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How to Behave Virtuously in an Irrational World How to behave virtuously in an irrational world MASSIMO PIGLIUCCI ABSTRACT WORK TYPE It is no secret that we inhabit an increasingly irrational world, plagued by Article rampant pseudoscience, science denialism, post–truths and fake news. Or perhaps, human nature being what it is, we have always lived in such a world ARTICLE HISTORY and we are now simply more keenly aware of it because of easy and Received: widespread access to social media. Moreover, the stakes are higher, as 13–April–2019 pseudoscience in the form of the anti–vax movement imperils the lives of Accepted: many, while climate change denialism literally risks a collapse of the human 10–June–2019 ecosystem. So how do we deal with the problem? How do we talk to Published Online: otherwise perfectly reasonable and functional people who nevertheless 24–November–2019 espouse all sorts of nonsense — and vote accordingly? In this paper I will explore a couple of real life conversations among many that I have had with ARTICLE LANGUAGE believers in pseudoscience, and then present and discuss virtue epistemology English as one approach to ameliorate the problem. No silver bullets are available, unfortunately, but it is our intellectual and moral duty to keep, as Carl Sagan KEYWORDS famously put it, the candle of reason lit even when surrounded by the Pseudoscience darkness of unreason. Science Denialism Aristotle’s Rhetoric Virtue Epistemology © Studia Humanitatis – Universidad de Salamanca 2020 M. Piglucci (✉) Disputatio. Philosophical Research Bulletin City University of New York, United States Vol. 9, No. 13, Jun. 2020, pp. 0-00 e-mail: [email protected] ISSN: 2254-0601 | www.disputatio.eu © The author(s) 2020. This work, published by Disputatio [www.disputatio.eu], is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons License [BY–NC–ND]. The copy, distribution and public communication of this work will be according to the copyright notice (https://disputatio.eu/info/copyright/). For inquiries and permissions, please email: (✉) [email protected]. 2 | MASSIMO PIGLIUCCI How to behave virtuously in an irrational world MASSIMO PIGLIUCCI §1. Introduction: the problem with pseudoscience is not that people are stupid HAVE BEEN ACTIVE IN THE AREA of science popularization, and in particular in public outreach about pseudoscience, since the mid I 1990s, when I started one of the first "Darwin Day" celebrations1 in response to yet another attempt by the Tennessee legislature (I was then a faculty at UT–Knoxville) to pass a law that would mandate equal teaching of evolution and creationism in public schools. As a young evolutionary biologist I initially approached the problem like most of my colleagues did, assuming that I was dealing with a bunch of country bumpkins, ignorant or stupid people, who just needed a few well presented scientific facts to see the light, so to speak, and reject their medieval nonsense. It quickly became clear that it was a bit more complicated than that. Here is what I mean, by way of a few select examples. A study conducted on upper secondary school students in Sweden (Lundstrom 2007) quantified the relationships between general science education, education about human biology, and skepticism about pseudoscientific beliefs. While the first two items, predictably, turned out to be correlated (i.e., students with higher science knowledge also had more knowledge of human biology), neither of them was statistically associated with skepticism, implying —under the assumed causal hypothesis— that more science knowledge (either general or specialistic) does not, per se, make students more skeptical. Then again, surveys in the United States consistently find an (inverse) relationship between acceptance of pseudoscientific beliefs and general level of 1 https://darwinday.org/ Disputatio 9, no. 13 (2020): pp. 00-00 HOW TO BEHAVE VIRTUOUSLY IN AN IRRATIONAL WORLD | 3 education (Goode 2002). For instance, when asked whether they agreed with the following statement: "God created human beings pretty much in their present form at one time within the last 10,000 years or so," 58% of respondents without a high school degree replied in the affirmative. But that number dropped to (a still disconcerting) 24% when respondents had some postgraduate education. Similarly, 92% of people without a high school degree say that Heaven is a real place, with the number going down a bit, but only to 73%, for people with postgraduate education. A whopping 56% of respondents with less than high school education think that the Devil sometimes possesses people, while 22% of people with more than college education think so. The same author, however, also reports that there is no consistent relationship between education and non–religious types of pseudoscientific beliefs. For instance, the percentage of people believing in UFOs is about the same regardless of whether they do not have a high school education or have carried out postgraduate studies. A different survey, also reported by Goode, found that about the same number of people with some college education believed in UFOs compared to those without high school education (51% vs 48%), with the numbers going down significantly (39%) only at the postgraduate levels. This is disturbing news: even if we assume the (largely untested) causal hypothesis that education influences belief (as distinct, for instance, from the effect of self–selection, or that of a common underlying factor), not only it is simply not a reasonable strategy to get everyone into PhD programs in order to challenge their pseudoscientific beliefs, it doesn't even work too well, as 4 people in 10 still retain them! But perhaps what is relevant in order to combat pseudoscience is not the kind of factual knowledge of science that is so often taught at both the pre– college and even college levels. Perhaps what makes a difference is a better conceptual understanding of the nature of science. A study carried out by Johnson and Pigliucci (2004) tested precisely this hypothesis, and the results were, once again, not at all encouraging. The authors found a mild (statistically significant) correlation between factual and conceptual knowledge of science (though of a modest magnitude: a pairwise Spearman's correlation of +0.27). But there was no relationship between either factual or conceptual knowledge of science and belief in a number of indicators of pseudoscience (with Spearman's correlations, respectively, of –0.18 and –0.06). Walker et al. (2002) had found similar results after conducting a study at three undergraduate universities in the United States. They measured the students' degree of science knowledge using questions from a national teachers' Disputatio 9, no. 13 (2020): pp. 00-00 4 | MASSIMO PIGLIUCCI exam. They also rated students' belief in a number of pseudoscientific claims, ranging from the ability to predict the future to the healing power of magnets. As the authors put it: We were interested in whether science test scores were correlated with paranormal beliefs. For each sample, we correlated the participant's test score with their average belief score. Across all three samples, the correlation between test scores and beliefs was non– significant. In other words, there was no relationship between the level of science knowledge and skepticism regarding paranormal claims (Walker et al. 2000). And things get worse, much worse. Kallery (2001) has investigated the attitudes of early–years teachers toward astronomy and astrology in Greece. The results indicated that an incredible 60% of the educators surveyed subscribes to astrological principles. About the same percentage (59%) viewed both astronomy and astrology as scientific, i.e. they could not distinguish between science and pseudoscience. No wonder their young students are confused, and will likely become adults that will carry such confusion into the next generation. Similarly discouraging results had been found in the Unites States by Eve and Dunn (1990), when it came to teachers' beliefs in psychic powers, astrology, and creationism. § 2. The real problem: not just logos, but ethos and pathos Aristotle, in his work on rhetoric2, pointed out what apparently a good number of contemporary scientists and science popularizers have a hard time wrapping their mind around: people, being people, are not going to be persuaded just by arguments and evidence (logos). Two additional things are needed: the speaker or writer has to establish herself as a credible, reliable source (ethos); and she has to connect emotionally to her audience (pathos), making clear why the topic at hand is of personal interest to them. When following the two specific examples discussed in the next section, the reader will easily see how arguments played the prominent role, with credibility a distant second, and emotional connection essentially non–existent. In my experience, most colleagues focus on the logic, thinking it sufficient for the task at hand. At most, they reduce the ethos to the simple rattling off of pertinent credentials ("PhD from the University of So–and–So"). And they positively disdain the pathos, thinking that going that route amounts to the 2 http://classics.mit.edu/Aristotle/rhetoric.html Disputatio 9, no. 13 (2020): pp. 00-00 HOW TO BEHAVE VIRTUOUSLY IN AN IRRATIONAL WORLD | 5 despicable practice of emotional manipulation, fit for Sunday preachers, not for serious intellectuals. Well, the joke's on them, since Sunday preachers —as well as purveyors of pseudoscience— do emphasize both the ethos and the pathos, even though, ironically, they lack in the logos. Take, for instance, antivax leader Jenny McCarthy. Her position on the safety of vaccines clearly shows that her logos is screwed up. But she presents herself to her audience as a fellow concerned mother (ethos), and of course has no trouble connecting emotionally with people who, like herself, are parents, whose primary concern is the health and safety of their young children (pathos).
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