Testing our Knowledge

Don't just question everything

The other day I said that we should be humble when it comes to propositional knowing, because we can never be certain. We can only have degrees of confidence. However, I don’t want the takeaway to be simply that we should be skeptical and question everything. We should, but there’s another side of this coin that I wanted to emphasize: It’s really important to consider degrees of confidence with respect to one hypothesis or another.

Take an issue like climate change. Can we, as non-scientist lay people, be certain about whether the climate is changing (warming), and whether humans bear responsibility for this? Without delving into the science itself, we cannot. But we can understand the basic arguments of both the consensus and dissenting views, and we can look for logical fallacies in their arguments. We should take pains to avoid adopting and pushing fallacious arguments ourselves. To that end, we should understand common logical fallacies and what a well-structured argument entails.

We can understand that a consensus of scientists supports the hypothesis that humans are largely responsible for global climate change, and we can understand the size of the consensus and its proportion relative to the dissenting position. 

We can look at things like institutional affiliations and credentials of the various stakeholders, but this can be thin ice. Wherever there’s an institution, there are opposing interests whose aim is to undermine it and sew distrust or confusion. An institution that studies climate change is a threat to big oil. An institution that studies obesity is a threat to corporations that sell sugary drinks.

Finally, we can introspect and understand our own biases. What do we believe is true? We can answer this by reflecting on what we want other people to understand about this issue. The stronger our beliefs, the more likely we are to cherry pick evidence and engage in fallacious dot-connecting. Why do we believe it? What convinced us? Is it evidence or simply arguments, anecdotes? Is our own reasoning sound?

We should do at least this much before adopting any kind of position ourselves.