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On the Psychological Foundations of the Skeptical Problem SHADOWS OF DOUBT: ON THE PSYCHOLOGICAL FOUNDATIONS OF THE SKEPTICAL PROBLEM by John Waterman A dissertation submitted to Johns Hopkins University in conformity with the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Baltimore, Maryland February, 2015 Abstract: Why is it that we can know so much about the world, but skeptical arguments seem so hard to resist? My dissertation offers a psychological diagnosis of the attraction of skeptical arguments. Just as vision scientists investigate illusion to better understand how perception is successful, I think that by investigating the causes of doubt we can better understand the nature of knowledge. Most contemporary accounts of the skeptical problem describe it as appealing to our ordinary intuitions about knowledge, and trace its origin to linguistic confusions. I argue that this diagnosis is mistaken on both counts. The received diagnosis assumes that skepticism is a byproduct of our ordinary epistemic practices. However, this diagnosis is overly reliant on armchair appeals to intuitions about cases by philosophers - individuals who are not ordinary epistemic agents by any means. To better understand the nature of skeptical arguments and their relation to our ordinary epistemic practices, I use the methods of the psychological sciences to empirically investigate how ordinary individuals reason about skeptical arguments, and the factors affect their evaluations. Using this empirical work as a foundation, I argue that the linguistic diagnosis of the skeptical paradox is inadequate because it does not do justice to skepticism’s intransigence: linguistic mistakes are easy to recognize, but skeptical doubts are hard to dislodge. I argue, instead, that the skeptical problem is a byproduct of a conflict between two separate components of our epistemic psychology. Specifically, I defend the idea that we deploy two different heuristic standards of evaluation towards potential beliefs. Toward favored sources, like perception and the testimony of friends, we apply the heuristic can I believe P?, and search for evidence that is consistent with P. Toward disfavored sources, like the arguments of rivals, we ask instead must I believe P?, and search for possibilities in which P might be false. These two standards, the first fallibilist and the second infallibilist, are inconsistent, and thus lead to the skeptical paradox. Dissertation Committee: Steven Gross (advisor), Michael Williams, Justin Halberda, Richard Bett, Howard Egeth ii SHADOWS OF DOUBT Acknowledgements No project like this is completed without a great deal of help, and I have many thanks to give. First, I owe an enormous debt of gratitude to Steven Gross for his support and guidance. This essay and my development as a philosopher have only been possible because of his generous insight. I also owe a special thanks to Justin Halberda for teaching me the ropes as I began to experiment with experimental philosophy. My thanks, too, to Michael Williams, whose work on skepticism inspired this project in many ways. I have also been fortunate to have met warm and fiercely intelligent friends in my time at Hopkins. Thank you to Brian Miller, Nick Tebben, Marianna Bergamaschi, and Karen Yan for all your insights and all your time. I owe a special thanks to the members of Language Lab, Derek Leben, Jeff Maynes, and Jon Hricko. You suffered through many of my half-baked ideas and still had the patience to help me improve them. Jon Hricko deserves a special thanks; I would not have started this project without his kick in the pants. I would also like to thank the administrative staff of the philosophy department for all their hard work and support. Without Alicia Burley, Leslie Bean, and Veronica Feldkircher-Reed nothing gets done, and this dissertation most certainly wouldn’t have. Many parts of this dissertation were delivered at various conferences over the last three years, and I have benefitted enormously from the insights of those audiences and from my commentators. Parts of Chapter 2 were presented at the 2012 meeting of the Southern Society for the Philosophy of Psychology, and I owe the audience there and my commentator David Rose thanks for all their input. Parts of Chapter 3 and 4 were presented at the 2013 meeting of the of the Pacific APA, the 2013 Northwestern Philosophy Conference, the 2013 meeting of the Society for Philosophy of Psychology, the 2013 Meeting of the Buffalo Experimental Philosophy Conference, the 2013 Mid-South Philosophy Conference, the 2014 Southern Society for Philosophy and Psychology, the 2014 meeting of the Central APA, and the 2014 meeting of the Society for Philosophy and Psychology. Many thanks to the audiences at those events and to Wesley Buckwalter, Joseph Schieber, Jeffrey Roland, Dan Korman, Edouard Machery, and Jonathan Weinberg for their incisive comments. iii SHADOWS OF DOUBT I owe a special thanks to Shaun Nichols and Ron Mallon for offering me an NEH fellowship at the University of Arizona to work on experimental philosophy, and for their generous support since that time. During my time in Arizona I made many friends who contributed to this project. Many thanks to Joshua Knobe, who always checks in to see how things are going, and who always has a helpful idea to offer. My thanks also to Jennifer Nagel, both for answering many questions about the psychology of knowledge attribution, and for offering an approach to philosophy I have emulated. Through my connection with Arizona I also met Joshua Alexander and Chad Gonnerman. We have now collaborated on a number of projects, and they deserve special credit for improving this project. I owe an enormous debt to my family. I have had the incredibly rare privilege of making my work something that I love. Very few people get that chance. I would never have had it without the love, support, and sacrifice of my parents and my sister. My family became larger in many ways during my time in graduate school, and so I have many thanks to give to Liz Bennett, Joanna Van Orden, Robert Knight, Margaret Chalmers, David Chalmers, John Van Orden, Jenny Van Orden and Jeff Lerman. Thank you all for everything over the years. An essay like this is made up of words but it is only made with time. Thank you to Ida, Hazel, and Noel for giving me a reason to finish. To Barb, who did the most to give me that time, as always, my love. iv SHADOWS OF DOUBT Contents 1. The Intuitive Foundations of the Skeptical Problem 1 1.1 Introduction………………………………………………….. 2 1.2 Past Attempts at Diagnosis…………………………………… 8 1.3 Empirical Diagnosis………………………………………….. 14 1.4 Psychological Foundations…………………………………… 21 1.5 A Sketch of the Argument……………………………………. 24 2. Experimental Philosophy and the Skeptical Problem 27 2.1 Introduction………………………………………………….. 28 2.2 The Method of Cases…………………………………………. 28 2.3 Intuition………………………………………………………. 31 2.4 Thought Experiments and Real Experiments…………………. 36 2.4.1 Gettier Cases………………………………………………….. 36 2.4.2 Gettier Experiments…………………………………………... 38 2.4.3 The Variation Argument………………………………………. 41 2.4.4 Experimental Control and Generality in Gettier Experiments…. 43 2.4.5 Recent Gettier Experiments…………………………………… 46 2.4.6 The Reformed General Variation Argument…………………… 49 2.4.7 Experimental Philosophy and the Skeptical Problem………….. 51 2.5 Responses to the Variation Argument…………………………. 57 2.6 Conclusion…………………………………………………….. 65 3. Contextualism and the Intuition of Conflict 67 3.1 Introduction…………………………………………………… 68 3.2 The Intuition of Conflict and Semantic Blindness…………….... 69 3.2.1 Tests For Context Sensitivity…………………………………… 71 3.2.2 Semantic Blindness…………………………………………….. 74 3.2.3 The Generality Response to Semantic Blindness……………….. 76 3.2.4 The Close Analogues and Partial Blindness Responses…………. 78 3.3 Testing the Intuition of Conflict and the Close Analogues Response 79 v SHADOWS OF DOUBT 3.3.1 Experiment 1: Empirically Describing the Intuition of Conflict… 81 3.3.2 Experiment 2: Testing the Close Analogues View………………. 87 3.4 Linguistic and Cognitive Accounts of the Intuition of Conflict….. 99 3.4.1 Dual Process Theory and Intransigence…………………………. 100 3.4.2 Heuristics, Biases, and Widespread Error……………………….. 104 3.5 Conclusion………………………………………………………. 110 4. Salience, Plausibility, and Skepticism 112 4.1 Introduction……………………………………………………... 113 4.2 Linguistic Contextualism………………………………………… 116 4.3 Testing Contextualism…………………………………………… 120 4.3.1 Null Results……………………………………………………… 120 4.3.2 Significant Results……………………………………………….. 124 4.3.3 Bad Methodology? ……………………………………………… 138 4.3.4 Experiments 1a - 1d ……………………………………………... 143 4.4 Salience and Plausibility………………………………………….. 147 4.4.1 Contextualism and Plausibility …………………………………... 150 4.4.2 Invariantism and Plausibility …………………………………….. 156 4.4.3 Plausibility and the Psychology of Law and Politics……………… 158 4.5 Testing Salience and Plausibility………………………………….. 164 4.5.1 Experiment 2a……………………………………………………. 164 4.5.2 Experiments 2b, 2c, and 2d………………………………………. 169 4.6 Repetition and Cartesian Priming………………………………… 181 4.6.1 Experiment 3a……………………………………………………. 182 4.6.2 Experiment 3b……………………………………………………. 190 4.7 Conclusion…………………………………………………….…. 195 5. The Psychological Foundations of the Skeptical Problem 208 5.1 Introduction……………………………………………………… 209 5.2 The Skeptical Problem……………………………………………. 210 5.3 Desiderata of a Diagnosis of the Skeptical Problem………………. 214 5.4 Psychological Contextualism……………………………………… 217 vi SHADOWS OF DOUBT 5.4.1 Confirmation Bias………………………………………………… 220 5.4.2 Confirmation Bias, Disconfirmation
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