Northwestern University scholar Sanford C. Goldberg:
Our moral codes need to acknowledge the messiness of life
Let’s imagine that you take your car, ride through the city, and go somewhere with your partner or some friends. The reason for your car ride is that you want to go from point A to point B, and that’s a social practice; right? However, Google Maps is going to generate knowledge based on that practice. From that vantage point, this is a socio-epistemic practice.
You could say that. But let me ask you this. This is a very familiar example that comes to me from the literature on the philosophy of biology. We say that the heart has a function, which is to pump blood. But surely, if you take a heart out of the human body and just put it by a door, it can be used as a doorstop. The fact that the heart can be used as a doorstop doesn’t tell you anything about the nature of the heart or its function. It’s a mere byproduct.
Similarly, even when the heart is functioning properly, it makes those beating sounds. So, you can say the heart actually produces noises. But it’s not because it produces noises that it’s persisted in the species. It persisted in the species because it pumps blood.
I think you can say very similar things about the function of social practice. There may be all sorts of things that happen in the practice that aren’t central to its function if I can put it that way.
That was a nice way of putting it. This whole project of explaining social epistemology is a political project in the broadest sense of the matter. Is that right?
Right.
So, have you been aware of the political implications of the work you are doing or were you doing it like how some do art for art’s sake or science for science’s sake?
That’s a really, really great question. I will say that the reason that I first got involved in social epistemology did not have anything to do with politics. I was beginning to think that the things that most interested me in epistemology showed me the limitations of my previous model. And I began to think of how could I expand or revise or even get rid of and replace my model with something that I found even more adequate. That was the original motivation.
But you’re absolutely right. I’ve thought more and more about these issues largely because of, I’ll be honest, the younger generation of social epistemologists, which contains many people who are superb thinkers and many of them are deeply interested in politics and the politics of our day. So, I can’t help but wonder and start thinking about the political implications of the kinds of views that I’m presenting as well. So, these days, I do think quite a bit about the political implications of these views.
That’s great because many examples are available across your works. So, let’s talk a bit about the second part of your books which deals with applications of social epistemology. Let’s start with the 7th chapter. What are the “epistemic costs of politeness” that you discuss there?
I had the great good fortune of being able to work with a colleague in China for many, many years. He and I were just talking about the cultural differences between China and the US. Obviously, one of the big ones is that there is really a heavy emphasis placed on politeness in China in ways that, at least when I was growing up in New Jersey and New York, there was much less of it. It dawned on me that there were epistemic costs to having a policy of politeness.
By epistemic costs I mean that we become less knowledgeable in a certain regard in polite societies than we are in non-polite societies. What I wanted to do with my Chinese colleague is I wanted to see whether Guiming Yang and I could articulate the theoretical basis for that idea. So, this paper tries to provide a theoretical basis for the sense in which you can be less knowledgeable in a polite society than you would be in a less polite society.
I sense that the whole chapter is, I would say, a mild criticism of political correctness as a discourse as well.
That’s really interesting. I had not thought about that dimension, which sounds very interesting. You’re right that it has implications for that. I would want to be a little bit careful here because, strictly speaking, what we argue for is the idea that if you live in a community that’s knowledgeable and its people are outspoken and willing to correct people who are wrong publicly, you’ll do better than living in a community where people are not outspoken or they’re not knowledgeable.
So, in that sense, if you live in a community where, for example, by factors like political correctness, they are inclined to keep their mouths quiet, you can lose out on the correcting that they would otherwise have done if they didn’t feel under pressure to keep their mouths shut, assuming that they’re knowledgeable in what they’re going to talk about. But you’re quite right about that. I hadn’t thought about that implication.
There is an age-old question. Let’s assume that you are happy believing in something false. Why should I dare to be impolite and take you out of your happy state, depriving you of the bliss of ignorance?
Good. In fact, you are raising an issue that I’m going to be discussing in my graduate seminar in the spring. It’s a really good question. It gets to the heart of what is the value of knowledge and how should we rank that value, with respect to other values like the value of happiness.
I tend to err on the side of knowledge, at least important knowledge. Significant knowledge should be valued greatly and should get in the way of your happiness if, for example, you have a false belief. But as I get older, I recognize that there are occasions when even I stopped short of saying, “Hey, you know what? I have to tell you this belief is false. Here’s how it would be better for you to think this way.” These are tough issues, though. So, that’s my non-answer answer to you!
This is indeed a tough issue. On the matter of politeness, there had been some really good political campaigns throughout history, which delivered justice and fairness to some extent but used some false claims to mobilize people. So, the end was actually good but not the means. Similar examples abound. What do you think of such campaigns?
Again, what you’re asking is a lovely question at the intersection of political philosophy, ethics, and epistemology. The way that I would put it is: How do we consider trade-offs? If you sacrifice trade-offs in epistemology, for example, by allowing or pushing these false beliefs, can it be justified by having good political outcomes? I would hesitate to say that the answer is never Yes. I think surely there are cases where the answer is Yes.
I’m not such a proponent of “you can never, ever, ever lie”. I think sometimes white lies are perfectly appropriate. I do get very worried, however, when we do this in our politics because I worry that lies in politics can have a corrosive effect on — what we call — the body politic. It can create cynicism. It can create a lack of trust. It can create all sorts of bad relationships between people that we in subsequent years are going to need to rely on if we’re going to have a healthy body politic.
So, my own view is that the standards are extremely high for ever using a lie in politics in order to try to get even a very, very good end. That’s a controversial view, but that’s just my view.
So, is it fair to assume that between two extremes, which are Kantian ethics and Utilitarian ethics, you are much closer to the Kantian version?
It’s funny that you asked that. You’re asking me very tough questions. I was just having a conversation with a friend of mine, who’s an ethicist. I was telling her that I don’t exactly know where my sympathies are. I will say I have some Kantian sympathies. That’s true.
But I also worry that any strict rule-based system or duty-based system that doesn’t acknowledge the messiness of life has always struck me as inadequate. I don’t want to accuse Kant of having been inadequate in that way, but I do think I see some Kantians whose views strike me as inadequate in that way. So, I couldn’t be a full-on Kantian even though I have some Kantian allegiances.
I understand that these two camps of theories are two extremes, and most people fall in between. As neither purely Kantian nor purely utilitarian, but I guess some can. Anyway, let’s go to Chapter 8, ‘Can Asserting That p Improve the Speaker’s Epistemic Position’. What did you mean by that?
So, start with the idea that if I tell you something, and you repeat it back to me having endorsed it, it seems like I can’t learn much from the fact that you just accepted what I told you. That seems pretty obvious. What I wanted to argue in this paper is that that so-called obvious truth turns out to be false. And I wanted to argue that it’s false for an interesting reason.
It tells us something interesting about, if you like, socio-epistemic communities. What it tells us is that we actually depend on people in our epistemic communities more than most people suspect. I’ve often used this example. I call it “the justification of conference-going”.
I go to a lot of conferences and feel bad because I have to leave home. When my kids were younger, it meant leaving my kids and leaving my partner. What justifies that kind of action or that kind of behavior? What I realized was it’s at conferences that I can be most confident about the standing of my own theories.
And the reason for that is this: If I go and present a paper of mine at a conference and I get lots of good feedback, all the objections seem like I can handle them. That fills me with a kind of confidence that there’s no evidence out there that I haven’t taken stock of and that I haven’t made elementary errors of reasoning without realizing it.
In a way, I’m using my community to keep me honest. And I think this is one of the great things about conferences. It’s also one of the great things about university life since we are in an institution that is set up to have all of these practices and institutions— again, I’m doing the happy side of this but not the negative side — that are designed to keep scholars and researchers honest and to make sure that they’re paying attention to all of the evidence they should be paying attention to.
So, what I tried to argue in this paper is that even when I tell you something and you repeat it back to me, I can learn something from you even there.
You are teaching at a prestigious academic institution. You’re a tenured professor, I assume. So, you’re in a position of authority. Don’t you think that some people might shy away from telling you the truth?
Absolutely yes. And I so appreciate that you keep this discussion real by focusing on the negatives. I think you’re absolutely right. I think that’s pervasive. And sometimes in some sense, I think that’s a good feature and in some other sense, I think it’s a bad feature.
Let me first say the sense in which it’s a good feature. Let’s assume that if you get a tenured job at a good university, that’s a good indication that you have a good track record in your research. That’s an idealistic assumption, but give me that for the moment. If you have a track record of success in research, that does seem to warrant greater authority being ascribed to you, when you actually talk at least within your field of expertise. That’s the reason why we trust experts, for example, more than we do non-experts. That’s the positive side of it.
The negative side is exactly what you put your finger on. I often lament the fact that once you reach a certain point in your career, it’s much less likely that you will get the kind of feedback that is most helpful. Because a lot of times, most junior scholars, in particular, will not feel entitled to tell you that you’re wrong.
TO BE CONTINUED