expert witnesses knew how the story turned out and thus could claim the radiologist should have predicted this outcome: “The defendant radiologist was being accused of negligence because of an alleged misinterpretation of chest radiographs that had been rendered prospectively and without any knowledge of what future radiographs would disclose, and yet he was being judged by radiology experts who had full knowledge of what the future radiographs actually did disclose.”6 It’s possible that, as well, the jury was swayed by this appeal to the hindsight bias: even though the evidence shows that about 30 percent 63

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of radiologists would make the same mistake, the jury had no problem assigning blame, taking only three hours to award the patient’s family $872,000.7 Strategic Reliabilism teaches us that sometimes biases need to be corrected, and the use of something like the consider-​an-​alternative debiasing strategy discussed in Chapter I, though potentially costly, could lead the jurors to overcome these biases, or at least reduce their impact. Reading the above, the pragmatist will see an implicit recommendation to use unreliable reasoning strategies that may fall prey to cognitive biases until it is worth using debiasing strategies to lead to more reliable reasoning. She might then ask where reliabilism comes into play in Strategic Reliabilism to begin with, if pragmatics end up being the gold standard, above reliability and truth. However, this example is just one of many; just because in this case Strategic Reliabilism gives the advice a pragmatist would give, in many others this epistemic mongrel will give the same advice a reliabilist would. Strategic Reliabilism is, after all, strategic: If debiasing can be done cheaply, easily, and effectively, then by all means, adopt that debiasing strategy in your reasoning. But if the debiasing strategy is, as it so often is, costly, slow, or onerous, then the substandard reasoning strategy will have to do—​it’s better than nothing.

6. CONCLUSION Many disciplines have practitioners who make normative pronouncements, from the perspectives of both judge and coach. 64

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They make judgments about the appropriate size of institutions, proper amounts of social funding, and the conditions required to reduce deception in financial advising. So philosophers are not alone in this normative impulse. However, none of these normative pronouncements self-​consciously recommend the near impossible. Instead, they formulate proposals based on scientifically acquired empirical evidence of the requirements of human well-​being, the limits on time, the causes of stress, the threats of poor health, and the variable influence of income on cognition and resilience. Before imposing a time-​honored normative principle, we should be sure we are not obligating vulnerable individuals to acts of heroism routinely or, for that matter, rewarding the privileged for scoring from third base on a routine single. With the exception of some practical theologians, however, philosophers are unique in the freedom with which their normative pronouncements, and the theories they come from, ignore well-​documented limits on human cognition and, ultimately, well-​being. Philosophy falters when it fails to account for the complex issues that arise from real people using their real cognitive structures (and limitations). Philosophers are always looking for generalizable guidance, but instead of generalizing based on the deep causes, in this case philosophers are searching for lofty idealization—​irresponsibly so. Thus, real people with real cognitive limitations will be unable to act in accord with these ideal—​yet impractical—​r ules. Just as some epistemologists tell us we must do whatever we can to make sure our beliefs are true regardless of the costs of checking, some 65

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ethicists tell us that we ought to respect people’s autonomy, even if that means letting them make damaging factual errors about their own capabilities without much investigation into their access to information, ability to use it, or real opportunity to pursue their goals. It seems that the ability, or even obligation, to judge comes part and parcel with philosophical training. However, untethered from the capacities and situations of real people, judging requires little more than high self-​regard and volume. But if informed by human capacities and situations, philosophical theorizing could become much more like coaching. Following this model may change the profile of philosophy, making applied philosophy less punitive and more ameliorative.

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Chapter III

The Natural Limits of Explanation

1. OWNING UP TO HUMAN LIMITATIONS Naturalistic approaches to philosophical issues, from metaphysics and mind, to knowledge and morality, give science pride of place in intellectual achievement. This priority is expressed differently in different forms of naturalism. Some are naturalistic about method, asserting that the methods of philosophy are continuous with the methods of science. Others are naturalistic about metaphysics, claiming that our best sciences—​physics, chemistry, and biology—​indicate that all phenomena in the universe are physical. And as a result, nothing that exists is supernatural. This physicalist brand of naturalism also suggests a hypothesis about explanation as well: All explanations are physical explanations, descriptions of causes that are entirely physical.1 In broadest outline, then, naturalistic philosophers explain all of the crucial categories, processes, and properties that occupy them in terms of natural processes. These processes are 67

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characterized by their natural, physical constraints. Our focus has been on epistemology, that area of philosophy that describes the nature, origins, and limits of knowledge. The previous chapter deflates the pretensions of contemporary epistemology and adjusts its aims, but it closes with a noble and promising replacement: a welcoming, scientific approach to improving reasoning strategies. This naturalistic theory of reasoning excellence would be based on the best scientific evidence of the time and the theory-​building efforts of thinkers in many disciplines. To the extent that this alternative is not appreciated by philosophers, it is because the sociology of professional philosophy rewards a guild-​like insularity. But their vision of what they are doing is never cynical. As a group, philosophers seem ceaselessly optimistic about the powers of the human mind and its ability to grasp explanations, and our ability to understand those powers via careful phenomenological introspection. But when a naturalistic philosopher surveys the scientific consensus about the detailed physical structure of human cognitive function, it becomes easier to see how our rigid neurological architecture imposes severe limitations on our understanding. Limits on signal propagation and neural activation are just two kinds of constraints on mental function. Memory, for example, is not an endless resource.2 There are limits on the number of items in memory that can be constantly activated,3 the number of relations among items in memory that can be integrated,4 and the limit enforced to avoid interference between items in working memory.5 And memory is not the only complex process whose components are difficult to track by introspection or casual 68

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observation. To cite another case, the faculty of attention proceeds by activating three broad component stages:  alerting, orienting, and executive. Both imaging and lesioning studies indicate that each of these processes is served by distinctive neural pathways, pathways whose functions are unlikely to be captured by analytic constructs arrived at through introspection of phenomenological contents.6 When we acquire understanding through observation, for example, an observation of even a simple object requires attentional capture of separable dimensions of shape, surface contour, color, and motion, to mention just a few factors—​attentional capture so complex, in fact, that even powerful computers struggle with object recognition. That capture process is measured in tens of milliseconds. Any less time, it cannot be captured in the window, and it is lost to later processes of storage and report. Any more time and it interferes with processes that come after or crowd out other analyses that co-​occur, placing so much load on working memory that we are unable to retain the event. Even the sensory analysis of a solitary dimension of color places measurable demands on one of many distinctive attentional processes.7 Understanding may require knowledge of something general, something law-​like, about the item being understood, and the connection between the general truth and the particular item is essentially explanatory. So it may be that there is no understanding without explanation.8 But there would seem to be plenty of good explanations without understanding. We may not understand why the caged bird sings, and neither does the bird, but there is an explanation. There are reasons, specifying causes, that 69

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account for the behavior. There are some facts that finches and iguanas, crows and bonobos will never know. Why not humans too? There is the truth of the causal description—​a fact about the world—​and the ability of the cognizer (finch, iguana, crow, bonobo, human) to understand it, a fact about their minds. The ontic view of explanation rationalizes this observation, and the stark distinction it marks between a good explanation and the endlessly variable powers of an audience. There are many limits on explanation, both cognitive and social. Those limitations are defined by the biology of a species, limitations on processing and conceptual range that likely make some truths unknowable by that species, including humans. For example, the phenomenon of consciousness may be complex in a way that we could track some of its elaborate neural causes but never have a transparent understanding of its many core causes. But beyond the cognitive and social, there is another limitation that is imposed by the world: Some problems may in fact be irreducibly mysterious. There are certain kinds of quantum effects whose occurrence may be inexplicable by humans. For example, why did the last atom of radioactive material decay when it did? Other events may be inexplicable because the relevant events are forever buried or its traces remain irretrievable, such as details about the origin of the universe or the evolution of human intelligence. Many common explanations for complex phenomena are true, but people find them hard to understand. Because humans have severe limits on memory and attention, this places limits on what they can (explain and) understand. We are most aware 70

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of this limitation when we try to explain things to children. If worms don’t have brains and can’t see, how do they know to retract into their holes as we walk by? How does lightning cause thunder? Why are people sometimes cruel to one another? We try to help them picture the causes—​the cells sensitive to vibration, the expansion of molecules when heated, and a person’s energetic anger or jealousy that explodes toward a fellow human—​so that they can understand how each cause plays its special role in producing the otherwise puzzling effect. But the lessons apply beyond juvenile cognition. Many phenomena that we try to explain involve many variables of different causal direction and potency; I have in mind domains like population ecology, or models of watershed pollution, which include dozens of variables. Understanding these is very different from understanding, say, why a billiard ball moves the way it does after impact, in which only a few factors are involved. Explanation, when complex, is not transparent or understanding-​supportive. You can’t hold each cause in your focus; you may not even be able to individuate them without computational assistance, and so the causes cannot be introspected or carefully observed. Instead, philosophers, like other ordinary humans, end up juggling them informally, haphazardly musing over this property or that. Self-​explanation, the stories we tell about ourselves, are likewise at their root a particular kind of complex explanation. Our motives, our desires, and the drives that execute them are many and often subtle. The processes that serve them often have a fast temporal scale, and little can be deciphered about 71

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those causes from the slow and monolithic experiences that have the right scale to be captured by our unaided gaze. So if there is an estrangement associated with the idea that this physical thing could be you, or when doing something that is best for you even though it doesn’t “feel” right, this is just the personal version of explaining something too complex to understand, something that requires a mathematical model or a Statistical Prediction Rule (SPR). It may feel odd, a little creepy, to submit to impartial demands you viscerally loathe. Denying yourself extravagances when planning for retirement, foregoing indulgence when looking after your health, biting your tongue in family disputes, correctly calculating the completion of a project—​all of these may require that you pursue your interests as if by remote control. When contemplating our own personal interests, we react to the ordinary features of complex information with a phenomenology of estrangement. That doesn’t make the self non-​physical, non-​ naturalistic, or otherwise unsuitable for scientific study, but just methodologically complicated, something social scientists have assumed for centuries.

2. THE DELICATE FEELING OF EXPLAINING In Cat’s Cradle, Kurt Vonnegut captures the story behind, and motivation for, explanation: “Tiger got to hunt, bird got to fly; Man got to sit and wonder, ‘Why, why, why?’ Tiger got to sleep, bird got to land; Man got to tell himself he understand.”9 72

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Vonnegut’s got this roughly right. There are few things more human than to wonder why, to find a way to end the indecision, and to rationalize why we stopped. At the center of this process is explanation. While philosophers have busied themselves coming up with normative accounts of explanation, visions of what a good explanation, in general, must look like, scientists had no such general concern. After all, long before we had the 20th-​century philosophers’ normative accounts of explanation, we had some very good scientific explanations, explanations (for example) for the biology of heritable characteristics, the chemistry of bonding, and the physics of diffusion. And when evidently good explanations conflicted with philosophical, normative proposals, it was philosophical principle that yielded. But explanations occur in many different subject matters, covering unique natural domains. Just as flora and fauna must be appreciated for their unique role in the kingdom of things, so too must good explanations for their unique activities. One indication (though not a necessary condition) that an explanation is good is that it connects different domains, often in a way that surprises, thereby uncovering a unity in nature. Physicists illustrate this value when they spell out the connections between alpha particle decay, electrolysis, Brownian motion, X-​ray diffraction, and black body radiation, which all yield the same value for Avogadro’s number. That is a stunning array of diverse phenomena, unified by an atomic hypothesis now nearly impossible to abandon. So not only do good explanations unwittingly unify, but their revision is not discretionary. No matter what your imagination tells you, you cannot reject the aspect 73

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of the atomic hypothesis that concerns alpha decay and accept the part connected to Brownian motion. You can’t reconceive atoms, assigning their properties different and new magnitudes but then expect them to play the same uninterrupted role in the gas laws and beta decay. After all, you have changed the original values of the variables. There is a reason that theorizing evokes imagery of the fabric of the universe: Pull one string, and you unravel not just a patch of theory but the entire tapestry. It is a seamless causal story that scientific explanations offer, and one that the joint use of multiple theories demands. These unanticipated connections indicate that an explanation is good, even if people don’t quite understand why. Now, people differ in the concepts they possess, and for this reason they walk away from the same explanation with different understandings. But because the understanding so often brought by explanation differs so greatly based on the education and idiosyncrasies of individuals, it is no wonder that so little could be said about explanation that is both general and useful. Fortunately, one thing we can say a lot about is what makes an explanation good. The most important feature is that it is simply correct or accurate—​this is at the heart of what is called the ontic account of explanation. If early chemists and biologists had proposed a genetic theory of traits prior to Darwin’s theory of evolution, we would not say the genetic explanation of heritable traits was incorrect or inaccurate or otherwise bad, simply because precious few people could understand it, and maybe no one fully. According to this view, the quality of an explanation is determined not by its psychological appeal or its logical/​formal 74

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features but by its possession of certain objective factors, like its accurate description of causal factors. Wesley Salmon says that “what constitutes adequate explanation depends crucially upon the mechanisms that operate in our world.”10 Change the constituents in the world, and you could change good explanations to bad (and bad to good). By grounding the quality of an explanation on mechanisms of the world, Salmon honors the standard separation of the world’s steadfast physical structures from the fickle effects of human motivation and understanding. The mechanisms that explain life or animacy may have to await explication until we have a better theory with which to understand it, but that doesn’t mean that the explanation isn’t right. The correct explanation might be easily within our reach, but we haven’t recognized it. As Salmon puts it: “The ontic conception looks upon the world, to a large extent at least, as a black box whose workings we want to understand. Explanation involves laying bare the underlying mechanisms that connect the observable inputs to the observable outputs. We explain events by showing how they fit into the causal nexus.”11 Maybe they haven’t been shown to your satisfaction, but that is more about you than about the explanation. Unfortunately, as we have seen with even simple examples of memory and attention, humans have rigid and rigidly limited neurological structures, and the boundedness of our cognition sometimes gets in the way of tracking ontic accuracy. Good explanation cannot be identified by its logical characterization or its psychological ones. Poor explanations can have a coherent logical structure, and good explanations can often contain a 75

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largely unarticulated logical structure. In the psychological tradition, it was common to suppose that good explanation makes complicated, arcane phenomena more familiar. But achieving this familiarity is all too contingent, too dependent on subjective factors like personal idiosyncrasy, to provide the basis for an account of explanation. Explanations may begin in wonder, but they aim to end in persuasion. The process of constructing an explanation discloses a deep disposition to chase understanding, to alleviate the dreaded uncertainty of indecision. This drive for explanation—​ the impulse to create a kind of story that fits the facts together and makes an event less puzzling—​suggests that humans have a corresponding vision of what explanatory stories should feel like. Facing curious events in the world or in our own lives—​an explosion, a souring relationship, unexpected weight loss—​we see a collection of facts and feel the need for a coherent arrangement. An explanation fits the pieces together, aligns the categories, and we feel we understand what brought the curious fact about. This image completes the vision of the poet William Blake, who once claimed that “The truth can never be told so as to be understood and not be believed.”12 Blake was too optimistic. The truth doesn’t impress us as much as Blake hoped, and we revel in falsehood even more often than the devil wagered. Some falsehoods, especially those about ourselves and our own self-​understanding—​like we will have enough money in retirement, or that money or tenure will make us happier—​seems to have a grip on us that cannot be loosened. And while knowing about it is not, by itself, enough to correct the effects of the 76

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falsehood, once we know about it, we can take steps to counteract it. Scientific evidence can help inoculate us against the enemy within. A good explanation can be accompanied by a feeling of understanding or not, and so we shouldn’t expect a good explanation to be greeted with unguarded affection. Sometimes a good explanation leaves you puzzled and cold. While explanation may be aimed at persuasion, some of the greatest stories of scientific success are rhetorical failures. Galileo, for example, was unable to persuade his clerical contemporaries. Many of the categories of his inquiry abraded people’s vision of coherence in a Catholic land. A coherent vision placed Earth at the center of the heavens, just as church authorities thought God would have it. If Galileo was right, then the settled lines of scientific and social authority were broken. Authoritative proclamations of the church could be questioned, contested, and defeated, interrupting group activity and consensus, and upsetting people’s social reliance on social relations like the infallible judgment of church doctrine. These violations also dismantled relations of social backscratching, like the patronage Galileo had received from the church. Or consider health models of genetic risk as an example of a good explanation that is greeted with confusion at best and willful ignorance at worst. Most conditions that have clear genetic influences (say, breast cancer) aren’t just a result of a single point mutation but instead are related to hundreds of single-​nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs). And there may be tens or hundreds of other factors. A single mutation by itself will not give you breast 77

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cancer, but as a whole the aggregation of many relevant mutations can strongly affect risk.13 This has been a difficult fact for the public to assimilate. Human memory and attention limits may prevent us from understanding this fact of multiple causes of both environmental and genetic origin, and so we confabulate causal connections between variables in the system whose powers are too numerous and subtle for us to track. This is especially easy to see when the news media and personal genetic profiling companies always seem obsessed with finding “the gene” for breast cancer, colon cancer, schizophrenia, cardiomyopathy, and so on, even though it is hardly ever that simple. Human beings strive to improve their lives and the lives of others. We must pursue this vision by efficiently allocating cognitive resources to significant problems. Chapter I brought the news, much of it familiar, that human cognitive limitations prevent people from making good decisions on their feet. Thus, the best way to work toward improving our lives is to do empirical research on the most effective strategies to tackle any given issue. Without this research, we end up relying on simple, phenomenologically accessible cues of accuracy, in part because these cues may help us to sporadically decide passably in the low stakes challenges of daily life. Consider the fluency heuristic. Fluency is a property of a psychological process used to casually “measure” how easy it is to think about something. It is an adaptive heuristic of sorts that helps us to allocate precious resources to appropriate problems. We ask ourselves whether we are likely to be right about a particular issue. We assess this by 78

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introspecting how difficult a task is. If it is demanding, it occupies lots of space in working memory, and we are aware of this because we then have difficulty adding tasks or dividing attention. Whenever this happens, we know we are more likely to be wrong in a judgment than when it is easy. But if it feels fluent, we assume it’s because we know how to do it—​the task is thus easy. If the task were hard, it would demand that we use all of our capacity. So it must be easy. So we must be right. Because the ease has a somatic marker, we can use that feeling as a psychometric property. We use fluency as a cue of truth or accuracy because its presence indicates we aren’t yet using all of our processing capacities, all of our mental workspace. To the extent that repetition assists fluency, people feel more fluent processing when an item is very familiar or regularly repeated. Feeling fluent in an explanation brings with it a confidence that it is correct. Yet unfortunately, fluency attaches to good and bad explanations alike. So how can fluency explain both the easy attachment of ancient scientists to horribly false theories and modern scientists’ embrace of excellent theories? Of course, no one wants to give up on a good theory, and most people think they are the ones who have the best theory. Gather five people each with a different theory of the Higgs boson, and each one will think they are the most likely to be correct. This conceit is not peculiar to physics. Ask five masons how soft the limestone mortar should be when laying up a wall of river rocks and you will provoke a lively argument. You will find the same kind of disagreement on topics in chemistry, cooking, psychology, 79

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plumbing, and biology. While this reflects a charming optimism, an optimism that is insensitive to the evidence, it can be poison to theoretical success when you are trying to move from an intuitive to an evidence-​based construction. So why does this unwarranted confidence, both in everyday life and in the scientific community, get a foothold? The answer is part psychology, part sociology, and part regulation by the mind-​independent world. When you achieve fluency with a true view, science explanation takes off. Why? Because you combine an accurate causal description (the defining feature of the ontic account’s “good” explanation) with the lubricated conceptual processing that supports the fast spread of knowledge. When you achieve fluency with a false view, conviction creates stubborn resistance to revision in light of evidence. In spite of that, this very “sense” of fluency is often invoked as a reason for accepting an explanation; it is treated as justificatory. According to many thinkers, this type of error is common, influential, and costly. Dawes argues that scientific and everyday explanation is dominated by flabby storytelling, in large part due to the sense of understanding it offers.14 Rogeberg contends that theories of economic behavior—​particularly neoclassical models that treat addictions as semi-​rational, meaning that they are seen as forward-​looking consumption plans made under full certainty and perfect information—​are driven by ad hoc stories that convey a sense of understanding but offer little else.15 Dan Gilbert and many other psychologists have documented affective forecasting errors, in which we easily lay out personal and life plans that are riddled with biases. We undersave for retirement and abuse our bodies, 80

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“discounting the future,” as Gilbert puts it.16 And we believe that events in our life affect our sense of well-​being longer, and more deeply, than they actually do. Although the occurrence of this feeling of understanding is neither necessary nor sufficient for good explanation, it drives judgments of the plausibility and, too often, the acceptability, of an explanation. Even the best philosophers are no match for the irresistible attraction of fluency cues. In a world in which distinguished psychologists have painstakingly described the nature and character of fluency, philosophers seem able only to grope inarticulately at the phenomenology. After talking about a particular perceptual belief, the philosopher Alvin Plantinga says it has a certain felt attractiveness or naturalness, a sort of perceived fittingness; it feels like the right belief in those circumstances.

Perhaps I  compare my perceptual belief to an alternative possibility: That’s not quite right: the belief is formed much too quickly and automatically for that; I don’t experience anything like a push or impulsion. Indeed, is it the case that can properly be described as “finding the belief in question attractive”? Perhaps not; perhaps that is not the way to describe the matter; still, there is something like that there, however hard to describe. (Where are the phenomenologists, now that we need them?) There is something in addition to the sensuous 81

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experience, some kind of an experiential reflection of the acceptance of the belief in the question.17

Plantinga is painfully aware that he is merely pawing at the idea that some aspect of our belief acceptance depends on a sense of fit with other evidence. Phenomenological description of complex processes always involves a certain amount of blind groping at feelings and their corresponding targets. After all, Descartes explained with confidence that birthmarks form when a pregnant woman looks at the sun. He even had a little theory of transmission:  “Sometimes a picture can pass  .  .  .  through the arteries of a pregnant woman, right to some specific member of the infant which she carries in her womb, and there forms these birthmarks which cause learned men to marvel so.”18 But we need to acknowledge how dull a tool the fluency heuristic is, not just for philosophers but for scientists (and policymakers) as well: The idea that the fluency heuristic has the hidden power to discriminate between technical, arcane alternatives in policy or science is a childish fantasy. In the history of science, philosophers and scientists alike have arrived at notoriously false views with great flourish and fluency. In any structured social environment, the sweep toward fluency is unavoidable. Indeed, by the time scientists have been trained, they are expected to move within their theory with great fluency and conviction. The noted historian of science Thomas Kuhn took many opportunities to explain how the young scientist cannot escape the effects of this practical immersion into a 82

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theoretical worldview: “At least in the mature sciences, answers (or full substitutes for answers) . . . are firmly embedded in educational initiation that prepares and licenses the student for professional practice. Because that education is both rigorous and rigid, these answers come to exert a deep hold on the scientific mind.”19 Fluency is a property of every scientific (and for that matter, any highly practiced) theory that has been accepted for any significant period, whether or not it was false. As Kuhn puts it: Aristotle’s Physica, Ptolemy’s Almagest, Newton’s Principia and Opticks, Franklin’s Electricity, Lavoisier’s Chemistry, and Lyell’s Geology—​these and many other works served for a time implicitly to define the legitimate problems and methods of a research field for succeeding generations of practitioners.20

Theories, like paradigms, serve an organizing function in the scientist’s mind and in the student’s curriculum. The scientist’s specialized training and routinized procedures create a common perspective or theoretical outlook, and with it, a powerful fluency of thought and action: “In that role [a paradigm] functions by telling the scientist about the entities that nature does and does not contain and about the ways in which those entities behave. That information provides a map whose details are elucidated by mature scientific research.” 21 83

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The remarkable uniformity of outlook is actually carefully taught: A scientific community consists, on this view, of the practitioners of a scientific specialty. To an extent unparalleled in most other fields, they have undergone similar educations and professional initiations; in the process they have absorbed the same technical literature and drawn many of the same lessons from it.22

If scientists don’t have evidence to the contrary, it is clear to see why they would stick with a theory that feels fluent. Yet at the same time, an accurate explanation may seemingly come from nowhere, with no attachment to the preceding apparently fluent explanations that now must be discarded. Thus, unless the real world interrupts to correct them, the sciences will generally rely on their favored fluent theory to understand the world. And while there are ways to make room for the real world to step in, they are not arrived at easily. While cheap tricks (like receiving information in difficult-​ to-​read lettering) may activate deliberate processes and thus clear the mind to allow for less biased reasoning, people are unable to correct these biases spontaneously.23 Rigorous processes like the diverse testing of hypotheses, blind peer review, and public discussion and accessibility of results are methods we can use to test and reduce these biases. No one likes being told their favored theory may be false or the result of cognitive biases, but that feedback may cause you to carefully consider your position and improve your judgments about the world, or even yourself. 84

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3. UNDERSTANDING AND THE “AHA!” MOMENT At bottom, most of us are with the pragmatist Charles Sanders Peirce: An explanation that sounds right also feels good. As he puts it, a good explanation “is turned back and forth like a key in a lock.”24 We conclude that we are zeroing in on an answer when we feel the tension of uncertainty release, when we have the “Aha!” feeling, some kind of aesthetic pleasure, the feeling that we’re really working hard at learning,25 the feeling of agreement from a cooperative consensus, the feeling that we’re acting for good/​rational reasons, some coherent course of action when we’re not too picky about what it is, and so forth.26 The explanation “feels right” and gives us the sense that we understand it, what I will call a “sense of understanding,” or SOU. In this “feels right” epistemology, how does the SOU feel? SOU is a phenomenological state. There is “something it is like” to have an SOU. Part of this sense is one of grasping a point, of being richly located in a network of causes that normally comes from a coherent outlook. Different people have endorsed different descriptions of the SOU. The most common is the Aha! description, like a flash of insight. The physicist Steven Weinberg defines it operationally: “Explanation in physics is what physicists have done when they say ‘Aha!’.”27 Aha! experiences have in common the features of suddenness, ease, positive affect (good feeling), and self-​perceived truth and confidence.28 But as we have seen, this last feeling comes cheap, and it comes whether or not we are correct. While it is striking that delusions of accuracy 85

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and confidence are so easily induced by feelings of insight, the important point is that it is a delusion. This feeling of insight does not track genuine insight and is not sufficient to fulfill an ontic account of explanation. It is also a normal property of mistaken belief or judgment. But this “flash of insight” description is too narrow an account of the SOU that often comes with a good explanation. Sometimes it is a slower appreciation, or a dimmer dawning. Richard Feynman, Nobel prize-​winning physicist, likes the image of the dramatic hero, latching onto an insight with a genius so powerful that even the most complicated solution is obvious to you: “You can recognize truth by its beauty and simplicity.”29 But, of course, this too is false. Feynman was not making the point that “recognize” is a success verb. Instead, he was inviting readers to suppose that this is why he kept at a problem while others gave up:  because he was able to recognize truth. Unfortunately, pronouncing a theory or statement as simple or beautiful doesn’t make it so. As it turns out, we not only have experiences that create a SOU, we can also study them. In fact, there is an active research program on the Aha! experience that is entirely about the feeling of insight and not at all about the truth of its deliverances.30 The rationale for this research, then, must be to examine the biological basis for the feeling of insight and to identify the neural mechanisms whose activation precedes or co-​occurs with this feeling when subjects face a task whose correct solution is known to be among a set of alternatives. Researchers have looked in many areas of the brain for the root of insight, and all they find 86

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is activity correlated with the conviction that they have solved a problem. There is no cortical layer whose firings track the truth itself.

4. THE ROMANTICIZED VIEW OF INSIGHT In spite of the scientific evidence laying bare the truth of Aha! moments and the experience of insight (even if false) that produces it, the romanticized view of insight placed the scientist at the center of a vexing problem, alone, and with a jaw set bravely against orthodoxy. The scientist struggles sleeplessly until one day the problem finally gives way under the pressure of the hero’s sustained focus. This vision of the lone hero raising the curtain on truth begins most papers on insight, even the most thoughtful of the lot:31 “Just as I put my foot on the step, the idea came to me, though nothing in my former thoughts seemed to have prepared me for it, that the transformations I had used to define Fuchsian functions were identical with those of non-​Euclidean geometry . . . . I made no verification . . . but I felt absolute certainty at once.” Only days later, after having returned home, he verified this discovery. When later studying arithmetic questions without apparent success, Poincaré again one day experienced an idea coming to him “with the same characteristics of conciseness, suddenness, and immediate certainty” (p.  54). Why is an insight accompanied by such experiences? According to Poincaré (p.  59), insight is “a real aesthetic feeling that all true mathematicians recognize, and this is truly sensibility,” capable of eliciting “aesthetic emotion.”32 87

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Insight may be all these things, but people care about it not just for the feeling but for its supposed power to grasp the truth. But relying on reports of a handful of scientists, often experiencing flights of grandeur, is no way to confirm a theory, and feeble motivation even to stimulate theory-​construction. If the history of science is our database, then the properties of conciseness, suddenness, and immediate certainty can only be judged equal opportunity disappointers. This frailty is obvious once the history of science is used as a body of evidence highlighting a series of dead ends rather than a hope chest of shiny accessories to pick and choose from to adorn your narrative. Numerologists, alchemists, phrenonologists, charismatic theologians, and humoural physicians all experienced insights so defined. But if false beliefs are accompanied by all of these insight experiences, their phenomenological path seems far less remarkable. The drug LSD reportedly produced the most vivid experiences of clarity, spontaneity, and certainty. And no one (anymore) wants to elevate LSD as the model path to insight. Instead, it tickled the pathways that produced insight feelings. And the same goes for people working hard on theories that are regrettably poor. The embarrassments of this flabby pattern of confirmation are never showcased. Every medieval doctor, every ancient astronomer, and every Renaissance geologist reported with great authority the quick and unexpected path of a proud discovery. Of course, those “discoveries” killed their patients with mercury or lead, misled generations with a prolix model of orbits incapable of explaining some of the best-​known observations of the time, or killed mine workers in collapses. No thorough 88

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treatment can ignore the regular occurrence of these features—​ conciseness, suddenness, and immediate certainty—​that strike scientists daily. And yet, for all of that, sometimes that psychological experience is accurate; the SOU is a faithful indicator of the way the world really is. And in fact, in many simple cases, there is no reason to doubt the accuracy of the fluency heuristic. Fluency itself is not rare or exotic. It is the mildly positive feeling of fluency that we get when absorbed in mindful activities—​from soccer to chess, from conversation to music composition. Our lives are filled with fluent hunches, feelings that whatever beliefs we happen to be entertaining are correct. We have endless opportunity to have these hunches because we are expected to answer all sorts of questions all of the time. People have reliable hunches about their enjoyment of eggplant fried rather than in ratatouille, or whether a local deli is further by one set of roads than another. We also have plenty of opportunity to be wrong because many of the questions we attempt to answer are about technical matters that we try to resolve by consulting our intuitions or impressions on the fly. Explaining the difference between a song and a poem may need to draw only on an intuitive, rudimentary grasp of common subjects, but not the difference between homologous and analogous structures in evolutionary biology. And given its inconsistent results, if we are able to avoid the pitfalls of fluency, we should. Plumbers have reliable hunches about whether a slow drain is the result of a turn in the pipe that is too tight or a level run of pipe out to the sewer that is too long. But even then there is no reason to rely on a hunch when you have a camera that 89

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you can snake into the pipe. With reasoning strategies of such practical consequence, it is not surprising that there are many policy lessons to extrapolate from the previous discussion of cognitive boundedness and bias, such as these: (1) Sometimes we need to enact policies that fly in the face of fluency when the fluency leads to false conclusions. (2) Public messaging should not rely on repetition. (3) Educational campaigns should never rehearse false information in an attempt to educate people. All that accomplishes is to make the false claim more familiar and easy to remember. Policy decisions require evidence-​based information about our own preferences and frailties, particularly when we have such a firm sense of understanding even when we don’t actually understand. In order to best address our interests, we have to adopt policies that discipline us to address the world’s complexities, even if we don’t “feel” accurate or right. We may not feel that aged people will starve in the street without a program like social security (in fact, we may feel that they won’t), but we would be wrong. We may feel that we will save enough for retirement, that we won’t overeat, that we will quit smoking, that we will be vigilant enough parents to supplement a poor public school system, that we will know what will make us happy in the future. Our list of strongly held but mistaken convictions or feelings about ourselves could be extended indefinitely. We also feel like something is true just because we’ve heard it over and over again. In one study, older subjects were given health information like “Shark cartilage is good for your arthritis.”33 Half of the participants were told that the FDA had proved 90

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this claim was false, and when they were asked immediately afterward, these participants typically remembered that the statement was false. But after three days, they recalled only a feeling of familiarity that they had heard the claim, and reported that the statement was true. Thanks to a feeling of fluency, they misread this familiarity as correctness, and their error was lithified. We need policies not just because advertisers and pundits outside of us specialize in disabling people’s self-​control but also because the little voices inside of us paper over recalcitrant autobiographical truths about us. And these uncooperative truths threaten our plans. Some of our strongly held feelings only operate to support a self-​serving system of beliefs we have about ourselves—​beliefs which, though false, are important to our self-​esteem. When we reflect on our character or our lives, we feel that our choices are coherent, that they are aimed at certain long-​term goals, even when this is just a lie we tell ourselves, about ourselves.

5. CREEPY TRUTHS AND ESTRANGEMENT: FLUENCY, NARRATIVE COHERENCE, AND EXPLANATION Making judgments about our best personal interests requires that we know a little bit about the narrative structure we would prefer our life to have—​not just the narrative structure we now say we want or that most appeals to us when we hear of it. But rather, the narrative structure that we would most enjoy while living 91

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through it. Given the inaccuracies of affective forecasting—​that we are unsettlingly poor at predicting what will make us happy or unhappy—​acquiring this knowledge about ourselves will not be easy. But knowing what narrative structure we would prefer our life to have often depends on our taking an outsider’s view on our own lives. In keeping with this estrangement,34 our explanations of our own preferences and behaviors may feel, and may be, unfamiliar to us. They may be too complicated to bear the marks of familiarity. There may be too many factors, operating in too many directions with too many different strengths, for us to track the causes with our ordinary cognitive faculties. We have a powerful need to preserve a sense of coherence about our own lives, to see a life story and not a string of unconnected events in which the winds of life blow us from action to action. Thus, we construct our life story as a coherent narrative, with a plot line drawn through each chapter by the unity of our determined character. And when we make mistakes, we like redeeming rather than absurd endings. We are, as Schechtman might have it, the authors of this narrative.35 But our life stories have a content that is often fictional and a coherence that is counterfeit. We are often conceited and self-​serving authors, prone to motivated reasoning and strategies of self-​presentation. And some of the same cognitive limitations that make us suboptimal reasoners make us suboptimal narrators. We don’t remember necessary details, and we don’t attend to crucial facts, whether consciously or not. Like scientific theories, life narratives can be coherent without being true. In fact, we are quite resourceful at fabricating 92

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coherence. We do this because our judgments about ourselves are often driven by empirical, defeasible theories we have about why we act in the ways we do. Conway and Ross found that, when looking back on events, people revise their earlier understandings of their skills and goals, portraying them as consistent with their current abilities and aims in order to create a sense of coherence about their narrative.36 This strategy allows people to make it appear as though they got what they wanted all along, and so esteem themselves (and have others esteem them) more highly. Consider, for example, a student’s goal to improve her study habits. The effort devoted to this project would be easier to rationalize if the student were successful at achieving the goal. But the perceived achievement of this goal can rest on either of two factors: (1) the actual elevation of the student’s performance, or (2) a self-​assessment that underestimates past skill levels. The second possibility makes it easy to claim improvement. Not surprisingly, then, when students participated in a program to improve their study habits, nearly all of them underestimated the quality of their past study habits. Michael Ross and his colleagues have studied the kinds of memory distortions that occur from pressure to make sense of our lives. In one experiment, McFarland and Ross studied college students who, over the course of the long-​term study, either fell in love or out of love with their dating partner.37 They delivered their assessments twice over the course of the study. For those in love at assessment time 2, they said that they were more in love at time 1 than they reported at assessment time 1. For those falling out of love, at assessment time 2 they reported that 93

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they were less in love at time 1 than they had actually reported then. Their illusion of stability allows them to maintain an image, false though it may be, that their relationship was the durable outcome of a stable preference. In short, we make our behavior appear more consistent than it is by misremembering our own pasts. Fabricating coherence is easy: We all like a good story.38 And we all like to believe that we are the authors of our own life narrative. Among our favorites are stories that recall our prior plans and goals in light of our current selves. Our stories have a seamless, if less than truthful, coherence.39 The hold that coherence has on us is a standing objection to utilitarian measures of human well-​being. Through the fabrication of coherence, people can usually maintain their typically high self-​regard. But it is a juggling act. In a maneuver that moves us “from chump to champ,” we disparage our distant past selves in order to create the desired appearance of growth and development.40 The empirical evidence is, at this point, pretty overwhelming that this tendency is a general self-​serving bias to maintain or enhance our already elevated current self-​assessment. We display this bias despite powerful contrary influences—​for example, when we are presented with evaluations that show no improvement from past to present performance. And in this effect we achieve both current self-​satisfaction and an explanation for the well-​documented end of life effects in evaluations of a good life. We all have our little (or big) sustaining illusions—​false beliefs that make it easier to face our daily challenges. The idea of a diminished past self is one such illusion, albeit a well-​confirmed 94

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one. Narrative fiction provides many examples of these everyday illusions. In Charles Dickens’s Hard Times, Sissy Jupe has a number of sustaining illusions; she believes what she needs to in order to proceed in life with good cheer.41 Some of the things she believes are false; some are simply fanciful. And in a chapter called “Sissy’s Progress,” Dickens makes it clear that her “progress” actually resides in her power to sustain an illusion. But our sustaining illusions are still illusions, and they are not just the stuff of fiction. In our youth, an illusion of invincibility sustains us. There is an old Italian adage, surely incarnated in many other cultures, that says that we spend the first half of our lives abusing our health and the second half looking after it. We dismiss health concerns in our youth and act as though it is true that such negligence or abuse has no long-​term destructive effect. It is an easy illusion to sustain because it is enjoyable and we sense no deterioration in the short term. But the short-​term information is bad data; it is not diagnostic of the actual long-​term damage being done. It is obvious that the predictively important information in accurate affective forecasting is the difference in long-​term health outcomes between coal miners and teachers, and in long-​ term financial security between savers and spenders. Health abusers and spenders have illusions of invincibility, and these illusions sustain us through times when the thought that we are indulging a weakness for cardiac lunches and shopping sprees make a normal person feel bad. That way, we get to keep eating and shopping. Put another way, illusions of invincibility sustain our good and fluent feelings in the present, even if they court 95

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attitudes that promote a crippled future they choose to ignore in the moment. These are real, false beliefs, held by real people, who then make decisions based on their presumed truth—​ cognitively biased decisions based on cognitively biased pasts, discounting the future because of a misjudgment of the present. So what happens when we know our conceptions of ourselves are inaccurate, that our authorship is disingenuous, and that this leads us to make choices that we know we don’t want to make? One reaction is to engineer fixes that extract better behavior from us, behavior we know is better for us. We try to stop smoking and believe it is within our power, but we have failed so often that this time we make a public announcement. We don’t feel the need, but know it is necessary. So there lies our goal of better well-​being, like our severed limb. We don’t feel it but know it is ours and important to us. This creepy estrangement of our current self from our future self remains one of the most substantial obstacles to embracing more reliable, welfare-​ enhancing policies. Another reaction is to dispense with sustaining illusions and instead announce that the event or system is too complicated to understand, either with current knowledge or perhaps ever. Maybe there isn’t really a sense of coherence because there just isn’t real coherence in our lives. There are moments in literature and science in which reality is traced with candor and a steady hand, with patience and detail respectful of the subject, like a matador in a full bow before he finishes the bull. As much as we want our life to be a seamless narrative, most of the apparent order is an artifact of careful reconstruction and 96

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self-​understanding. The truth about life is much messier, more contingent and complex: Leaning over the gate I  regretted so much litter, so much unaccomplishment and separation, for one cannot cross London to see a friend, life being so full of engagements; nor take ship to India and see a naked man spearing fish in blue water. I said life had been imperfect, an unfinished phrase. It had been impossible for me, taking snuff as I do from any bagman met in a train, to keep coherency—​that sense of the generations, of women carrying red pitchers to the Nile, of the nightingale who sings among conquests and migrations. It had been too vast an undertaking, I said, and how can I go on lifting my foot perpetually to climb the stair? I addressed myself as one would speak to a companion with whom one is voyaging to the North Pole.42

Even Keats’s Nightingale, to which Woolf clearly alludes, can’t capture time and beauty in poetry, or chronicle the triumphs and journeys it has observed.43 The same kind of steadfast refusal to accept the simple but counterfeit explanation is evident in the closing moments of the The Virgin Suicides. The boys’ view is represented by a single narrator, looking back at the girls’ suicide, and he issues a report: In the end we had pieces of the puzzle, but no matter how we put them together, gaps remained, oddly shaped emptinesses mapped by what surrounded them, like countries 97

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we couldn’t name. “All wisdom ends in paradox,” said Mr. Bruell, just before we left him on our last interview, and we felt he was telling us forget about the girls, to leave them in the hands of God. We knew that Cecilia had killed herself because she was a misfit, because the beyond called to her, and we knew that her sisters, once abandoned, felt her calling from that place, too. But even as we make these conclusions we feel our throats plugging up, because they are both true and untrue.44

The narrator is not there to please, not there to sustain the illusion that everything works out for the best or even that agents have their reasons when they don’t. The accurate description of what led to the suicides is brutally uncompromising, leaving the puzzle of their collective deaths frustratingly unresolved. We would love to hear that the suicides came out of the blue; they were a complete shock. Then at least we could store this event safely away, out of reach. Or, we might like to see a simple narrative line drawn through the events before the suicides, so that we can suppose that the suicides were predictable—​that we could see them coming all along. That way, the order of events could be rationalized in some way. Either explanation could give coherence to the events; they would create a story we could tell. Both of these passages capture the fact, the truth, that the longing for complete explanations in many experiences, though powerful, and at the root of much self-​deception, is not even possible to fulfill. Using just the tools of introspection, of attentional 98

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focus and phenomenological apprehension, the grain of explanatory understanding is coarser than the finely sifted truths about ourselves we hope to capture. It is an interesting question what a complete, full, and accurate narrative of one’s life would look like—​one without abbreviations that are introduced to simplify a complicated path to the present (or to hide an embarrassing one), or one without the bias toward an upward trajectory. You could only imagine that an accurate story about a person’s ultimate position would have many, many, details, not all of them equally important. Our own understanding of ourselves, then, is like our understanding of many other complex systems, like the causes of conscious awareness. And though it is less natural to feel disconnected from our conscious life than from other complex systems, it is clear that even if we have an accurate characterization of the causes of a system’s operation and thus an objectively accurate understanding, this gives us no sense of understanding. Unfortunately, this is as true for our consciousness as it is for examples of ontic accounts we saw earlier. The neuroscience of consciousness, like that of complex systems, will produce a complex computational theory that similarly outstrips our unaided cognitive powers. This analogy of explaining consciousness to other physically complex systems is not designed to persuade researchers in the field but to enumerate the natural cognitive limitations that make our efforts to understand and explain consciousness so frustrating. These limitations explain our severe dissatisfaction with physicalist 99

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accounts of consciousness. A  common objection to physicalism, the idea that there are no things other than physical things, is that it could never explain how subjective, conscious experience could arise from something purely physical. But many philosophers have noted the peculiarity of claiming that there is something wanting in the physicalist explanation for consciousness. Even on a complete list of items in the universe, we can’t imagine at some point during the reading of this list, that we say, “Oh, that is how consciousness is created!” People often say that physical items are just not the right kind of thing to produce subjective experience, but the fact is they are saying it without having even the first idea how many causal relations and items are involved in ordinary awareness.45 So in effect they have a very specific conception of what an acceptable explanation would look like. But what, exactly, are they imagining that would make them find any explanation credible? This is a case in which people’s conception of explanation may be the obstacle to accepting a good explanation. With so complex a world, we need to wedge a catalog of causes into a narrative that allows only a few. With a brain whose goal of accuracy outstrips its resources, we use lots of heuristics. That’s why we have an implicit narratology. I’ll wager that a population ecology model with a hundred properly weighted variables never inspired an Aha! moment concerning the interactions of those variables. Neither would a scientifically satisfactory computational model of the brain.

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6. CONCLUSION Despite its grip on us, fluency is not a reliable tracker of the truth, at least not until we have good enough theories (which fluency itself, or the sense of understanding, doesn’t track). The best account for the epistemic role of explanation in theoretical progress is accuracy rather than fluency, even when our explanations don’t produce understanding. Scientific progress in human history has now permitted the crafting of policies so sophisticated that they anticipate and control for cases in which self-​understanding departs from our best solutions to problems of governance and well-​being. In keeping with evidence-​based standards, future policy prescriptions will require that legislators who feel their autonomy and incorruptibility very deeply will submit to a higher call, to scientific measures that curb their behavior. Those evidence-​based policies respond to years of people begrudging the taking of items they will never miss and perhaps never owned. And others suffer for that conceit. We can even expect to improve government decision making by identifying when a House or Senate committee has a charge that outstrips its members’ abilities. That is normally an unwelcome lesson, but the truth is often indifferent to our illusions. The Enlightenment is not all romance.

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Chapter IV

Taking People as We Find Them Philosophy and Evidence-​Based Policy

1. INTRODUCTION The earliest Western philosophical thought about political life focused on the grand themes of the political systems of ancient Greek culture: Plato’s or Aristotle’s thoughts about just governance. And so questions arose such as, “What kinds of institutions is it rational for a political animal to have?” Many students of political philosophy would write about the views of those great Greek thinkers or about other topics that occupied the greats. Locke told stories of the origins of property being the mix of labor with nature, Hobbes spoke of fealty to a king for protection from aggression, and Nozick reimagined the emergence of governments from a state of nature as the rise of a protection racket for the propertied to safeguard their assets. But without evidence of how people act without a state, without a government, without property, without norms, it is hard to detail the 102

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rise of these institutions, especially if you are trying to justify their existence. Many of these traditional theories have strong normative consequences—​that certain kinds of taxation or transfer credits are illegitimate, that colonized property isn’t stolen, or that you deserve inheritance. With untested intuitions and anecdotes as evidence, the constructions of social and political philosophy could appear abstract or fragile, unable to carry much weight in the real world. But there is a route to a social and political vision other than beginning with intuitions, anecdotes, and thought experiments. One way to defend a vision of institutions, like a welfare state, is to proceed more like a scientist, and to learn more about the kinds of things that humans are and, in particular, what humans require for well-​being. Philosophers’ intuitions are at odds here about the requirements of well-​being; psychologists’ less so. There is a fair bit of empirical evidence about what humans require to be happy, how stable happiness is, and what can be done to bend lives in its direction. Constructing the institutions that orient citizens toward happiness is a complicated and controversial affair, but surely when there is a broad consensus about desirable outcomes (e.g., longer and healthier lives, more satisfying jobs, more honest employees and public servants, etc.) we could use the help of psychologists to assist us in shaping policies that guide us to those outcomes. In light of the fact, shown time and again in the preceding chapters, that reliance on intuition can often lead us astray, I want to use this occasion to propose applications of evidence-​based reasoning in government and governmental 103

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policy. Our trustworthy response to the evidence rests on our natural human endowments and the epistemic prescriptions outlined in Chapter I, and yet when it comes to thinking about policies, philosophers have always performed a kind of abstract political theorizing loosely tied to their convictions about broad concepts like autonomy, equality, fairness. But when Aristotle commented on the essentially social nature of humans, that conviction, however deep, does not tell us much about the specific form of government we should have or the kinds of policies we should support in practice. It doesn’t mean that thinkers with a more atomistic conception of citizenship, perhaps Adam Smith or John Stuart Mill, would have favored very different institutions or forms of government from those of Aristotle. And beyond philosophy, disciplines such as political science, economics, sociology, psychology, and neuroscience expand the circle of foundational thought about humane and responsible policy. Our institutions, like the theories that underlie them, are scientific works in progress. The views of all the above disciplines are subject to criticism, as they continue the search for better, fundamental theories. Economists engage in foundational thinking when they assume, propose, or defend the idea that choice is desirable because it promotes well-​being. They also defend the view that more choice, because it increases average utility and thus more well-​ being, is more desirable. But that is not what we always get from having more choices. Instead, normal people under normal circumstances get decision paralysis as the options increase:  for example, they don’t participate in things like retirement plans 104

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when they have to make too many decisions about which mutual funds to hold in their retirement portfolio. And as a result, they lose valuable time that their pre-​tax investments are exposed to the market. So in light of the awareness that our foundational thinking sometimes leads us astray, we return to the question: What sort of government ought we to have? Further, what goods should the government promote, and how ought they to do so? If we thought it was the government’s job to give people a fighting chance to be happy, we would have to take the science of happiness a lot more seriously. In the 1990s, I followed this line of reasoning and began to explore what policy would look like if we treated one of government’s goals as making people happy, and if we tried to achieve that goal by using the available scientific knowledge about the activities that bring happiness. This chapter presents three policies that could contribute to happiness, using as a compass not philosophical intuition or deep cultural commitment, but the best scientific evidence about what makes humans human, and the aspects of the world that influence their well-​being, including the very idea of well-​being. By suggesting that valuable policy information lies in the sciences of human thought and exchange, I  am not cutting philosophy loose from meaningful exchange on these enduring questions. Instead, I am reiterating two points made earlier in this work. First, philosophy is just one of many disciplines that attempts theoretical and practical progress on issues of well-​being. And second, no discipline is guaranteed a place in the halls of the 21st-​century university. If any given distinctly 105

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concentrated field of thought, no matter how well intended, turns out to be nothing more than focused attention to the fashion of the day, we should dismiss it, just as surely as we eventually rejected alchemy and fortune telling, and just as surely as we should reject whatever constructions of positive philosophy attract the fancy of metaphysicians. Saving money is one way to put more power for well-​being into our hands. Another is to know what matters to humans—​ and so what institutions and relationships they should build. The proposals that follow concern both sorts of power. Sometimes, for example, misery comes from chronic and deep privation. Hunger, illness, and constant threat of scarcity or trauma can be redressed by injections of cash, and so sources of inefficient distribution or undeserved allocation are important to identify as an easy remedy for misery. That is the story of inherited wealth. In a world of plenty for all, we might want to allow the moral luck of inheritance to pass unnoticed. But in our world, a world of both great opulence and crushing poverty, inherited wealth represents the squandered power of money for well-​being.

2. DO INHERITORS DESERVE THEIR BEQUESTS? INHERITANCE AND THE LUCK SUBSIDY Policies to address inequality should be tackled with empirical evidence rather than by intuition, impressionistic judgment, cultural myth, or the inertia of pre-​existing laws written by those 106

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who profited from inequality. When studying how people distribute their resources, it becomes clear that human intervention has messed up the natural balance. Because of this, we now ought to introduce sources of variability to compensate for the artificiality we introduced. In this regard, redistribution is no more unnatural than the introduction of conventions that made the original skewed distribution possible. It is only for pragmatic, motivated reasons that we assume that what we own is what we deserve. But, as it turns out, a large portion of wealth is the result of luck, undeserved by those who have it. When it comes to redistribution, we should start with the low-​hanging fruit of these undeserved resources, and empirically based policy can show us the way. As discussed in Chapter I, philosophers train by considering loopy scenarios, and they test their intuitions against outlandish possibilities. This requires patience, and it is no surprise that philosophers hold dear the process and aspiration of argument. However, this can leave philosophers with little sense of when they are wasting their breath. Philosophers have a moral obligation to not dither—​since much harm can accrue during that time, with nothing gained from reflection and deliberation—​ and arguing with the chronically insincere, or the willing dupe, conflicts with that obligation. Some arguments, like those that consider what to do with inheritance, are perennially unsatisfying. But they needn’t be. Sometimes, the best way to defend causes that are conservative in the traditional political sense is to frame the argument in terms that ignore or transcend history. Critics of affirmative action concede a history of racism, but they 107

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announce that they aren’t racist and slavery is over anyway. So now we are all equal and that requires us all to start from scratch. When an interlocutor refuses to even agree on the premise, philosophers are wasting their breath on disingenuous arguments while real people suffer. But with empirical evidence it is usually easy to see when people aren’t starting from scratch. The legitimacy of inheritance is a very good example of a dishonest policy dispute. While some might want to see it as an argument about the right of parents to benefit their children by handing over cash or other property when they die, the dispute about inheritance has always been about rich people who want to create a legacy and their progeny who want to be wealthy and believe that hobbling inheritance will interfere with that goal. Receiving an inheritance is easy work; the estate tax has never been about punishing hard-​working people. Most beneficiaries don’t have to lift a finger. If dishonest pundits, committed dupes, or cynical ideologues can draw you into an argument about whether you are born with a right to control what you have, you are all of a sudden talking about elevated ideas untethered to a history of inheritance that features unapologetic power play, naked cruelty, and crass manipulation of the offices of government. Invitations to muse or argue about whether people deserve what they earn mock the seriousness of people’s maltreatment on the short end of this history. So we ought not pretend that taxation tampers with a pristine existence any more than the multi-​million-​dollar exemption on inheritance for the landed class does, or the lower tax rate for capital gains for wealthy 108

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investors does. The “natural” distribution of goods is not natural at all, but decided, in all likelihood, by people who could take the most advantage of it. This is the way we should look at the intervention that resulted in the inheritance tradition as we now know it. Is the “natural” state the one demanded by the Magna Carta, when peasants could keep the deer they hunted? Was it when people were able to keep the issue of the woods, or the fish in the seines? Or was it the tradition of imprimatur? Before the Magna Carta, landed occupants, lucky to be born of the aristocracy, controlled virtually all property. After the Magna Carta, they still owned all the property but as a grace permitted the serf, unlucky to be born of serfs, a few hunted deer and trapped fish. In short, people with property enjoyed laws that systematically favored them. It is not that this is a natural state. It was created through and through. Their status as landed or monied is inherited, not earned. Believing otherwise is sheer ideology. In arguing against the US federal estate tax, the Investor’s Business Daily editorialized, “People should not be punished because they work hard, become successful and want to pass on the fruits of their labor, or even their ancestors’ labor, to their children. As has been said, families shouldn’t be required to visit the undertaker and the tax collector on the same day.”1 A clever line, sure. But since the first $5.45 million is exempt from estate taxes, very few people will ever schedule this busy day. Ironically, the perceived injustice is often trumpeted by those who could only dream of being wealthy enough to reach this multi-​million-​dollar trigger. 109

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This passage expresses the diffuse disgruntlement so many people feel when they realize that they cannot control the world from beyond the grave. But this sentiment is misleading. Specially structured trusts do allow the wealthy to evade some measure of inheritance tax. But more important, this sentiment is crippled by self-​focus. (What would it be like for me—​since I hope to be rich—​to face death regretting the impending taxation? Or what would it be like for me, since I hope to inherit my family’s wealth, to be taxed on the wealth of my bequeathing benefactor?) Is the impact of death worse for wealthy than poor families, and so much so we have to provide protection for them? The goal here is not the idly vindictive one of punishing those with estates, especially because no one claims they have done anything wrong. Instead, it is the positive one of feeding the poor or food insecure. In our economy many paths to wealth are paved atop a labor pool of limited options and laws that protect and enhance wealth. The distribution of wealth is in part a result of the poor being silent benefactors of the wealthy. After all, lots of poor families visit the undertaker and payday lender on the same day. Where is their editorial in Investor’s Business Daily? On the view I support, the legitimacy of the estate tax, and the justification of inheritance itself, has little to do with hard work. In fact, it is surprising that defenders reach for the idea of work. Ignored are the gifts of luck and deliberate and strategic lobbying and legislation that keep on giving. Nearly a third of all billionaires inherited their wealth.2 Many on the “Forbes list” of richest Americans come from upper-​class backgrounds. 110

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Still others just missing the cutoff belong to families that would be on the list if the wealth hadn’t been divided among siblings. Whatever the frequency of inherited wealth, the normally venerated American tradition claims that desert depends on a person’s contribution and effort. Without that contribution or effort, that property does not belong to you—​on any moral theory that attempts to justify ownership.3 The victims of these regressive policies are making a loan to those who came by this undeserved wealth. The poor have been damaged by not having access to the benefits of that unassigned money. Their lives will be shorter, they will be hampered by more injuries and illnesses, they will work longer hours under less pleasant conditions, and so on. One reasonable approach for rebalancing is to compensate them for this loan, at an interest rate commensurate with the cost of lost years and pain and suffering that is tied in normal cases to life years, injury, and death. We can be confident that the interest rate approximates levels of usury. The rate cannot be tied to the reduced value of their work or future earning power, for that is already discounted by their blamelessly low status. If the rebalancing seems complicated and irritating, it is not nearly as bad as being poor. It may be that whether or not the poor have a claim to unassigned wealth depends on funding priorities. The prima facie counterargument to my proposed policy begins with the claim that, according to a utilitarian or Rawlsian idea of social justice, it is better for everyone that wealthy people not undergo a heavier estate tax. That is, it is in fact better for the less fortunate and poor that certain people who can create jobs and engage their 111

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money in productive activity have the wealth from their inheritance. Effective policymakers can be excused for asking whether, say, the unemployment rate is “natural,” or the 23% child poverty rate in the United States is somehow “natural” given the estate tax rate, because presumably the wealthy are already engaging their inherited wealth in job creation and productive activity. There will always be a way of delaying a policy by highlighting imagined risks of the consequences of implementation, and I am afraid this one has been raging since the English Poor Laws. My argument evades this tactic. We have never lived in a world in which the wealthy didn’t receive better education, diet, police protection, health care, jobs, leisure, and laws tending to protect these arrangements. We have never lived in a democracy in which we confiscated the majority of adventitious wealth to protect people who will die without it—​or even experimented with such an arrangement. So any imagined counterfactual to this way of existence is just that—​imagined, not based in reality. We have always just treated the existing rates of mortality as “natural,” along with the human-​made laws that sustain them. Alternatively, we could ensure the poor’s basic needs by redistributing goods that the wealthy claim to have earned, a notoriously errant claim. I believe this action could be justifiable given that many, if not most, of the wealthy won at the craps table while rolling loaded dice. But this confiscation and redistribution will probably never occur in the United States given the state of affairs laid out above. So perhaps it’s better to establish as a redistributive source assets that are least deserved—such as 112

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inheritance—​and be done with it. Even there, scholastic disputes are mobilized to dither while “respecting” a default position—​conveniently forgetting that it’s only the default because the wealthy and powerful set it up that way. Many of the specific and technical questions are treated, on my approach, as familiar tools to justify delay:  What, exactly, counts as wealthy? What is in the tax code? What is the effective tax rate for the wealthy? And so on. But when you have millions of children without food, with poverty-​related health problems, with a public unwillingness to help for fear of unfairness to the most powerful, we should be crafting a much more careful story about the basis of poverty in bad luck instead of arguing the details. Once we’ve done that, and given that the resource pie is fixed, we should experiment more with directly saving the lives of poor children in their own lifetimes rather than certifying, with solemn concern over many generations, that no money can be taken from the wealthy unless we can show it would have no negative impact on the economy or the lives of the wealthy, or that it doesn’t violate norms that institutions of privilege have crafted. There are two questions that matter for desert. One is whether one’s wealth, self-​made or not, was deserved, adventitious, or somewhere in between. The second is whether, once made, there are institutional structures, acting like civic subsidies (e.g., regressive taxes, laws protecting lobbying, and political parties captured by the wealthy via super PACs and protected by Citizens United), which help people retain 113

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their wealth. It is clear that the answer to this second question is “yes.” Answering both questions together should have a chastening effect. Once we see that the deck is stacked so that institutional structures protect adventitious wealth, we should be much more inclined to reshuffle the cards so everyone gets dealt a fair hand. The notion that passing down an estate is a right, rather than a privilege, is largely taken for granted in the United States today. The zeal with which this “right” is defended is alarming, given that most people are not even subject to estate taxes; they stand to hand over far less than the automatic exemption which in 2016 sits, as noted above, at a hefty $5.45 million. In fact, only 1 in 700 deaths triggers taxes on an estate; 99.9% of people are not affected at all by this tax.4 Why would we think that inheritance is a tradition any more elevated or worthy of respect than a tradition like footbinding? So many alternative arrangements exist in other cultures that we need to explain why the particular ones we maintain have actually survived. Political arrangements, such as tax policies and social priorities, are taken for granted by most citizens. The daily demands of job and family are salient, and most of us acquiesce in, and ultimately become unmindful of, diffuse structural features of a society that facilitate inequity, unnecessary suffering, and arbitrary disadvantage. But this need not be the case if we look at the science of happiness. A few simple policies based on evidence about efficient distribution could reverse stubborn and tragic trends—​like those of child poverty. 114

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3. THE SCIENCE OF HAPPINESS AND A UTILITARIAN ARGUMENT FOR REDISTRIBUTION People value happiness, and helping them to secure it is one of the most fundamental functions of a civil society. Unfortunately, the route to happiness appears to be indirect and in some ways evasive. We cannot simply purchase it by acquiring goods and services,5 and it seems to be immune to direct efforts to capture it; happiness appears available only in noninstrumental form. The aggressive pursuit of happiness in itself is self-​defeating: This heated quest increases stress and anxiety, undermining the prospects of happiness. On the other hand, while money can’t buy happiness, it can clearly buy things that make life more fun during the search. At any rate, this is essentially the intuition behind striving for a jacuzzi or a vacation home. These intuitions about happiness make it a complex topic, affected by many variables. But the variables that affect happiness are stable enough that they can be studied systematically and quantitatively, and they have been in one form or other for over forty years. Principles addressing happiness need to be empirically established before we can make reasonable decisions about efficient and effective redistribution. We are aware of at least one principle addressing happiness that’s true: money has a decreasing marginal influence on happiness. People commonly believe otherwise, but they are, in general, wrong. For example, a leading research summary on income 115

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and subjective well-​being (“SWB,” which refers to how people report their quality of life) reviews the findings as follows: 1. There are large correlations between the wealth of nations and the mean reports of SWB in them;6 2. There are modest but consistent correlations between income and SWB within nations, although the risk of unhappiness is much higher for poor people;7 3. Economic growth in the last decades in most economically developed societies has been accompanied by virtually no increase in SWB, and similarly, increases in individual income do not reliably lead to higher SWB8; and 4. People who prize material goals more than other values tend to be substantially less happy.9

What these four findings add up to is this: Money may enhance SWB when it means living in a developed nation and avoiding poverty, but once you’re in an already wealthy country and financially comfortable, increases in income have a diminishing influence on the SWB of its citizens. Even Betsy Stevenson and Justin Wolfers,10 who argue that money always increases happiness, are actually describing a curve that almost flattens out; their data reinforce the fact that the marginal utility of money for happiness is sharply diminishing—​whether it goes to zero or not. This is one of their “stylized facts.” Even taxation that is steeply progressive is unlikely to reduce the happiness of the target population once wealthy.11 People’s ability to adapt to even dramatic changes in life circumstances is stunning. 116

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The doctrine of the decreasing marginal utility of wealth for happiness is lore in economic decision theory.12 To a person making $20,000 per year, an additional $10,000 could be a life-​altering windfall. It could make possible the option of buying a car (with all of the attendant advantages, such as a wider range of job possibilities), allow a family to move to a safer neighborhood, or improve the diet or medical care of the recipient. To a person making $500,000 per year, on the other hand, $10,000 is likely to be of considerably less benefit. For example, it may make the difference between buying a standard or an oversized lot for a vacation home. In short, the greater your wealth, the more money is required to make the same overall contribution to your well-​being, and the less a particular amount of money contributes to your well-​being. These findings about happiness, which for ages have existed as adages and parables but now have evidence to back them up, stand at the basis of any agenda for redistribution. If people accumulated money that is unjustly held because unearned, the appropriate redistribution incorporates facts like those mentioned above. More specifically, we should use this empirical knowledge to produce the most efficient distribution. In the United States, in which millions of children live in poverty—​and in a world in which billions more share the same fate—​excess wealth should not be wasted on individuals for whom the excess makes no significant marginal difference, or to which they will quickly adapt. But more to the point, gains from inheritance are unearned and so adventitious—​the result of luck. So we see that redistribution can be defended in either of two ways. The first is on the well-​being grounds that inherited 117

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money, whether or not it is deserved, won’t make much of a positive impact on the owner and so would do more good if it is redistributed to the poor, whose lives would be much improved by injections of cash. The second is on the normative grounds that inherited money, because unearned, doesn’t belong to the inheritor anyway, so the state is free to redistribute it in accordance with its priorities. The questions then become, how do we do it, and on what principles do we rely? If a goal of government is to increase the happiness of its citizens, then perhaps we could base redistribution on its contribution to happiness. Whatever the motivating principles might be, their ultimate durability, if not immediate acceptance, will rest on empirical facts about the requirements of human well-​being.

Redistribution Based on Justice In elaborating this happiness-​based redistributive proposal, we might begin with Rawls’s “maximin” principle. This principle states that to the extent that any inequalities are permitted by a civil society, social and economic inequalities are to be arranged so that they are both (a) to the greatest benefit of the least advantaged, consistent with the just savings principle, which states that differences in savings should not be allowed to be so great as to counteract the correction of social and economic inequalities described in the first part of the principle; and (b) attached to office and positions open to all under conditions of fair equality of opportunity. This condition places a requirement on the 118

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relationship among institutions in a society. They should be arranged so that any two persons with the same native talent and the same ambition should have the same chances of success in the competition for positions of advantage that distribute primary social goods, like civil and political rights, income and wealth, liberties, and the social bases of self-​respect.13 I recommend an application of the difference principle that redistributes (a) any unearned amount of money or (b) an increment of money (adjustable by context), earned or unearned, whose loss would make no significant difference to the happiness of members of that group. As we saw above, people whose basic needs are met radically overestimate the contribution that money will make to their happiness. However, people living in poverty correctly predict that having more money would make a significant difference to their happiness. Increments can be individuated in many ways. One way might be the unit required to produce some significant unit of well-​being. This application of the difference principle puts meat on the skeletal claim that inequalities should benefit the least advantaged.

Redistribution Based on Resources Fairness and justice are two values among many. The last fifty years have focused on procedural guarantees that make it possible for people to be treated fairly. And there are fifty years’ worth of reasons they haven’t been. The reasons are familiar. Discrimination is now illegal, but the standard of proof is so high that that the guarantee of fair treatment has no bite. Public 119

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education is open to all, but its quality varies drastically with level of funding, and school funding is based on home values,14 themselves nonaccidentally related to race and ethnicity. And so on. In short, what matters is not a formal guarantee of fair procedure, but a substantial endowment for fair outcome. One alternative is to evaluate policies not by their formal guarantees but by the resources they put in the hands of people who need them. Resource-​based principles, like those that underlie Basic Income proposals for a government-​guaranteed income for every citizen, for example, are designed chiefly as attempts to give content to procedural guarantees like the difference principle. The difference principle states that social and economic inequalities are to be arranged so that they are to the greatest benefit of the least advantaged, consistent with the just savings principle discussed in the above section. In particular, proponents of resource-​based principles attempt to make the difference principle more accountable to both the ambition and the endowments of the actor. They believe that people are responsible for the consequences of their choices, but should not be required to suffer consequences of circumstances over which they have no control. For example, people born with disabilities, poor health, or poor natural endowments have done nothing to bring these circumstances upon themselves. So, the argument proceeds, a civil society should not allow people’s life prospects or earning power to be relevantly affected by these circumstances. Resource theorists embrace the converse of this claim as well:  People who choose to work hard to earn more income should not be required to subsidize those choosing more leisure, 120

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and hence less income. According to Ronald Dworkin’s prominent resource-​based theory, people should begin with equal resources, but they may conclude with unequal economic benefits as a result of their own choices. But it should also be noted that people can also conclude with unequal economic benefits because of systematic patterns of privilege given to the wealthy, no matter what the source of that wealth. And that is what we find to be the case when we look at the evidence. One recent study found that, while “ordinary citizens . . . have little or no independent influence on [governmental] policy at all . . . economic elites are estimated to have a quite substantial, highly significant, independent impact on policy.”15 That is to say, the wealthy get to write the laws that create these patterns of privilege, reinforcing their means to more wealth. And the vicious cycle continues on.

A Just Redistribution of Resources With this empirical evidence now in hand, we can apply the difference principle to the relationship between money and happiness. If you are born to poverty (obviously through no fault of your own), other patterns of inequality should be arranged to compensate for that fact, as long as there are others who benefit from this distribution who were not born to poverty. According to the Children’s Defense Fund, over five million children in the United States live in poverty and are allowed to suffer for having lost the lottery they didn’t have a choice in entering. From a moral perspective, they are utterly innocent, 121

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without responsibility for the sorry state in which they find themselves. Meanwhile, the Death Tax Elimination Act passed by the US House of Representatives in 2000 gives back $30 billion of estate tax revenue to those already wealthy enough to have such sizable amounts exposed to taxes in the first place. If we were in a world in which everyone led a satisfactory life, the negligent inefficiency of the institution of inheritance might be tolerable or inoffensive. If all objects of moral concern, perhaps including nonhuman animals, had their basic needs satisfied—​such as health care, food, and shelter—​we might be more indifferent to issues of redistribution. However, that is not the world we live in. Hunger and malnutrition remain a fact of life in segments of the US population. On a single night in January 2015, about one half million US citizens were homeless, one quarter of them children.16 As endlessly creative as people are at imagining the wishes of the formerly living, we suffer an inexplicable loss of imagination when it comes to estimating the suffering of those currently living in need or the amount of good that might be done by legitimate rebalancing of adventitiously acquired wealth. In order to correct a chronic unfairness of conventional origin, we need federal support programs funded by sources on which people have the least warranted claim. There is, after all, no natural right to inheritance. Any such rights are strictly state-​created. As such, they are utterly subject to state discretion. Fairness requires ongoing rebalancing of a luck surplus. Rebalancing reduces at once needless suffering and arbitrary disadvantage. What’s more, given research on cognitive biases, we know that taxing an 122

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inheritance has a psychological advantage, in that people forego a gain rather than suffer a loss. Inheritance, like a pay raise at work, is perceived as a gain. Given the presence of loss aversion about, say, your existing resources, taxing a gain like inheritance is far less hedonically negative than taxing your current salary. This makes a huge psychological difference to the level of subjective pain those taxed will experience. Sharply curtailing inheritance (by either imposing an escalated tax or changing laws so that the greater portion of estates escheat to the state), and redistributing proceeds from the limitation to those most in need, is feasible, psychologically practical, and morally sound.

4. A MODEST PROPOSAL: GETTING RID OF THE HOUSE COMMITTEE ON SCIENCE, SPACE, AND TECHNOLOGY We can think of other types of evidence-​based policy reform that eliminate inefficiencies, redress the natural limits on human knowledge, and control the many corrupting influences of money. Though there are many candidates to choose from, here I choose to focus on the House Committee on Science, Space, and Technology as it is almost uniquely obsolete among government institutions and especially vulnerable to corruption by cozy lobbying arrangements. It is used by its members as a front for communicating political commitments to their base, cashing in on the informational asymmetries on the committee. The committee should be disbanded, and its function should 123

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be replaced with administrative law, created by legal professionals who are also experts in the relevant science (as we find in Denmark, England, and France, for example). The goal, shown via this exemplar, is to have a procedure of policy formation that follows evidence-​based rather than ideological standards. Though the US government has access to the greatest science and the ability to create the greatest infrastructure the world has ever known, it makes policy as though we all lived in a medieval village.17 In Chapter III, I chronicled the common seduction of laypeople and legislators by the sense of understanding. This seduction allows individuals to rely on their untutored and egocentric sense of understanding, never a good recipe for truth-​ tracking pursuits.18 Jim Inhofe, chair of the Senate’s Environment and Public Works Committee, attempted to refute claims of global warming by throwing a snowball to the committee chair and commenting that it is freezing cold outside right now.19 Furthermore, the modern conception of democracy came into the world in the 18th century with an 18th-​century vision of human cognition and well-​being. The assumptions of early democracy held that people had vastly unequal intellectual skills that sort them for citizenship and capabilities for, and rights to, well-​being. This psychological theory, the outcome of casual observation and parochial prejudice reinforced by a sense of understanding, endorsed slavery, elevated to law a contempt for women, and abandoned the impoverished to charity. And it assumed that we could do no better than to have stakeholders argue in a public forum about what policies to live by. 124

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Unfortunately, as we have seen, the sense of understanding attaches to good and bad theories alike. However, once you are psychologically steeped in a good theory, the sense that it makes can then drive better decisions and correctly reject the dysfluent and recalcitrant approaches that have been proven to be worse. For example, behaviorism is a poor theory to use as a psychological instrument for modeling human behavior, given its principled silence about the unobservable things beneath psychology’s tent, the nature of mental mechanisms. And rational choice theory, which seeks to sort good and bad choices according to an ideal model that prescribes values, routinely stumbles in applications to the choices of real, fallible, humans with limited material and cognitive resources and even less time. The crippling effect of poor social and psychological theories for policymaking is hard to overstate. Our sense of understanding can lead to good policy, then, only when our best science orients it, and when our best science is good enough. Fluoridated water, vaccination, anti-​smoking campaigns, response to famine, limits on radiation exposure—​these evidence-​based innovations have vastly improved our health and reduced overall suffering. And just as certainly as we now know that early democracy was wrong on slavery, women, and the impoverished, we also know that the non-​expert electorate fighting over which side of an issue can be louder does not result in the best policies to promote well-​being. A modern democracy must recast policymaking in a scientific image. Without scientific expertise informing the policy discussion, it is rare that casual stakeholders are able to separate the wheat from the chaff. 125

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Unfortunately, our democracy has not yet come around to the necessary role of scientific expertise in policymaking. The standard way that law gets made is through congressional committees, like the Banking Committee or the Appropriations Committee. As a part of the process, House committees sponsor bills that members craft. The other congressional chamber, the Senate, then shepherds through a sister resolution. In writing and reviewing potential laws, the committees have some advantages that lay citizens do not:  the authority to demand information be delivered to them, money and staff resources to explore scientific details, easy access to scientific information through the eager cooperation of the academic world, and the practical (and in some respects, formal) secrecy needed for unobstructed, and thus more efficient, inquiry into any matter the member deems relevant. But even with these advantages, some committees consistently shirk their duties to their constituents, and have rendered themselves obsolete. It is difficult to find a lawmaking function served by the House Committee on Science, Space, and Technology (HCSST). Let’s begin with the fact that the charge of the committee is to consider House resolutions about science, space, and technology. Even given this mandate, it is unfortunately the case that the performance of the committee is not chiefly driven by evidence. In their public discussions in the media it is clear that the members of the HCSST are unprepared to discuss the business of the committee; often they don’t understand the science of the specific House resolution. Accordingly, members might have deferred to relevant 126

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experts, or they can attend optional educational sessions on specific topics, as an alternative to voting without any understanding of the topic. Committee members are not experts in any of the relevant fields (nor are they expected to be), and so ought not substitute an expert’s judgment with their own, or ought to educate themselves on the matter at hand. And yet, this willful ignorance appears to be standard operating procedure, and their votes are predicted by partisanship rather than scientific acumen. Members are especially vulnerable to lobbying and conflicts when the scientific evidence is not partisan.20 Importantly, the committee is an extremely inefficient way to make law. In the 112th–​114th Congress (2011–​2016), 430 bills were introduced to the HCSST. Only 66 came to a vote, 19 of which became law (0 vetoed, 364 “tabled”).21 Finally, with no unified purpose left to the committee, their partisan committee majority is free to pursue an untethered agenda of obstructionist criticism of scientists and scientific administrators on issues about which there is, in fact, monolithic scientific consensus. It is hard to estimate the damage done to the United States’ scientific standing in the world to have members of the HCSST grandstanding and mocking evidence of global warming, or second-​guessing the reliability of peer review. While committees sometimes get renamed or disbanded, we have to distinguish between standing committees, like Pensions (1880–​1946), and Pacific Railroads (1865–​1911) on the one hand, and special, joint, and select committees on the other, like Energy Independence and Global Warming (2007–​2011). The HCSST is itself a standing committee. Disbanding a standing 127

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committee is rare; it hasn’t happened since 1970, and the last one before that, in 1946.22 But just because it happens infrequently doesn’t mean it shouldn’t happen now. In the last few years, the HCSST has considered several hundred bills on highly technical topics ranging from biofuels and carbon capture to methamphetamine cleanup and ocean acidification. It is hard to imagine anything less than a PhD degree in the specific field pertaining to a piece of legislation yielding an adequate understanding and critical analysis of its science, but in the past twenty years, the number of PhDs in Congress has ranged from 18 to 24 (out of 435), with the current number at 23.23 There are only two PhDs on the HCSST.24 Without expert advice in such diverse fields even a smart person is doomed to ignorance about the relevant House resolution. Thus, it’s safe to say that in the entire House of Representatives, perhaps two or three legislators could tell you the exacting scientific technicalities of why the release of carbon warms the earth’s lower atmosphere, or how stem cells could be used to reverse nerve degeneration. This is not a criticism of legislators; it is rather a description of the informational limits on human beings, a knowing nod to the cognitive boundedness whose discovery was acknowledged and explained in Chapter I. And that is also the reason that we need strict rules for representatives on the HCSST:  to ensure they understand the basic scientific issues (if not the specific facts) of the proposed legislation in front of them, to require that they attend educational sessions if they do not, and to punish them if they fail to do even that or if they misrepresent the content of a bill in a public discussion. If this 128

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seems like an impossible amount of time for committee members to spend, then the entire committee should be disbanded and their tasks left to administrative law written by expert technocrats. It’s not that we need more PhDs on the committee. We need more members prepared to defer to the findings of science. Yet the HCSST does not warn, sanction, or otherwise punish those who misrepresent scientific facts when disseminating information to the public about a bill under discussion. So there is no disincentive (other than the personal suffering caused by one’s own indecency) to scuttle a piece of committee legislation assembled by one’s political opponents by misrepresenting its content and inducing fear of its consequences.25 Consider the case of Dana Rohrabacher (R-​48th district CA). In his role as former vice chairman and current member of the HCSST, Representative Rohrabacher should be judged on his defense of good science. So far, he is failing that test badly. In order to advance citizen aims for efficient energy use, one bill before Representative Rohrabacher and the HCSST during the 111th session of Congress (2009–​2010) was titled “HR 3247: To establish a social and behavioral sciences research program at the Department of Energy, and for other purposes.” The bill proposed that the Department of Energy (DoE) tap scientific research in judgment and decision making to explore “social and behavioral factors that influence energy consumption and acceptance and adoption rates of new energy technologies.” As such, it would have looked at the reasons that people use energy sparingly or abundantly, purchase electric and hybrid automobiles or gas-​guzzling SUVs, turn off lights in unoccupied 129

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rooms or leave them on, and with that information would have attempted to help citizens make more energy-​efficient decisions for themselves. In speeches before the committee and on television, and in his role as vice chairman of the HCSST, Representative Rohrabacher misrepresented the science behind this generation’s most important discovery in policymaking:  We want to make better choices, but we are imperfect decision makers. It seems that this judgment research was difficult for Representative Rohrabacher to understand, but remarkably easy for him to talk about, and he repeatedly misinformed the public about the content of HR 3247. One of his favorite charges was that this research involved “psychiatry,” twisting people’s minds toward a pre-​determined political preference. In committee debate, Rohrabacher exclaimed:  “Do we want single-​family homes to be portrayed as so inefficient that we have to hire psychiatrists to convince people to move into condominiums or apartment complexes, because that’s so much more energy efficient?” It is disturbing that this senior member of the HCSST does not recognize the difference between the science of decision making and the profession that treats schizophrenia and bipolar disorder; the difference between cognitive psychology and the medical practice of psychiatry. And it is even more disturbing if he knows the difference but is distorting the scientific findings for partisan political gain. Either way, there is every reason for the HCSST to reprimand a member who flouts experts or deliberately utters falsehoods to the media, or in any public venue, because in all of these cases national interests are at stake. 130

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Seven years later, Rohrabacher still maintains his seat on the committee. Clearly, we need a more systematic method of controlling incursions into arcane science by political opportunists. Voters need to know how and by whom untutored politicians get advised and whether they show up for expert panels and educate themselves before deciding on a policy. Citizens need evidence that there is a political price to pay for dishonesty; the House should make the misrepresentation of scientific results a sanctionable or otherwise punishable offense. If lobbying and expensive campaigns are here to stay, these procedures, if implemented, would still at least satisfy basic accountability conditions. All of these procedures are designed to satisfy a generic epistemic principle, the idea that our procedures should be selectively responsive to the best available evidence. Ironically, it is this kind of discrimination of arcane expertise is precisely what House committee members lack. But until the committee learns how to compel responsible behavior from its members, science will continue to be used cynically by members who want to generate campaign funds and whip up the voting base. As an example of an alternative model to legislating via committee, the Federal Reserve has a statutory mandate from Congress to promote “maximum employment, stable prices, and moderate long-​term interest rates.”26 That is to say, the Fed already is an expert body that creates policy. There are also regulatory agencies that contain experts. The Environmental Protection Agency “is called a regulatory agency because Congress authorizes [the EPA] to write regulations that explain 131

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the critical details necessary to implement environmental laws.”27 Thus, experts determine how to enact laws, even if they didn’t write them. No one argues that the current rate of ocean acidification is good, or that agricultural runoff makes fish more safely edible. So we do not need legislators deciding these issues. In fact, the science is good enough now to know how to reliably, if imperfectly, regulate employment and interest rates, and lead in gas. The quaint model of uninitiated legislators making decisions about arcane matters is not just futile nostalgia; it is outmoded sentimentality we can no longer afford. In addition to inaccuracy, the current influence of money and partisanship on the HCSST (and perhaps other standing committees) compromises the integrity of the HCSST. One remedy might be to eliminate lobbying or to control it, as governments do in many European countries. Or the government could enforce a low and transparent limit on campaign funding and thus remove the incentive that politicians have to cozy up to financial benefactors of their campaign. But in the United States, these curatives have little hope of receiving support. The corrective I  propose—​elimination of this standing committee—​ specifically targets the HCSST. Such visions are always designed to propel remedies as far as they can go, even if they will fall short of perfection. As it stands, policymaking and voting procedures in the United States have fallen hopelessly short of the ideals of democratic inclusion. Few events show this more clearly than the utter failure of voting and policy decisions in this country to be responsive to the citizenry or selectively sensitive to the best available (scientific) evidence. 132

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The proposal to abandon the HCSST derives from principles of epistemic deference familiar to philosophers who study knowledge. If truth is your goal, then testimonial deference to arcane science is the best option. The alternatives—​substitution of personal belief or hasty cramming—​cannot track the truth on terrain so complex. Engaged and attentive legislators may be able to act responsibly on the advice of finance, banking, or housing experts. But the arcane details of physics, chemistry, and biology only allow a kind of blind deference to experts. That isn’t what the committee system was designed to do, and it certainly isn’t what HCSST envisioned as a potential problem. But a problem it is, and the only honest solution is to acknowledge the difficulty of understanding the scientific evidence responsible for accurate policy, and replace a committee of sporadically informed and compromised initiates with a decision-​making process that the public deserves.

5. OUTSIDE STRATEGIES AND THE DANGERS OF COMPLICATED RULES: THE INDEX OF HONESTY No man is allowed to be a judge in his own cause; because his interest would certainly bias his judgment, and, not improbably, corrupt his integrity.—​James Madison, Federalist Paper 10

On April 12, 2012, Congress enacted the STOCK Act, designed to “prohibit Members of Congress and employees of Congress 133

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from using nonpublic information derived from their official positions for personal benefit, and for other purposes.”28 The prior safeguards were obviously inadequate, and the flood of unprosecuted legislator violations reported in media outlets like the Washington Post29 and CBS News’ 60 Minutes30 finally became too audacious and embarrassing. Among other instances of representatives enjoying unfair advantages in the market and over their constituents, one event instantly became emblematic of the economic advantages enjoyed by a privileged political class. On September 18, 2008, as the economy edged toward collapse, representatives from across the country attended a closed-​ door meeting with Secretary of the Treasury Hank Paulsen and Federal Reserve Chair Ben Bernanke; immediately afterward they made trades, shorted stocks, moved into equities considered safer, or cashed out of equities altogether. No one else in the country had the information provided at that meeting, and legislators obtained superior investment results because no one else could make financial moves with the same speed and quality of information. Though this occurrence brought public attention and scrutiny, it was not an isolated phenomenon—​the financial records of legislators clearly indicate that they routinely benefit from privileged information. The last two decades of scholarly work document that House members consistently outperformed the market by about 6%, and senators by 12%.31 When these persistent material gains are based on stock trades, the transactions are often not only suspiciously timed but are focused on small companies or arcane sectors otherwise normally unknown to legislators.32 134

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Given this history of unethical (and possibly illegal) doings, this book makes one prediction and one policy proposal. The prediction is that in light of decision-​making research on conflict of interest outlined below, the STOCK Act is very likely to fail. The policy proposal is that as a replacement for the STOCK Act, legislator and relevant staffer investment must be restricted to selected, broad market indexes (like the S&P 500). This, and all other potentially conflicting financial arrangements, must be logged in a database and controlled by a kit of automatic preventative tools upon the legislator’s entry into Congress or a relevant staff position. These tools would monitor the database and alert the ethics committee to any automatically flagged transactions or changes in the financial condition of the principal or their family members. Behavioral decision-​making research shows that the best way to promote ethical behavior—​and limit unethical behavior—​is to limit opportunities for mischief.33 The STOCK Act, however, assumes that we do not need to remove financial incentives to act on conflicts; politicians merely need mandated disclosure in order to curb the impulse to violate, asserting that “public financial disclosure provides a means of monitoring and deterring conflicts of interest.”34 (While the STOCK Act did originally include a provision that these reports be available online in an easily searchable format, this was removed via amendment in 2013 for all but the key groups.)35 Yet even with mandatory reporting, there is no evidence that transparency reduces unethical action in the face of a conflict of interest. In fact, the best empirical research in behavioral decision theory—​conflict of 135

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interest research by figures like Cain, Loewenstein, and Moore,36 and moral credentialing research by Monin and Miller,37 Effron, Cameron, and Monin,38 and Merritt, Effron, Monin39—​predicts that transparency in fact emboldens those tempted. In line with this research, my Indexing Proposal, set out below, is designed to stem conflicted actions in the first place, rendering irrelevant the conditions that cause ordinary inattention, routine weakness of will, and chronic temptation. Behavioral decision-​ making research would not have arrived at either the STOCK Act of 2012 or the US House of Representatives Committee on Ethics “pink sheet,” an official memo updated regularly setting out events that trigger financial disclosure. First, vague and complicated ethics rules in fact undermine compliance. Consider the standard tailored for the House Committee on Ethics that “each individual Member has the responsibility of deciding for himself whether his personal interest in pending legislation requires that he abstain from voting.”40 But this mandate has not deterred conflicts and there is no clear standard in either the STOCK Act or the pink sheet that makes it easier for Congress to investigate a potentially violating legislator. Instead, the pink sheet issued in November 2011, for example, protects the very same rules of legislator discretion in voting that permitted House members who were bar owners to vote on Prohibition. Acting unethically on these conflicts is the result of what applied ethics scholars Max Bazerman, David Messick, and Ann Tenbrunsel call “ethical fading.”41 Ethical considerations fade, or become less important, when potential violations are described vaguely or recognized poorly. Ethical 136

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fading begins with vague and complicated definitions of prohibited behavior, and it resists correction when enforcement agencies offer complex exceptions, mistakenly assuming our ability to resist corrupting influences, and grant latitude to legislators in the handling of conflicts. One of the scientifically contradicted myths of folk wisdom in the STOCK Act is that the threat of public disclosure is a barrier to corruption. Behavioral decision researchers have already explained why disclosure strategies such as those in the STOCK Act generally do not work. In a study by Cain, Loewenstein, and Moore, 42 some participants, the “estimators,” were asked to estimate the number of coins in a jar. Other participants, the “advisors,” gave estimators advice concerning the number of coins in the jar. Advisors got a better look at the jar than estimators. Estimators were paid for the accuracy of their estimates, while some of the advisors were paid according to the accuracy of their estimator’s estimate, and other advisors were paid according to how high their estimator’s estimate was. So advisors in this latter condition had a conflict of interest. They had an incentive not to be accurate but to inflate the estimator’s guess. Pertinent to the STOCK Act is the behavior of this latter group of advisors when they disclosed their conflict of interest to the estimator:  The advisors’ recommendations were higher and less accurate than those of advisors who did not disclose their conflict. In other words, contrary to common wisdom and entrenched policy, disclosure of conflict is likely to embolden rather than deter violators. With their potential conflicts disclosed, they will feel licensed to risk moral impropriety and test 137

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ethical boundaries. The legislators can simply say they believed they could vote impartially, and believed they did so—​why else would they risk detection when they knew their trades would be disclosed?43 That disclosure has the ironic effect of producing unethical behavior makes sense in the context of a broader theory of “moral credentialing” developed by psychologists Benoit Monin and Dale Miller.44 Disclosure of a conflict of interest is an act of honesty, and performing it gives them certain moral credentials.45 In turn, this boosts their self-​regard and in their minds liberates them to later act in more morally questionable ways. This effect has been widely observed. A  recent comprehensive review of the moral self-​licensing literature reports that white students who were able to establish their nonracist credentials were more likely to recommend a white over black job candidate with the same credentials. People who recalled a past action that was moral were more likely to cheat on a math task than were people who recalled a past immoral action. People who bought environmentally responsible products (compact fluorescent light [CFL] bulbs) rather than neutral ones (incandescent light bulbs) were more likely to make intentionally inaccurate judgments in a subsequent task in order to win money and to take more of the experimenter’s money than they had rightfully won. In all of these cases, establishing their moral credentials, like disclosing their potential conflicts, made people more likely to violate an ethical standard in the future. And it is not surprising that people aren’t aware of this effect, because they view their 138

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own intentions as more diagnostic of their identities than the actual behaviors they engaged in.46 By siding with parochial intuition that fear of detection sanitizes behavior, the Ethics Committee’s pink sheet and the STOCK Act treat the representative’s individual right to vote on bills as more fundamental than the protection of the public trust, and thus risks allowing a corrupt member of Congress to act unethically on a conflict. However, given the weight of the evidence of corruption, the duty to protect the public from conflicted politicians should trump the legislator’s liberty for conflicted action.

An Obvious but Untested Proposal Behavioral decision research not only predicts the failure of the STOCK Act but also provides the basis for a replacement. There is a simple rule that will eliminate conflicts of interest regarding investments in individual equities: Indexing Rule: House and Senate members, as well as identified positions on the staff, must have any of their equity positions in broad index funds. There are a number of compelling arguments for this proposed Indexing Rule. First, and most important, it reinforces a fundamental principle of representative democracy:  Those with legislative power are in no different a position to benefit or be harmed by their decisions than the constituencies they represent. Broad indexes, rather than individual equities or sectors, move with the market, not with decisions on specific legislation. 139

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Second, while compliance with the STOCK Act prompts laborious and ongoing supervision of each legislator’s individual equity transactions, compliance with the Indexing Rule requires minimal oversight. Invest in the market index, let it grow, sit on the sidelines, hold while the market falls, add to it, or cash it in, as each legislator pleases. Third, using insights from behavioral decision making, the Indexing Rule disables the conditions that create conflicts of interest. Currently, conflicts arise because legislators enjoy an informational advantage about individual equities in the stock market and are able to trade on that advantage. The Indexing Rule makes informational advantage impossible to secure, and so evidently futile to pursue. At the same time, the Indexing Rule places no relevant restrictions on the liberty of legislators. It doesn’t prevent them from experiencing the upside and downside risk from exposure to the market. Legislators and staff can still invest in the market and benefit from the elevated returns that equities deliver in the aggregate and in the long run. In fact, the only downside risk, mentioned in hallways but not in print, is that the scrutiny and investment restriction could discourage decent people from pursuing the legislature. Without evidence, this seems a baseless concern. The private sector imposes similar restrictions on the highest of achievers, and there is no evidence that they flock to substitute markets. Because this proposal has already been implemented in the private sector, another advantage is that many of the practical limits on its use have already been worked out.47 And these controls could easily be applied to legislators. Upon entering Congress, the principal would build a digital database profile, recording 140

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all of his or her financial information (e.g., investments, trusts, mortgages, auto loans, credit card and other debt, insurance policies) and personal relationships (e.g., spouse, father, mother, siblings, along with their financial interests). None of this need be public (a huge stumbling block that prompted the 2013 revision to the act). Such systems have pre-​defined rule-​sets identifying conflict violations and severity of penalty. Flagged changes in finances would have to be recorded in a specified number of days (for example, ten days) and violations would result in various probationary fines and, if uncorrected, expulsion from Congress with loss of pension. This latter provision is already in the STOCK Act. Besides the stray, and circumscribed, exceptions, the proposed regulations capture all of the routine ethical improprieties and corruption and will leave prosecution of the rare cases to post hoc fact-​finding. Democrats and Republicans alike have been corrupted by these conflicts. This indexing mandate advances a bipartisan call for simplicity and fairness. Rather than spreading money on the congressional floor and then punishing legislators for picking it up, we should just keep the floors clean.48 By abiding by an indexing code of conduct, members of Congress only give up the opportunity to use privileged information for their financial benefit. Some (most likely the members of Congress themselves) may complain that this preventative tools approach is all stick and no carrot. But the goal is to prevent and prosecute unethical behavior, not build character. What’s more, as shown, a pat on the back may make the legislator feel morally credentialed, and so more disposed to ethical impropriety. And 141

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there is no reason that conflict of interest guidelines used in the private sector should be deemed ethically demanding for public officials. Mere willpower alone has not ensured that legislators honor their solemn oath to represent the interests of a constituency. The decision sciences offer a far more credible recipe for compliance.

6. CONCLUSION None of the fixes proposed in this chapter can reverse the powerful and regrettable trends of money in politics in a democracy whose character is changing faster than we can react. But it is hard to imagine just how much the policymaking machine of today will have to change in order to counteract the lumbering and dull behemoth that popular capitalist democracy has become. A philosophically serious approach to evidence-​based policymaking keeps foundational notions in clear view, like the requirements of well-​being and desert, and replaces distorting idealizations with scientific visions of human activity. I  have looked at three examples of evidence-​based policymaking: happiness and desert-​based redistribution, scientifically enlightened legislating about science, and correctives for conflicts of interest in government (and other institutions). In each case, the neglect of evidence is costly, and the lessons of naturalism are invaluable. 142

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Many disciplines have practitioners who make normative pronouncements. They make judgments about the appropriate size of institutions, proper amounts of social funding, and the conditions required to reduce deception in financial advising. So philosophers are not alone in this normative impulse. However, none of these normative pronouncements self-​consciously recommend the near-​impossible. But with the exception of some practical theologians, philosophers are unique in the freedom with which their normative pronouncements ignore well-​ documented limits on human cognition, affect, and overall well-​ being. We philosophers sometimes tell ourselves that this is because practical limitations are too remote from the deep and general philosophical issues that grip us.

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Chapter I

1. 2. 3. 4.

5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12.

Quoted in Michelson, 1903, p. 24. Pryor, 2004, p. 70. Zagzebski, 2003, p. 19. Thanks to Fred Kronz, program director at NSF, for clarifying NSF policy regarding public presentation of these excised reports. Kim, 1988, p. 382. Kelly, 2011, pp.146–​147. Steup, 2008, p. 379 http://​www.3ammagazine.com/​3am/​74992/​. http://​www.3ammagazine.com/​3am/​74992/​. Grove and Meehl, 1996; Swets, Dawes, and Monahan, 2000. http://​fivethirtyeight.com/​features/​science-​isnt-​broken/​#part3. Quine, 1986, pp. 664–​6 65.

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13. And when the model of naturalism changes, so too does its institutional instantiation. Rather than philosophers being familiar with empirical results, they became trained in the disciplines, some of them below even taking advanced degrees. Abner Shimony and David Malament in physics, Robyn Dawes, Paul Meehl, Josh Knobe, and Lance Rips in psychology, Richard Lewontin, Elliot Sober, Bill Wimsatt, Philip Kitcher and Godfrey-​Smith in biology, Carl Craver, Adina Roskies, Bill Bechtel, Paul Churchland, Patricia Smith Churchland, and Josh Greene in neuroscience. 14. Barber and Odean, 2000. 15. Strevens, 2013.

Chapter II 1. Meehl, 1986, p. 372. 2. Dawes, Faust, and Meehl, 1989, p. 1672 3. See, for example, Chi, Glaser, and Rees, 1982. 4. Agricola, pp. 3–​4. 5. More specifically, in so far as it is the practical reasoning of the subject that is at issue in the case, the present view rules that it is the interests and purposes operative in the subject’s practical environment that ought to govern our evaluation of the knowledge claim. On the other hand, if the knowledge claim is being evaluated for use in our own practical reasoning, then it is the interest and purposes operative in our own practical environment that should govern. All that seems intuitively correct. The considerations raised in this section, therefore, count in favour of a version of attributor contextualism. (Greco, 2008, p. 434.) Similar recent examples, by smart and honest and well-​intentioned scholars, are plentiful: It is, however, wholly unintuitive to suppose that the truth of an agent's belief that she is not, say, a BIV [Brain in a Vat] is because of her cognitive ability (even if we are willing to grant that her cognitive ability plays 146

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some substantive role in this cognitive success). Indeed, if anything, it seems that the cognitive success in question here is more creditable to the good fortune of being in an epistemically friendly environment than it is to the agent's cognitive abilities. (Pritchard, 2008, p. 34). Even if it is okay to dismiss our intuitive judgments about time-​ travel and oracle cases, it’s not okay to dismiss our intuitive judgments about The Murder Lesion and The Psychopath Button. Or at least—​and this is enough for my purposes—​it’s not okay for the causal decision theorist to dismiss our judgments about The Murder Lesion and The Psychopath Button if it’s not okay for the evidential decision theorist to dismiss our judgments about The Smoking Lesion. (Egan,  2007). 6. Berlin, 2000, p. 598. 7. Rachlinski, 1998; Sunstein et al. 2002, esp. ­chapter 6.

Chapter III 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13.

For a very thoughtful discussion of this issue, see Wright (2007). Cowan, 2005. Just and Carpenter, 1992. Halford, Wilson, and Phillips, 1998. Oberauer and Kliegl, 2001. Geva, Zivan, Warsha, and Olchik, 2013. See, for example, Belopolsky and Theeuwes, 2010. Strevens, 2013. Excerpt(s) from Cat’s Cradle by Kurt Vonnegut, 1963. Salmon, 1984, p. 240. Salmon, 1984, p. 276. Blake, 1868. This is presumably why the National Cancer Institute of the National Institute of Health recommends that women with various clusters of 147

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14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26.

properties rely not just on the Gail/​BCRAT model, but the models that incorporate factors associated with family history (like Ashkenazi Jewish ancestry) and the BOADICEA model that incorporates both BRCA1/​ BRCA2 genetic risk factors; see http://​www.cancer.gov/​types/​breast/​ hp/​breast-​ovarian-​genetics-​pdq#link/​_​344_​toc. Other examples that easily challenge familiar conceptions of understanding can be found in Diamond and Briand, 2004 and in Parasuraman and Greenwood 2005. Dawes, 1999. Rogeberg, 2004. Gilbert, 2006; Gilbert et al., 1998. Plantinga, 1993, pp. 91–​92. Descartes, 1637. Kuhn, 1996, p. 20. Kuhn, 1996, p. 25. Kuhn, 1996, p. 123. Kuhn, 1996, p. 192. Alter, Oppenheimer, Epley, and Eyre, 2007. Peirce, 1908, 100. Labroo and Kim, 2009. Hertwig, et al., 2008. After seeing the blustery endorsement of feelings of fluency, it would be disappointing in the extreme to find that it is generally an unreliable guide to the truth; it is a poor indicator of actual frequencies in the world. And where it is accurate, its success is, some portion of the time, a fragile trick, good for only one kind of carefully orchestrated quest. But this is what we find. When psychologists have turned to examine the “validity” of feelings of fluency, the rare successes don’t form a natural grouping. It is as though psychologists spilled out all possible mental tasks onto our palette and picked them over until they found a few that managed to survive experimental tests. This would explain the odd assortment of cognitive jobs on the experimenters’ list. The most expansive study looks at fluency feelings when charged with recognizing cities, companies, musical artists, athletes, and billionaires. What do these objects 148

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27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39.

4 0. 41. 42.

43. 4 4. 45.

have in common? Nothing really. But in order to transform the feeling of fluency into an accurate indicator of true belief, they must be presented to people in a very controlled way. Weinberg, 2004, pp. 24–​25. Topolinski and Reber, 2010. Feynman, 1965. Kounios and Jung-​Beeman, 2009. Topolinski and Reber, 2010. Topolinski and Reber, 2010, p. 402. Skurnik, Yoon, Park, and Schwarz, 2005. For a lovely foundational discussion of estrangement, replete with literary illustrations, see Moran (2001). Schechtman, 1996. Conway and Ross, 1984. McFarland and Ross, 1987. Dawes, 2001. As Nietzsche correctly pointed out in his otherwise hysterical diatribe on Wagner, an incoherent plot—​in Parsifal, for example—​can appear coherent if you don’t press the issue. For example, why, Nietzsche asks, should we think the unchaste woman wants to be saved? (See Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy and the Case of Wagner.) Wilson and Ross, 2001. Dickens, 1854. Woolf, 1931, 283. See Strawson (2004) for a compelling philosophical argument against reigning meta-​cognitively primped, over-​intellectualized narrativity. Keats, 1819. Eugenides, 1993, pp. 246–​257 I make a point similar to this in Trout, 2016. Galen Strawson cuts right to the central problem with the common anti-​physicalist objection: “Many make the same mistake [as Leibniz] today—​the Very Large Mistake (as Winnie-​the-​Pooh might put it) of thinking that we know enough about 149

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the nature of physical stuff to know that conscious experience can’t be physical. We don’t. We don’t know the intrinsic nature of physical stuff, except—​Russell again—​insofar as we know it simply through having a conscious experience. “We find this idea extremely difficult because we’re so very deeply committed to the belief that we know more about the physical than we do, and (in particular) know enough to know that consciousness can’t be physical. We don’t see that the hard problem is not what consciousness is, it’s what matter is—​what the physical is.” (http://​www.nytimes.com/​ 2016/​05/​16/​opinion/​consciousness-​isnt-​a-​mystery-​its-​matter.html).

Chapter IV 1. http://​ctdebate.org/​PDFs/​CDAPacket2Oct10.pdf “A Good Year To Die.” Investors Business Daily, Posted 01/​0 4/​2010 07:11 PM ET 2. According to Inside the 2015 Forbes List: Facts and Figures, 1,191 members of the list are self-​made billionaires, 230 inherited their wealth and another 405 inherited at least a portion but are still working to increase their fortunes. Forbes has a principled way of designating an individual as “self-​made.” There is a scale of 1–​10; 1 represents someone who inherited all of the wealth and is not working to increase it (Laurene Powell Jobs), whereas 10 is given to those who grew up in poor/​impoverished homes and overcame significant obstacles (such as Oprah Winfrey). http://​www.forbes.com/​sites/​kerryadolan/​2015/​03/​02/​ inside-​the-​2015-​forbes-​billionaires-​list-​facts-​and-​figures/​#21986db56cec. 3. Over the past five years, the federal government has received less money from estate tax than in previous years for two main reasons. First, the tax rate has gone down. Of course, one could still see a gain from past years with a lower tax rate for a host of reasons. Second, the threshold has been raised for paying estate tax at all. In 2000, estates of $600,000 or more were taxed. In 2013, estates of only $5 million or more were taxed. This leaves out a significant portion of potential revenue. My proposal has been to start at the top, where the greatest inefficiencies and excesses exist. 150

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4. http://​www.americansfortaxfairness.org/​tax-​fairness-​briefing-​booklet/​ fact-​sheet-​the-​estate-​inheritance-​tax/​. 5. Although it can be improved by purchasing opportunities to engage in the activities that bring joy. For busy people with resources, that may mean hiring people who shop and cook and clean for you—​but only if it is allowing you to substitute more joyful activities, and only if you are not employing people with the conscious purpose of becoming happier. 6. Inglehart, Foa, Peterson, and Welzel, 2008. But also see Stevenson and Wolfers, 2008. 7. OECD, 2011. 8. Diener, Louis, and Shigehiro, 2013. 9. Clark and Senik, 2011. 10. Sacks, Stevenson, and Wolfers, 2012. 11. Shigehiro, Ulrich, Diener, 2011. 12. For one of many expressions of this doctrine, see Layard 2005, a distinguished labor economist. 13. While we advert to the difference principle here, any similar principle designed to regulate otherwise arbitrary advantage would serve our purpose. Both the decreasing marginal utility of wealth and its inability to make the already wealthy significantly happier become powerful evidence for steeply progressive redistribution when combined with the power of a small amount of money to significantly improve the objective state and subjective happiness of the truly destitute. 14. Laine, Greenwald, and Hedges, 1996. Also see Chetty and Friedman, 2010. 15. Gilens and Page, 2014, p. 572. 16. HUD, 2015. 17. I have made the case to a larger, general audience, to disband the House Science Committee, at http://​www.salon.com/​2016/​05/​14/​the_​house_​ science_​committee_​hates_​science_​and_​should_​be_​disbanded/​. 18. See Posey (R-​Fla). On March 26, 2014, the House Committee on Science, Space and Technology, one of the most influential science policy bodies in the country, met with the US President’s chief science advisor. Members of the House Committee complained, in effect, that current science-​based 151

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19.

20.

21. 22. 23.

24. 25.

initiatives to slow global warming uncomfortably conflicted with their sense of understanding. As one member put it, it just didn’t make sense to say that people were causing global warming. After all, the earth had warmed up between the ice ages when there were no people around, so how could we blame humans for the current warming? “Just because we’re alive now,” he reasoned, “the tectonic plate shifts aren’t gonna stop, the hurricanes [and] tsunamis aren’t gonna stop, the asteroid strikes aren’t gonna stop.” [posttv url=“http://​www.washingtonpost.com/​posttv/​politics/​inhofe-​ brings-​snowball-​on-​senate-​floor-​to-​dispute-​climate-​change/​2015/​02/​ 26/​37f6acb4-​bdfe-​11e4-​9dfb-​03366e719af8_​video.html”]. For another illustration of ignorant meddling with arcane science, see Lamar Smith, chair of HCSST; http://​www.nytimes.com/​2015/​12/​05/​science/​chief-​ of-​house-​science-​panel-​picks-​battle-​over-​climate-​paper.html. This article by Richard A. Smith from 1995 cites some interesting research about how lobbying and interest groups influence the early stages of bill creation, that is, at the committee and subcommittee stages; http://​www. wise-​intern.org/​orientation/​documents/​R40086.pdf. From www.congress.gov. This link gives details about the massive committee overhaul in 1946; http://​legisworks.org/​sal/​6 0/​stats/​STATUTE-​6 0-​Pg812.pdf. The range of PhDs in Congress has been 18–​24 in the past 20 years. The lowest was 18 in the 108th Congress. These data can be found primarily through the Congressional Research Service, e.g., http://​www.wise-​ intern.org/​orientation/​documents/​R40086.pdf. http://​library.clerk.house.gov/​documents/​Doctoral_​Degrees.pdf and https://​science.house.gov/​about/​members. This is not to say that the remark is not available to public scrutiny. If a committee or subcommittee is discussing something on the record, then the thing being discussed is likely a bill (in the introductory phase). If it is being discussed in a committee, then a public record is made of the bill even if it is never voted on. Thus, the congresspeople talking about it risk 152

153

Notes

26. 27. 28. 29.

30. 31. 32. 33. 34.

35. 36. 37.

having their words cross checked with the contents of the bill, either by the press or their peers in Congress. Fed goals.pdf; (http://​www.frbsf.org/​education/​publications/​doctor-​ econ/​2004/​september/​federal-​funds-​discount-​rate). http://​www.epa.gov/​laws-​regulations/​laws-​and-​executive-​orders. https:// ​ w ww.gpo.gov/ ​ f dsys/ ​ p kg/ ​ P LAW-​ 112publ105/​ p df/​ P LAW-​ 112publ105.pdf. Just a few months after its passage, the Washington Post published a three-​ part exposé of legislator violations, raising specific doubts about the power of the Stock Act to stem corruption. The Washington Post series can be found at http://​www.washingtonpost.com/​politics/​congress-​members-​back-​ legislation-​that-​could-​benefit-​themselves-​relatives/​2012/​10/​07/​c2fa7d94-​ f3a9-​11e1-​a612-​3cfc842a6d89_​story.html; http://​www.washingtonpost. com/​politics/​members-​of-​congress-​trade-​in-​companies-​while-​making-​ laws-​that-​affect-​those-​same-​firms/​2012/​06/​23/​g JQAlXwVyV_​story.html; and http://​www.washingtonpost.com/​politics/​lawmakers-​sell-​off-​stock-​ in-​company-​included-​in-​senate-​investigation/​2012/​0 6/​23/​g JQATXwVyV_​story.html. For the 60 Minutes story, see http://​www.cbsnews.com/​8301-​18560_​ 162-​57323527/​congress-​trading-​stock-​on-​inside-​information/​. See Ziobrowski et al., 2004, 2011. Javers, (2005); Keating, and Higham, (2012). See Bazerman and Banaji, 2004; Sah and Loewenstein, 2014. US House of Representatives Committee on Ethics, November 29, 2011, Memorandum to All House Members, Officers, and Employees, p. 6. In addition, even with easier access to the Financial Disclosure Reports, the information on them is not easily interpreted by the untrained eye of the ordinary constituent. See the Technical Appendix of the STOCK Act for further discussion and details. Cain, Loewenstein, and Moore, 2005, 2011. Monin and Miller, 2001. 153

154

Notes

38. 39. 4 0. 41. 42. 43.

4 4. 45.

4 6. 47. 48.

Effron, Cameron, and Monin, 2009. Merritt, Effron, Monin, 2010. House Ethics Manual, Chapter 5. Bazerman and Tenbrunsel, 2010, p.  148; also see Tenbrunsel and Messick, 2004. Cain, Loewenstein, and Moore, 2005. Of course, what they actually believed is difficult to verify. They can say that the timing of the lucrative trade was simply coincidental. This was Senator Coburn’s reply, for example, when asked why he purchased bonds from a small company named Affymetrix on the same day a compromise was reached, one he made possible by lifting a hold he had placed on the legislation. Legislators can also say that their broker placed the trade without their instruction. The broker then backs up the story and unethical intention is unverifiable. Monin and Miller, 2001. Research participants find the researcher more trustworthy if the researcher is upfront about being paid to conduct the study. See Kim, Millard, Nisbett, Cox, Caine, 2004. Kruger and Gilovich, 2004. One major financial services firm with over 60,000 US employees (Deloitte and Touche), controls conflicts of interest in just this way. Outside strategies of this sort can be found in Trout, 2009.

154

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162

163

INDEX

affirmative action, 107–​108 alchemy, 37, 88, 106 philosophy as the modern equivalent of, 52–​53 Ameliorative Psychology, 5, 9, 12, 20, 24–​25, 31 and reasoning, 25–​33, 58 Apgar score, 21 attention, 4, 32, 38, 41, 69–​70, 75, 78, 98

conflict of interest, 50, 135–​142 legislation to fix, 139–​142 in members of Congress, 133–​139 consciousness, 70, 99–​100 consider an alternative, 28, 31–​33, 64 Conway, Michael, 93

Bishop, Mike, 5, 7, 9–​13, 17, 24, 41–​42, 60 Blake, William, 76

Dawes, Robyn, 4, 9, 27–​28, 40, 80 Descartes, Rene, 82 desert, 103, 106–​113, 118, 142 Dickens, Charles, 95 Difference Principle, 118–​121 Dworkin, Ronald, 121

cognitive boundedness, 4, 7, 23, 31–​33, 35, 38, 60, 75, 90, 92, 99, 128 in explanation, 67–​71 and epistemology, 58, 65 in decision making, 78 cognitive excellence, 17. See also Strategic Reliabilism Cognitive Revolution, 24 conceptual analysis, 11

Epistemology, 1–​6 4, 68, 85, 101, 104, 131, 133 Mongrel, 7, 22, 32, 60–​6 4 Naturalized, 24 Normative, 7, 9–​11, 24, 58–​6 0 Standard Analytic (SAE), 5, 10, 13, 15, 17, 24, 26–​30, 41–​4 6 Traditional, 2, 9–​12, 15, 25, 30, 35, 43–​45, 47, 57–​58 163

164

Index equidynamics, principle of, 33–​34 estate tax, 108–​114, 122–​123 evidence, 2, 4–​8, 11, 15, 17, 19, 27, 35–​38, 43, 48, 54, 57, 65, 68, 77, 80, 84, 87–​88, 90, 101–​108, 123–​127, 131–​133, 142 explanation, 43, 67–​101 fluency, 78, 83, 89, 91 good explanation vs. bad explanation, 70, 73–​81 narrative coherence, 30, 91–​100 ontic View, 70, 74–​75, 80, 86, 99 self–​explanation, 71, 76, 97, 101

redistributive remedies, 121–​123 inheritance, 103, 106–​110, 113–​114 legitimacy of, 110, 117, 122 loss aversion, 123 intuition, 2–​6, 11–​19, 22–​23, 26, 29, 33–​35, 49, 52, 57–​58, 80, 89, 103, 105–​107, 115, 139

false consensus effect, 14 Feyerabend, Paul, 10 Feynman, Richard, 86 Fisher, Ronald, 5

Kahneman, Daniel, 4, 27, 40 Keegan, John, 33–​34 Kitcher, Philip, 16–​17 Kornblith, Hilary, 4 Kuhn, Thomas, 82–​83

justification, 2–​3, 7, 11–​13, 17–​18, 47, 49, 57, 59, 80 circular, 8 epistemic, 13, of inheritance, 110

Galileo, Galilei, 77 Generic Epistemic Principle, 131 Gilbert, Dan, 80–​81

Locke, John, 102 Lord Rayleigh, 1

happiness, 22, 26, 76, 90, 92, 103, 105, 114–​119, 121 Hastie, Reid, 27–​28 hindsight bias, 27, 30–​32, 63 Hobbes, Thomas, 51, 102 House Committee on Science, Space, and Technology (HCSST), 123, 126–​133 remedies for replacing and reforming, 132–​133 legislative failure of, 127 lack of technical expertise, 126, 128 lobbying influence on, 123, 127, 131–​132

McFarland, Cathy, 93 Meehl, Paul, 4–​5, 9, 38, 40 memory, 41, 68–​70, 75, 78–​79, 93 money, 30, 76, 106, 111–​119, 121, 123, 132, 139, 141–​142 diminishing marginal value on happiness, 115–​119 relationship to subjective well-​being, 116 narrative, 4, 88. See also explanation, narrative coherence Naturalism, 6–​7, 9, 24, 36, 42–​43, 67, 142 Nisbett, Richard, 4, 40 normativity, 5, 7–​11, 15, 20–​21, 24, 28, 40, 58–​6 0, 64–​65, 73, 103, 118, 143 Nozick, Robert, 102

Indexing Rule, 139–​141 inequalities, 106–​107, 121 Rawlsian justification for, 118–​119 Dworkin’s resource-​based theory, 121

164

165

Index Philosophy, 3, 5, 10, 12–​13, 16, 22, 34–​37, 40–​58, 65–​68, 102–​106 analytic, 10, 15, 17, 43, metaphilosophy, 43, 47–​49 as normative discipline, 40, 58, 65 experimental, 34, 44, 48 constructive, 46–​49, 52, 55 First Philosophy, 52 progress in, 4, 47–​50 requirements in university curriculum, 45–​4 6 of science, 5, 9–​10, physicalism, 67, 99–​100 Peirce, Charles, 85 Plantinga, Alvin, 81–​82 Popper, Karl, 5 poverty, 26, 106, 112–​114, 116–​117, 119, 121 programs to address, 112, 119, 122 Predictive Modeling, Golden Rule of, 19–​20

Salmon, Wesley, 75 Sense of Understanding, 80–​81, 85–​86, 89, 99, 101 relationship to HCSST, 124–​125 stasis requirement, 13 Statistical Prediction Rules (SPRs), 8–​9, 19–​23, 26, 28, 42, 53, 72 Stevenson, Betsy, 116 Stich, Stephen, 4 STOCK Act, 133–​141, Strategic Reliabilism, 5, 9, 12, 17–​19, 32–​33, 58, 60–​6 4 Strevens, Michael, 33–​34 Tversky, Amos, 4, 40 understanding, 68–​71, 74–​81, 128, 133. See also Sense of Understanding self, 76, 97, 101 The Virgin Suicides, 97–​98 Weinberg, Steven, 85 well-​being, 11, 23, 38, 43, 49–​50, 65, 81, 94, 96, 101, 103–​106, 117–​119, 124–​125, 142–​143. See also, money, relationship to subjective well-​being Wittman, M.P., 20 Wolfers, Justin, 116 Woolf, Virginia, 97

Quine, W. V. O., 5, 6, 24 redistribution, 107, 115–​122, 142 Rogeberg, Ole, 80 Rohrabacher, Dana, 129–​131 Ross, Michael, 93

165

16

167

168

169

170