Changing Minds With Style∗
Carolina Flores April 2021
Abstract People often respond to evidence in ways we don’t anticipate. This causes trouble for understanding those who respond to evidence in ways that differ from our own and for our ability to rationally engage with them. I argue that we can address these problems by seeing others’ ways of interacting with evidence in terms of epistemic style. I offer an analysis of epistemic styles as ways of respond- ing to evidence which express epistemic character, that is, a recognizable way of being an epistemic agent. I argue that we have reason to think that people take up epistemic styles in robust, though context-dependent, ways. This allows us to use models of others’ epistemic styles to predict their responses to evidence in relevant contexts, enabling us to select evidence that they are likely to find persuasive. More importantly, sensitivity to epistemic styles gives us a way of understanding those whose epistemic behavior is at odds with our own, instead of seeing their behavior as the result of irredeemable irrationality.
1 Introduction
People interact with evidence in a wide range of ways. For example, evidence that persuaded you might leave others cold, or make them retrench. What to one person obviously indicates nefarious intentions, to another suggests bumbling incompetence. Where one person briskly rules out alternative explanations, another keeps them live, refusing to make up their mind. This variation in way of interacting with evidence compromises our ability toun- derstand one another, often leading us to think that others’ responses to evidence respond are due to deep irrationality. And it poses an under-noticed problem for at- tempts at rational persuasion. How are we to select evidence, and more generally, carve out a strategy of persuasion, without knowing how our interlocutors will inter- act with evidence? And how can we come to acquire this knowledge in the face of the diversity of responses we encounter? Troublingly, such problems for understanding
∗Acknowledgements: Thanks to Laura Callahan, Elisabeth Camp, Danny Forman, Alex Guerrero, Tyler John, Kelsey Laity D’Agostino, Ting-An Li, Matt McGrath, James McIntyre, Thi Nguyen, Jill North, Dee Payton, Susanna Schellenberg, Ernest Sosa, Caroline Von Klemperer, Christopher Willard-Kyle, and Elise Woodard for helpful comments on previous drafts. Thanks also to participants in the Rutgers Aesthetics Graduate Seminar for helpful discussion.
1 and rational persuasion compromise our ability to rationally deliberate, and therefore constitude a threat to central democratic practices. To address these problems, I introduce the notion of epistemic style. I analyze epis- temic styles as ways of interacting with evidence that express an epistemic character, that is, a distinctive way of being an epistemic agent. Though the notion of epis- temic style has remained under-theorized, the phenomenon is familiar: think here of the charge that American politics has come to be dominated by the “ paranoid style,” which expresses “heated exaggeration, suspiciousness, and conspiratorial fan- tasy” (Hofstadter 2012), of the distinctive ways in which analytic philosophers tend to reason, or of the rigidity of thought of which we accuse bureaucrats (Graeber 2012). I do not take these examples to be curious peculiarities. To the contrary, people take up epistemic styles in stable and predictable ways, tracking facts about social context, their goals, and their affective state, among other factors. This relative stabil- ity enables us to model others’ epistemic styles in a context, and to use such models to select effective strategies for persuasion. Perhaps more importantly, sensitivity to epistemic style furthers our understanding of others. The plan for the paper is as follows. In§2, I articulate difficulties for understand- ing and rational persuasion raised by the multiplicity of ways in which people interact with evidence, and suggest that they constitute a serious social and political problem. In §3, I develop my analysis of epistemic styles. In §4, I argue that people take up epistemic styles with enough stability to enable observers to construct adequate mod- els of others’ epistemic style. In §5, I argue that, equipped with such models, we can come to understand others’ responses to evidence and select more effective strategies of persuasion, addressing the difficulties canvassed in§2. I respond to ethical worries about sensitivity to epistemic styles in §6.
2 The Messy Reality of Interactions with Evidence
There is a wide range of different ways in which one may respond to evidence.Dif- ferent people—and even one person when placed in different contexts—can and do respond to evidence different ways. This occurs even when people share the sameset of doxastic attitudes. For one, we find variation in what evidence agents find compelling. For example, some people are unlikely to change their mind based on first-hand testimony, but find statistical surveys highly persuasive, whereas others are resistant to statistical evidence, taking it to occlude crucial fine-grained aspects of human experience.¹ People also vary in what inferences they draw from the evidence. This can be due to finding different hypotheses salient (Nelson 2010). For example, noticing a child’s manual dexterity might lead their art teacher to infer that they could become a painter, while their ambitious parents infer that they would make a highly-paid sur- geon. Similarly, theoretical values—roughly, what features one takes to make for good
1. This variation can also come in degrees: some people might find statistical evidence convincing, butonly to a low extent, while for a different agent this is extremely weighty evidence. Thanks to Caroline Von Klemperer for pointing this out.
2 explanations for observations—affect what one infers from evidence (Kuhn 1977, Dou- ven 2009, Willard-Kyle 2017).² The Quinean with a preference for desert landscapes will opt for a theory with few postulates, whereas the maximalist will prefer a more complex theory that fits more data. As a result, they will come to different beliefs based on the same evidence. Such values and interests affect what one does with the evidence one receives more generally. Sometimes, we make up our minds impulsively, jumping to conclu- sions immediately. Other times, we cautiously consider many alternative hypotheses, and keep them all on the table until decisive evidence comes in. Sometimes we are comfortable with uncertainty, and able to hold in mind considerations pointing in dif- ferent directions; other times, uncertainty feels intolerable. Sometimes we carefully think through the implications of evidence we receive. Other times, we make only the most obvious adjustments in the light of evidence. All of these factors end up affecting what conclusions we draw. Further, people set their evidential thresholds—their thresholds for how much (compelling) evidence it takes to change their mind—in a wide range of different ways. For example, grit in pursuing one’s goals is often aided by resistance to evidence that points to low probability of success, mediated by high evidential thresholds for chang- ing beliefs about one’s chances of succeeding (Paul and Morton 2018). Defeatists do the opposite, taking even the smallest setback to show that they are doomed. Evi- dential thresholds can also vary globally. Some adopt a suspicious, skeptical attitude across the board and require a lot of evidence to update any of their views. At the other extreme, one may adopt a starry-eyed, omnivorous mindset and let one’s mind fluctuate with any evidence that comes one’s way. I do not mean to suggest that all these ways of interacting with evidence are ra- tional, or epistemically permissible. I am merely noting that we do, as a matter of fact, find such variation in how people interact with evidence. Plausibly, not allways of interacting with evidence are rational. It is fairly uncontroversial that some epis- temic thresholds, weightings of theoretical values, and so on result in epistemically impermissible responses to evidence.³ Beyond that, there is substantive disagreement. Proponents of uniqueness hold that, given a body of beliefs and evidence, there is precisely one rationally permissible response (White 2013, Dogramaci and Horowitz 2016, Schultheis 2018). Permissivists think that there is at least sometimes more than one permissible response, and differ as to how varied they take epistemically permissible responses to be (Douven 2009, Kelly 2013, Willard-Kyle 2017, Callahan forthcoming). Again, I am neutral on this debate: my focus here is on the descriptive claim that people respond in different ways, not on the rationality of those responses. The consequences of this diversity are far-reaching. Encountering a person who interacts with evidence in ways that are very different from your own can be a deeply disconcerting experience. Such responses can appear unintelligible. Why would someone respond in a way that is so different from our own? What could they possi-
2. Such theoretical values are not necessarily, or typically, consciously articulated. 3. Though not entirely uncontroversial: James (1979) argues that such settings are part of one’s passional life, and beyond rational assessment. One might then additionally think that the results of any such settings are epistemically permissible.
3 bly be thinking? This generates a sense of distance and alienation, and can easily lead to thinking that it is just not worth engaging with them. More specifically, finding others’ responses to evidence unintelligible easily leads to thinking they are deeply irrational—not merely that they responded to some evi- dence irrationally. Grimm (2019) labels this tendency to infer deep irrationality “judg- mentalism.” On judgmentalist views, others’ responses to evidence, where they differ from our own, are the result of their inability to reason well. From our vantage point, others appear not just to be responding irrationally (which they may or may no be), but to be irredeemably irrational. These differences also pose a problem for rational persuasion, that is, forgetting others to rationally change their minds in response to evidence. The problem is one of evidence-selection. How do you select evidence that will persuade your interlocutor? Do you offer them institutionally-sanctioned evidence, or do you steer clear fromit? Do you prepare for them to respond by elaborating a recherche view of the world, or for efforts to stick to a straightforward picture of reality? Do you expect askeptical mindset or ease of acceptance? Without answers to such questions, the task seems hopeless. It is hard to productively engage if one’s points keep falling flat, and if the points others make in return seem weak or irrelevant. Understanding, rational persuasion, and rational engagement more generally are socially and politically vital. Lack of understanding can lead to social estrangement and hostility to those we don’t understand. Further, as mentioned, it can lead to judg- ing others to be deeply irrational. In turn, this tends to reduce how much we engage, leading to a vicious loop where the prospects for mutual understanding continually thin down, and where mutual alienation and distrust continually poison the social waters. As political scientist Michael Morrell, without such understanding,
it is highly unlikely that citizens will demonstrate the toleration, mutual respect, reciprocity, and openness toward others vital for deliberative democracy to fulfil its promise of equal consideration that is central to giving collective decisions their legitimacy. (Morrell 2010, 114–5)
Further, in the absence of such understanding, the likelihood that we will persuade others remains low. And persuasion can be of deep political and social importance. Getting others to abandon racist or sexist beliefs, or to come to correct factual beliefs about topics such as vaccine safety, climate change, or the effects of harmful policies and legislation, is important, especially given how it can interpersonal interactions and political positions. Without a realistic shot at rational persuasion on such topics, we lose an important lever for improving the social world.⁴ All of this leaves little space for productive joint deliberation, that is, for collec- tively discussing important issues faced by the community and deciding on how to
4. Perhaps we can, in some of these cases, change people’s minds through propagandistic, non-rational means; see, for example, Stanley (2015)’s discussion of civic rhetoric. However, one might have concerns about the ethics of non-rational persuasion. At a political level one might think that democratic decision- making is incompatible with citizens being “swayed by intimidation or flattery” (Rousseau 2018). Further, it is not clear that non-rational persuasion on its own is particularly effective. In my view, which I cannot defend here, propaganda can help shape up non-cognitive aspects of people’s minds in a way that facilitates changes in belief; but such changes ultimately still require providing evidence. See [redacted].
4 address them. Such deliberation is indispensable to democracy. Indeed, according to the deliberative democracy tradition (Dryzek 2002, Estlund 2009, Landemore 2017), it is to the cornerstone of democracy. The messy reality of human interactions with evidence therefore threatens to compromise the prospects for real democracy.⁵ Fortunately, we can address these challenges. A new conceptual resource— epistemic styles—will help.
3 Epistemic Styles
Styles writ large are ways of doing things: of dressing, talking, writing, and so on. But they are not just any ways of doing things: they express character, ways of being an agent. Drawing on this general notion, I will introduce the notion of epistemic style. Epistemic styles, then, are ways of doing one specific human activity—responding to evidence—which express epistemic character. It is intuitive that there are such styles. Consider, again, the paranoid style, a way of responding to evidence that reveals suspicion, a tendency to exaggerate, and a preference for conspiracy theories; or the bureaucratic style, a way of responding to evidence that expresses a skeptical, detail-oriented attitude and high trust in authority. Yet this notion has not been explicitly developed or theorized. In this section, I will draw on existing theories of style writ large to articulate this intuitive notion into an account of epistemic style.
3.1 Style: an overview The notion of style has its primary home in aesthetics.⁶ In one common use of the term, a style is a unified way of doing things: of dressing, gesturing, speaking, moving, and so on. Some styles are (aesthetically) good, others are not.⁷ Style shows up across a wide range of activities and domains of life. A flamboyant style can show up in flashy, glittery outfits, in pronounced facial expressions, and in throwing exuberant parties. At the same time, style is manifested in different ways across activities and domains. A flamboyant style will result in different outfits at a dance party and for apicnic,at least if the person inhabiting the style is sensitive to social norms. When we talk of someone having a style, we mean that they do a number of things consistently, that is, in the same way. As Arthur Danto notes, the notion of consistency at play here is not “formal” consistency: It is the consistency rather of the sort we invoke when we say that a rug does not fit with the other furnishings of the room, or a dish does notfit with the structure of a meal, or a man does not fit with his own crowd (Danto 1981, 207). 5. See Hannon 2020 for discussion of psychological challenges to deliberative democracy and psychological challenges related to the one I address here. 6. For classic discussions, see Sontag 1966, Danto 1981, Baxandall 1985, Robinson 1985, Wollheim 1987. 7. I am here employing the descriptive notion of style, on which a style need not be an achievement. As Riggle (2015) notes, there is also an evaluative notion of style on which style is an achievement, and something that not everyone has. It is in this sense that some people are stylish and some people are not.
5 We cannot describe a style in a purely formal way, by listing abstract rules for com- bining different constituents (e.g. different items of clothing). Instead, the orthodox view is that what unifies ways of doing different things into a single style is thatthey all express (aspects of) the same character (Robinson 1985, Wollheim 1987). I am here thinking of character in thin sense. Any coherent psychological profile counts as a character. A full account of the unity of style would require an account of the unity of character, that is, an account of what makes different psychological traits and dispositions fit together into a coherent whole. Offering such an accountis beyond the scope of this paper. The value of appealing to character lies in the fact that we have a better intuitive grasp of what psychological traits fit together than ofwhat surface behaviors fit together. Indeed, to the extent that we can tell which behaviors fit together, it is in virtue of seeing them as expressing the same psychological traits. This reflect the fact that, in general, we understand others by understanding their mental lives: as McGeer (2007), we are “inveterate mentalizers” (McGeer 2007, 137) who find it natural to understand all sorts of behavior in psychological terms. Expression is a matter of showing or making manifest (Green 2016). Because one cannot show a trait that one does not have, expressing a psychological trait requires having that trait. Expression can but need not be deliberate: blushing, crying, or laughing at a funny joke all express emotions and are typically involuntary. Behavior that is in a certain style shows or makes manifest, deliberately or not, aspects of a coherent psychological profile that the agent inhabits at the time. This account of the unity of style explains why very different actions—dressing for a picnic or for a party, talking in a certain tone of voice, characteristic gestures—fall under the same style: they express the same character. You count a “going on in the same style” across domains insofar as your way of acting expresses the same character. And two people making different choices count as having the same style because the waysin which they do things express aspects of the same character. Importantly, a style that a person takes up need not express their character, con- ceived as a set of stable, long-standing traits.⁸ It may even turn out that, as situa- tionists about character claim, people lack such long-standing traits (Harman 1999, Doris 2002, Alfano 2013). Instead, people put on styles—like they put on outfits (and sometimes by doing so). In genuinely putting on a style, people also take up thecor- responding character, however temporarily.⁹ This echoes views of the self on which one’s identity crucially involves taking up social-setting-specific roles (Goffman 1978), ways of reasoning (Rovane 2019), or modes of agency (Nguyen 2020b).¹⁰ To reiterate, the core idea that I am taking from the aesthetics literature on style is that styles are ways of doing things that express character, recognizable ways of being an agent. Individuals can flexibly take up different ways of being, and thereby take up different styles.
8. Thanks to Elisabeth Camp and Thi Nguyen for illuminating discussion on thispoint. 9. One can also fake taking up a style, as reflected in talk of phonies, fakers, posers, and people whoare not “real Xs“ (e.g. not real punks). In my view, what is involved in such cases, is copying the surface behavior characteristic of a style without genuinely taking on the character expressed in that style. 10. If you think the self has more stability than this suggests, you can still endorse all I go on to say below; you would simply get the simplification that people take up a constant epistemic style, one which expresses their stable character.
6 3.2 Style in an epistemic key Applying these points to the epistemic domain, I suggest thinking of epistemic styles as follows:
Epistemic Style: An epistemic style is a way of responding to evidence that expresses aspects of an epistemic character—a unified set of epis- temic values, preferences, traits, and interests.
One could describe an epistemic style by stating all the input-output pairs of
11. Note that the result of such a characterization would not be a mathematical function: typically, one style is compatible with different responses to evidence. The same input evidence can result in different new beliefs (even starting from the same background belief set). 12. The Center for Applied Rationality (https://www.rationality.org/) even offers workshops, at $4,900for four and a half days. And there are a range of online manuals to this style, including Eliezer Yukowski’s Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality, and online spaces committed to this style of reasoning, such as the online forum Less Wrong (https://www.lesswrong.com/), “a community blog devoted to refining the art of rationality.” See Metz 2021 for more discussion of this community.
7 I take these to be just two examples of a much broader phenomenon. Any way of responding to evidence that expresses combinations of epistemic values, preferences, traits, and interests that delineate a coherent way of being an epistemic agent will con- stitute an epistemic style. As I mentioned in §3.1, it is beyond the scope of this paper to provide an account of the unity of character. In particular, I will not specify which combinations of epistemic preferences, traits, values, and preferences constitute epis- temic characters. This would require substantive research. Even without such an account, however, we have a pre-theoretic grasp of which epistemic/psychological profiles are feasible; and, as psychology develops, we will come to a better under- standing of the psychological limits of character. Similarly, I will not provide an account of what makes a preference, value, trait, or interest epistemic. However, we can get a grip on this notion by appeal to phenomena that have been extensively discussed in epistemology. For example, Jamesian prefer- ences for collecting true beliefs versus avoiding false beliefs (James 1979) are certainly included in epistemic character. More generally, how risk-seeking or risk-averse one is with respect to epistemic goods (Buchak 2013) is a component of epistemic charac- ter. For example, as we have seen, the paranoid style arguably involves highly valuing collecting true beliefs over avoiding false ones, or, to put it differently, being highly risk-seeking when it comes to epistemic goods. Theoretical values and how one weighs them (Douven 2009, Kelly 2013, Willard- Kyle 2017) are also components of epistemic character: for example, one’s weighing of observational adequacy vs. fit with common sense play a role. And so are one’s cogni- tive interests (Nelson 2010), and epistemic traits, in particular, epistemic virtues (Fair- weather et al. 2001, Sosa 2015) and vices (Kidd et al. 2020) (such as intellectual humility, arrogance, and open-mindedness). Importantly, as the examples above illustrate—and as has remained under-noticed in epistemology—these epistemic preferences, values, traits, and interests do not float free of one another, but can cohere or fail to cohere into epistemic characters. In addition to expressing internally unified characters, epistemic styles are nor- matively and causally connected with other aspects of human existence. Epistemic aspects of character can fit or fail to fit with non-epistemic ones, and non-epistemic traits may shape and constrain the epistemic character one takes up, as I will detail in §4.¹³ For example, one would expect a person who tends to suspicion and paranoia to manifest these traits in interacting with evidence, perhaps by frequently opting for conspiracy theories to explain data. And we would expect a cheerful optimist to set high evidential thresholds for beliefs in their own abilities and in others’ goodness, which would enable them to maintain those beliefs in the face of (some) counter- evidence.¹⁴ 13. Indeed, in some cases it is hard to trace a definite line between epistemic and non-epistemic aspects of character. For example, to what extent is suspiciousness an epistemic trait? It systematically shapes one’s responses to evidence; at the same time, it is also made manifest in one’s gait walking down the street, one’s interactions with new people, and plenty of non-epistemic behavior. 14. This is not to deny that epistemic style can and does come apart from other aspects of style: thephilo- sophical iconoclast’s approach to metaphysics might express rebellious, free-thinking originality, while her normcore, plain outfits express a bland appreciation for practicality. As my discussion in§4 will sug- gest, we have enough facility with social types and human nature to navigate the context-dependency
8 We find an even tighter connection between ways of responding to evidence and ways of inquiring more broadly: ways of gathering evidence, allocating trust, asking questions, and so on. These are often of a piece with how one responds to evidence, and it is no stretch to think that epistemic character is also expressed in such activities. In the rest of the paper, I will be especially interested in how ascribing epistemic styles helps us select evidence in persuasive ways, understand others’ perspective, and rationally engage. Before that, I want to pause and note some additional ways in which the notion of epistemic style might be of interest. First, once we have recognized epistemic styles, we can ask which epistemic style we ought to take up in a given context. Some epistemic styles are more truth-conducive than others; some express epistemic virtues, others epistemic vices; some encode a higher proportion of rational responses to evidence than others, and so on. Given such facts, which epistemic style should one take up in a given context? And, more generally, how do we assess and compare epistemic styles? I conjecture that the answer will involve context-dependent, graded assessments.¹⁵ For example, it seems plausible that different epistemic styles might be good in different contexts, and that which styles agents develop and get in the habit of taking up ought to be sensitive to the contexts in which they frequently find themselves in. Filling in the details is a project for another time.¹⁶ Second, I have here outlined only a couple of examples of epistemic styles. One could apply the general framework to compile a list of epistemic styles. This would in- volve thinking more about the limits of epistemic character, and mining information about how people interact with evidence so as to find out what are common epistemic styles in different contexts. Further, once equipped with standards for assessing epis- temic styles, one could come up with specific suggestions of styles to adopt in differ- ent contexts. More generally, such work has the potential to expand our sense of live possibilities for ways of being an epistemic agent.
of people’s character and how it is expressed, and to draw or refrain from drawing connections between the epistemic and non-epistemic. 15. Note that this is not an endorsement of permissivism about epistemic rationality. It may be that, as proponents of uniqueness hold, there is precisely one epistemically rational response to evidence given a set of beliefs. But epistemic styles are patterns of such responses, and will at least sometimes include a mix of rational and irrational responses. The question of how to assess and compare such patterns still arises even for the proponent of uniqueness. 16. See Lasonen-Aarnio forthcoming for a compelling discussion of how to assess dispositional profiles, which could be productively applied to epistemic styles. In her account, assessment is relative to a standard of success (e.g. truth) and to a value function, which assigns values to manifestations of dis- positional profiles. The score of a dispositional profile is the weighted average of its manifestations in relevant counterfactual cases, where relevance is in part contextually determined. Applying this to styles, the epistemic style one ought to adopt on a context is the one which has the highest weighted average (e.g. most often gets you at the truth) across relevant counterfactual cases—out of the epistemic styles that are feasible for agents like us. This position echoes Morton (2017)’s view of practical deliberation, according to which agents should deliberate in ways that allow them to reliably achieve their ends, given their cognitive capacities, in the contexts in which they regularly find themselves.
9 4 Epistemic Styles: Adoption and Ascription
In the last section, I developed an account of epistemic styles as ways of interacting with evidence that express an epistemic character. I will assume that there are such styles qua abstract objects. All that this requires is for there to be internally unified sets of epistemic preferences, values, traits, and interests which can be expressed in patterns of responding to evidence. But do people take up such styles? Do they do it in a fleeting way, or in somewhat stable ways across similar circumstances? In particular, is there enough stability that we can identify others’ epistemic styles and make use of that knowledge to anticipate their responses to evidence? In this section, I will argue that the answer to all three of these questions is yes.
4.1 Taking up epistemic styles Taking up an epistemic style—in a context, with respect to some of one’s beliefs—is a matter of having dispositions to respond to evidence that are in that styleinthat context, with respect to those beliefs. One can have a disposition without permanently having it: one might be disposed to respond to evidence in given ways only for a restricted time period. Having these dispositions requires two things: cognitively implementing the ab- stract functional structure (input-output pairs of
17. If one’s responses to evidence match the style’s structure but one does not inhabit the character, one does not genuinely have that style, but merely appears to. 18. Callahan (forthcoming) calls such sets of commitments epistemic frameworks. 19. That said, people who have stably similar doxastic sets are likely to share an epistemic style, otherwise their beliefs would likely end up diverging.
10 beliefs about Jeffrey Epstein’s fake suicide. And the same belief set can be accompa- nied by a range of different epistemic styles. For example, anti-vaxx beliefs are often accompanied and sustained by taking up the paranoid style. In contrast, other anti- vaxxers respond to counter-evidence to their stance on vaccines by arguing that there are costs to vaccines that mainstream medicine overlooks (for example, contributing to an over-medicalized, “unnatural” lifestyle), taking this to be the result of differing views of the good life, not of an evil conspiracy.²⁰ In sum, taking up an epistemic style in a context and with respect to some of one’s beliefs is not a matter of one’s intellectual views on how to respond to evidence; instead, it is a matter of actual cognitive implementation of dispositions to respond to evidence in that style.
4.2 The relative stability of epistemic styles I will now argue that we take up epistemic styles in robust ways. A central reason why we should expect people to take up epistemic styles with some stability has to do with our need for mutual intelligibility. Specifically, in or- der to effectively communicate with one another, we are well-served by having our responses to evidence be mutually intelligible. If our responses to evidence are not mutually intelligible, as I discussed in §2, we may fail to get our points across, and find what others are saying irrelevant or pointless. Adopting a shared epistemic style avoids these pitfalls and ensures mutual intelli- gibility. Specifically, given our natural tendency to understand others in psychologi- cal terms, adopting an epistemic style makes our behavior intelligible in terms of that character and of its psychological constituents. The fact that the style is shared makes it easier for others to achieve such understanding: it is much easier to understand oth- ers when they are like us. In other words, it is plausible to think that communities adopt specific epis- temic styles as conventions (Schelling 1980, Lewis 2008): self-reinforcing and self-maintaining equilibrium solutions to the social coordination problem of mutual intelligibility. In fact, this is just an instance of the broader point that we arrive at shared understandings, conceptual resources, and belief sets as equilibrium solutions to the problem of understanding one another (Sankaran 2020).²¹ Once such conventions are in place, individuals will tend to conform to them to ensure that they are intelligible to others. Such conformity is enforced by the fact that the costs of failing to be intelligible can be steep, including social exclusion and marginalization. This is most visible in the pathologizing treatment of neurodivergent people (e.g. people with schizophrenia) whose ways of responding to evidence differ from neurotypical ones.²²
20. See Hausman 2019 and Goldenberg 2021 for discussion. 21. Of course, none of this implies that communities or individuals in communities consciously and delib- erately come up with epistemic styles and enforce them (though that may happen in some cases). This is a game-theoretic explanation, appealing to the structure of interactions between agents, not to their psychology. 22. People with schizophrenia reveal distinctive patterns of responses to evidence, characterized by abias against disconfirming evidence (Moritz and Woodward 2006) and by a tendency to take seriously out- landish hypotheses (liberal acceptance bias, Moritz and Woodward 2004). This epistemic style facilitates
11 This is not to say that we all mechanistically end up responding to evidence in the same ways. Individuals can and do fail to conform to norms, riff off mainstream styles, adapt them to their own idiosyncrasies, and develop their own, distinctive epistemic styles. Indeed, one might especially value, admire, and seek to emulate those who reason through the evidence they get in ways that are especially insightful in a relevant domain. Further, the social world is fragmented, with different communities shaping their members’ epistemic characters in different ways. There are many solutions to theso- cial coordination problem of mutual intelligibility, many different ways of responding to evidence that express character and are intelligible in virtue of expressing character. Different communities come to different such solutions.²³ Further, once a community has agreed on a distinctive, rigid convention, abiding by that convention becomes a powerful signal of community membership. We see this play out in the real world. Let us return to the two examples I discussed in §3.2: the paranoid style and the rationalist style. Both of these are community- based epistemic styles. Communities form around the endorsement of conspiracy theories: think here of QAnon supporters, with their distinctive and isolated online spaces, or of flat-earthers, who even have an organized society.²⁴ People in such com- munities are more likely to take up the paranoid style, at least when thinking about issues relevant to the conspiracy they endorse.²⁵ In an even clearer case, the rationalist style is actively promoted and taught by the self-proclaimed rationalist community, and systematically applied in their online communities. In both cases, taking up a different epistemic style would compromise one’s membership in the relevant com- munity. Thinking about pressure toward social conformity and mutual intelligibility, and examining concrete cases, gives us reason to think that people take up epistemic styles in ways that are responsive to their context. In particular, we have reason to think that people take up epistemic styles in response to the social norms on reasoning in that context. But such social norms are not the only factor that matters to what epistemic style a person takes up. Coming up with a full theory of what factors condition the epistemic styles people take up would require substantial empirical work. My goal here is to appeal to existing discussions in psychology and epistemology, as well as intuitive judgments, to show that we have a somewhat robust grasp on what kinds of factors trigger the adoption of epistemic styles with specific features. Centrally, an individual’s goals constrains which epistemic style they take up in
the formation and maintenance of delusions. Plausibly, our difficulty in understanding how someone could reason in such ways helps explain their social exclusion. 23. This contrasts with other views of mutual intelligibility, which emphasize intelligibility among allagents with beliefs and desires (Davidson 1985). In my view, though there may be a minimal level of intelligibil- ity that holds between all folk-psychological agents, full intelligibility requires more: it requires a grasp of one another’s epistemic styles. 24. For a vivid description on QAnon community spaces, see LaFrance 2020. And you can find the Flat Earth Society at https://theflatearthsociety.org. 25. Meyer (2019) gives some evidence that those who have conspiracist beliefs are more likely to display intellectual vices characteristic of the paranoid style. More work needs to be done to study the epistemic style(s) in these communities.
12 a context. In fact, we can understand conformity to dominant epistemic styles as an instance in point: the desire to conform and be easily intelligible to others leads us to adopt the dominant epistemic style. But one’s goals go beyond social conformity. For example, one might, at an early stage in a philosophical project, take up a playful, exploratory style when hearing what others have to say about it, and later on take up an aggressively defensive epistemic style because one wants to protect one’s carefully developed view from objections at all costs. Similarly, we can understand the ways in which people respond to evidence on cherished beliefs (Stebbing 1939), or when the stakes for getting it right are high, by noticing how one’s goals constrain the epistemic style one takes up. I will take these cases in turn. As a vast body of research in social psychology establishes, when we cherish a belief—perhaps because it is central to our identity, social affiliations, or the mean- ing we find in life—we tend to be reluctant to abandon it, and engage in motivated reasoning so as to maintain it (Kunda 1990). In particular, as Dan Kahan’s extensive work on cultural cognition demonstrates, people tend to respond defensively to evi- dence that threatens their core political values or identity (Kahan 2012).²⁶ This may be understood in terms of the goals we take up when it comes to those beliefs (how- ever tacitly): when it comes to cherished beliefs, our goal is not to get at the truth, but to protect our self-esteem and motivation. Indeed, some argue that such beliefs are primarily regulated by a psychological immune system responsible for keeping us motivated (Gilbert 2006, Mandelbaum 2019). More specifically, when it comes to evidence against cherished beliefs, weadopt a resistant epistemic style: one that sets high evidential thresholds, encourages one to consider many alternative explanations, or only takes seriously a narrow range of evidence. This still leaves different styles available, so that a full explanation of how individuals respond to evidence on their cherished beliefs needs to describe the epistemic style they take up in such cases. The stakes of getting it right on a question have an analogous effect. Ifgettingit wrong on a question would carry high moral or practical costs—for example, if you are sitting an important exam—accuracy goals (Kunda 1990) come to the forefront, and we are likely to adopt a cautious epistemic style. Finally, our epistemic style is also sensitive to non-cognitive aspects of our mental lives. We respond to evidence differently when we are tired and have had a few drinks, compared to when we have slept a full night and are buzzed on caffeine. The effects of cognitive load and mood are particularly robust. People engage in motivated rea- soning less when under cognitive load (i.e. when their working memory is occupied); in other words, they are less likely to take up epistemic styles with the features above in those circumstances (Ditto et al. 1998, Valdesolo and DeSteno 2008). And a positive mood seems to make one take up a sloppier, less reflective epistemic style (Schwarz 1991). In sum, then, people robustly adopt different epistemic styles depending on factors such as social norms in their context, their goals, and non-cognitive aspects of their
26. We may also cherish a belief in a context because abandoning that belief would have high practical or moral costs, for example, when it comes to abandoning your belief that your partner is a decent person.
13 mental lives.²⁷ In other words, people have “meta-styles,” styles of adopting epistemic styles in response to specific contextual triggers. The picture that emerges—and, again, which needs further empirical study— straddles the line between character-based and situationist views of epistemic behavior. On character-based views, our interactions with evidence, barring excusing factors and neurological snafus, express who we really are as stable, diachronically coherent epistemic agents (Zagzebski 1996). Situationists (Harman 1999, Doris 2002, Alfano 2013) vociferously protest that research in social psychology indicates that responses to evidence are fully determined by trivial and irrelevant situational factors. The picture I put forward here is a fragmentationist one. Much like different setsof beliefs (fragments) might guide action in different contexts, different epistemic styles are active in different contexts.²⁸ The contextual factors to which the situationist ap- peals matter, but they matter precisely by shaping and constraining which epistemic character we inhabit.²⁹ ³⁰ If the picture in this section is along the right lines (which, again, is ultimately an empirical question), we take up epistemic styles with some stability and robust- ness. As long as you accept this claim, epistemic style ascription will be helpful in anticipating responses to evidence and in understanding others, as I will show in §5.
4.3 Ascribing epistemic styles I will now show that we are often in a position to correctly ascribe the epistemic style people take up in a context. Given that epistemic styles are repeatable and shareable, we can build a library of styles. This is a matter of drawing on experience to construct models ofepistemic character: the conspiracist, the endlessly curious, the bureaucratically-minded, and so on.³¹ For the reasons outlined in §4.2, the characters we find will tend to cluster into a few familiar types (at least, compared to all possible patterns of responses to evidence). This library of epistemic styles provides a useful cognitive shortcut to ascribing epistemic styles: pattern matching our interlocutors’ responses to evidence to epis- temic styles in our library.³² This reduces cognitive labor. Drawing on this library
27. This list is not meant to be exhaustive: as our understanding of psychology grows, so will ourgraspon what factors trigger epistemic styles of different sorts. 28. See Lewis 1982, Egan 2008 and the essays in Borgoni et al. forthcoming for more on belief fragmentation. 29. Such incidental factors can still play a role once styles are set: that of masks on epistemic styles. Because taking up a style is a matter of having certain dispositions, and dispositions can be masked(Johnston 1992, Bird 1998), adopting a style does not mean that all of one’s responses to evidence (in that context and on that topic) will be in the style. Still, against the situationist, I contend that we genuinely have the dispositions corresponding to the style, and that these play an important explanatory role in accounting for how people interact with evidence. 30. Other recent work on character and character traits emphasizes a middle way between unificationism about character and situationism. See, for example, work on the CAPS model (Mischel and Shoda 1995) and the mixed traits model (Miller 2014). 31. You might worry that constructing such a library is a morally objectionable form of stereotyping. I discuss this concern in §6. 32. This is a dynamic process, where we adjust the model we are using as we get more information about
14 is much easier and faster than having to, each time, come up from scratch with a fine-grained psychological profile for your interlocutor. There is an additional shortcut to prediction that comes from thinking interms of styles. In some cases, all of the epistemic styles compatible with the behavior you witness (or at least, all the ones that are plausible candidates for an epistemic style the person would take up) indicate similar responses in the domain at hand. For example, perhaps adopting a bureaucratic style, or the hardcore analytic philosophy style, would yield similar patterns of responses to evidence, and those are the only two styles compatible with what you know about this person in this context. In such cases, you don’t need to fully determine which epistemic style model to use to make accurate predictions.³³ Further, recall that epistemic style is connected with non-epistemic aspects of char- acter. Given such connections, we can draw on non-epistemic aspects of behavior to sketch out our interlocutor’s overall character, and, based on that sketch, ascribe an epistemic style. You might note someone’s appreciation for rules and detail-oriented personality and infer that they tend to interact with evidence in a fairly bureaucratic style; or note their mischievous personality and ascribe a playful style.³⁴ ³⁵ At a deeper level, note that, without appealing to epistemic styles, it is unclear what responses to novel evidence, or to evidence bearing on beliefs that a person has not considered before, we should expect given the agent’s past responses to evidence. Epistemic styles allow us to address the question of what counts as going on in the same way when responding to evidence. Going on in the same way is responding in ways that manifest a unified epistemic character. Without appealing to styles and character, however tacitly, it is at best unclear how we would even use the agent’s past responses to evidence to predict new ones.
5 Putting Epistemic Style Ascriptions to Work
In this section, I will show that having a grasp of the epistemic style one’s interlocu- tor takes up enables understanding and facilitates rational persuasion, addressing the challenges discussed in §2.
5.1 Understanding Understanding others is a matter of grasping the other’s perspective on the world, of “seeing her experience as she sees it” (Debes 2018, 64). As we saw in §4, inhabiting an
our interlocutor, perhaps also adding new epistemic style models to one’s library. 33. Lasonen-Aarnio (forthcoming) makes this point when discussing the feasible dispositions compatible with a specific action. 34. These are toy examples; a lot more would need to be said to securely bridge such broad personality traits to epistemic traits. 35. These points—appeal to a library of styles and connections with non-epistemic behavior—make ascribing epistemic styles much easier than figuring out values for isolated epistemic parameters, e.g. separately figuring out how epistemically risk-averse a person is, whether they are open or close-minded, andso on. Doing so would deprive us of the information we get from non-epistemic behavior, and it would not allow us to make the kinds of cross-parameter inferences that we can make once we have epistemic styles in mind. Thanks to Matt McGrath for pressing me to clarify this.
15 epistemic style involves being disposed to respond to evidence in certain ways. Such dispositions reflect a distinctive way of seeing one’s experience; as such, theyarea component of the perspective one takes up on the world.³⁶ For this reason, grasping a person’s epistemic style in a context yields a partial grasp on their perspective, and therefore constitutes (partial) understanding of the other. More specifically, we come to understand the other qua epistemic agent, one who (in that context, on that topic) lives by certain epistemic values. We cannot come to understand others in this way merely by getting at isolated epistemic parameter settings, for example, by determining how averse they areto acquiring false beliefs. Understanding a person is holistic. As Iris Murdoch puts it,
When we apprehend other people we do not consider only their solutions to specifiable practical problems, we consider something elusive which may be called their total vision of life… in short, the configurations of their thought which show continually in their reactions and conversation. (Murdoch 1956, 39)
Grasping these configurations of thought in the epistemic case requires the broad sense of a person’s epistemic character that comes with knowing their epistemic style; knowing how they have set specific epistemic parameters is not enough. This holistic understanding of the agent enables us to look at specific responses to evidence in a more charitable way than we might otherwise. Seeing a response to evidence as part of an epistemic style involves seeing it as expressing a coherent way of being an epistemic agent, and as making sense in light of that way of being an epistemic agent. This mitigates the judgmentalist tendency to assume that our interlocutor responds as they do due to deep irrationality. The significance of seeing a response as part of an epistemic style is thatoneno longer sees it as the result of the inability to reason well, but as the result of setting a range of epistemic parameters in ways that, given the evidence at play, leads to a spe- cific response. This does not mean that sensitivity to style makes us see allresponses to evidence as epistemically permissible. Epistemic styles can include epistemically impermissible responses. Plausibly, this is true even for good epistemic styles: an epistemic style might be good because it mostly results in good responses to evidence in relevant contexts, but nonetheless include some irrational responses. The kind of understanding I have discussed so far is distanced and third-personal: it involves making sense of others’ responses to evidence intellectually, by seeing how they express a certain character. But we can also simulate others’ epistemic styles (Goldman 2006): we can imagine having certain epistemic values, preferences, traits, and interests, and simulate how we would respond to evidence.³⁷ This fosters empathetic understanding and closeness with our interlocutor (Maibom 2007).³⁸
36. This fits with my preferred account of perspectives in the literature: Camp (forthcoming)’s view of per- spectives as open-ended dispositions to notice certain kinds of information, to respond to it in certain ways, and to evaluate the world along certain lines. 37. Godfrey-Smith (2005) argues that modeling mental states can be done both in a theoretical way and through simulation. My discussion here applies that suggestion to models of epistemic styles. 38. Thanks to James McIntyre for discussion.
16 As Hannon (2020) has compellingly articulated, empathetic understanding has many benefits, including reducing disdain for others and helping resolve deep con- flicts. Perspective-taking and empathy (which, I have argued, are fostered by sensitiv- ity to epistemic style) have been shown to decrease biases and polarization, increasing the likelihood of positive evaluations of out-group members.³⁹ These benefits are particularly significant in political contexts. Political delibera- tion requires tolerance, mutual respect, and openness towards others. Unfortunately, in recent years, many Western democracies (especially the US) have witnessed grow- ing rifts in political views. Perhaps most worryingly, we have witnessed growing affective polarization, with partisans increasingly disliking and mistrusting thoseon the other side of the political spectrum (Doherty et al. 2019). Empathetic understand- ing can function as an antidote to such dangerous polarization, and thereby enable people to have better conversations and reap the benefits of collective deliberation. Further, feeling understood on an empathetic level inclines us to trust our inter- locutors more. Trust, in turn, leads people to take the evidence offered more seri- ously, and to continue to engage. Increased trust can be a powerful tool to help oth- ers leave echo chambers, by getting them to start trusting those who voice disagree- ment (Nguyen 2020a). In particular, increased trust helps avoid evidential pre-emption (Begby forthcoming), i.e. belief confirmation in the face of counter-evidence offered by someone taken to be untrustworthy. Finally, simulating an epistemic style has benefits for the simulator. It fosters human connection—which, at least for those with a non-solipsist temperament, is in- trinsically valuable. Further, simulation involves temporarily taking up an alternative way of being an epistemic agent. This can teach us to appreciate a wider range ofways of engaging with the world. We might even end up adding new epistemic styles to our own repertoire. In this way, the usually cautious person might learn to adopt a more playful epistemic style, and employ it in helpful ways when in a group of cautious inquirers, or vice-versa.⁴⁰
5.2 Evidence-selection Correctly ascribing an epistemic style also helps us select evidence that our interlocu- tors will find persuasive. Once you know someone’s epistemic style in a context and with respect to some set of beliefs, you know what inferences they are likely to draw from evidence, which evidence will appear strong to them, and how much evidence it will take to change their minds (in that context and on that topic).⁴¹ Equipped with such knowledge, you will be in a position to make good predictions about how they are likely to respond to a range of relevant evidence. This in turn enables you to select evidence that they will find persuasive, to figure out how much evidence you haveto
39. See Morrell 2010 for an overview. 40. Such simulation also comes with risks: empathetically understanding the conspiracist might result in be- ing caught in vicious conspiracist thinking oneself. For more on the benefits and perils of such cognitive flexibility, see Nguyen 2020b and Camp forthcoming. 41. Note that different ways of responding to the same evidence may be in the same epistemic style, sothat knowledge of epistemic style does not always allow you to make a singular prediction for how they will respond to evidence. But it will substantially narrow down the range of responses.
17 offer, and to anticipate and pre-empt objections to your arguments that, given their epistemic style, are likely to arise. For example, suppose you are struggling to persuade your uncle that climate change is real, despite offering what seems to you conclusive evidence. You come to the view that his epistemic style (in this context, when it comes to this topic) is the paranoid style. Given this epistemic style, you would expect him to find conspir- atorial explanations highly salient, to strongly prefer evidence from more informal sources than from the mainstream media, and to have a high evidential threshold for changing his mind on climate change. Armed with this knowledge, you can select more persuasive evidence to offer him, anticipate alternative explanations for that evidence, and persevere in a way that is sensitive to his high epistemic threshold. Our position is even better if we know the person’s meta-style (that is, what epis- temic styles they are disposed to take up in different contexts) and can detect relevant shifts in context. In particular, suppose you have a good sense of what your interlocu- tor’s central beliefs are, and you know the epistemic style they tend to adopt when it comes to their central beliefs. In that position, you can tailor the central claim you are trying to get them to accept so as to avoid incurring commitments that contradict their central beliefs, and hence avoid triggering a defensive epistemic style. You might, for example, only argue for vegetarianism instead of veganism even if you have strong reasons for both views, so as to keep them engaging in a friendly epistemic style.⁴² Equipped with knowledge of the person’s meta-style and sensitivity to contextual changes, we may also decide to pass on seriously engaging with a person in a given context. Sometimes, the best strategy is to wait until one’s interlocutor is in a context where they will take up a more receptive style. For example, you might be better off trying to change your climate-denier uncle’s mind while having a friendly catch-up at a bar than by provoking a heated discussion at a family reunion. I have been talking of knowing our interlocutor’s epistemic style. In fact, it is often enough for evidence-selection to adequately model one’s interlocutor’s epistemic style, where an adequate model may diverge from their actual style.⁴³ Further, we can model a subject’s epistemic style without any commitment to the subject inhabiting the corresponding epistemic character. We do not have to com- mit to their genuinely having that style as opposing to merely matching responses to evidence in the scope of the model. For example, you might not actually form any views on whether your climate-denier uncle genuinely thinks like a conspiracist: you might only be interested in changing his mind about climate change, and find it help- ful to note that his responses in this domain are well-predicted by a paranoid style model.This will be enough to help you select evidence that he will find compelling, and articulate an effective strategy for persuasion more generally.
42. Thanks to Chris Willard-Kyle for highlighting this point. 43. Whether a model is adequate is a function of one’s practical interests in employing that model. We can use a model with relatively narrow scope, to only cover some of the person’s responses to evidence in a context. And we can set our fidelity criteria in a range of different ways, counting a model as adequate even if it makes a number of wrong predictions—as long as it makes enough correct ones for our practical purposes in using that model. See Weisberg (2012) for discussion of the use of models, and for discussions of scope and fidelity criteria in particular.
18 6 The Ethics of Sensitivity to Epistemic Styles
Having outlined important advantages of sensitivity to epistemic styles, I will now dis- cuss two ethical concerns it raises. The first worry is that such sensitivity results in manipulative interactions. The second worry is that it involves objectionably stereo- typing others. I will argue that these concerns do not impugn sensitivity to epistemic styles writ large. but need to be taken into account to constrain how we use such awareness. Epistemic style models are tools. Much like any other tool, they can be deployed in morally objectionable—but also morally virtuous—ways.
6.1 The manipulation worry The first worry is that sensitivity to epistemic style enables manipulation. Itamounts to using information about a person’s character so as to make use of their weak points, selectively presenting information to get the change of mind that we want. This, the objector claims, is objectionably manipulative. As such, much like propaganda, it is not a tool that is in general suitable to rational engagement in democratic contexts. To respond to this worry, it is helpful to notice that sensitivity to epistemic styles can be used to rationally persuade others, specifically, to offer them genuinely relevant evidence on the topic under discussion to which the person on the receiving end responds by rationally updating. In such cases, the subject who receives the evidence employs their rational capacities. If, as the Kantian holds, manipulation constitutes in bypassing the agent’s rational will, then such instances of style-sensitive persuasion are not manipulative.⁴⁴ In fact, being sensitive to others’ styles might sometimes be required to avoid ending up manipulating others. Specifically, not being sensitive to others’ epistemic style can end up resulting in “rational propaganda” (Jacques 1965), i.e. in presenting relevant evidence that your audience cannot metabolize, and therefore just accepts on the smokescreen of technical language and authority, without employing their rational capacities. Further, selecting evidence in ways that are sensitive to others’ epistemic style can be a form recognition respect (Darwall 2006), of acknowledging and taking into account others’ mental lives. The alternative we standardly go for—offering whatever evidence seems most persuasive to us—can be a way of arrogantly insisting on the primacy of our own perspective. It can involve myopically failing to recognize that our perspective is just one among many, and narcissistically taking others to be mere mirrors to our own epistemic agency. Perhaps the clearest way to see why sensitivity to epistemic style is often respect- ful is to take up the point of view of someone receiving evidence from an interlocutor who is sensitive to their epistemic style. For example, if a libertarian wanted to persuade me that taxes on New York city millionaires should be kept low, I would have no objection to being spared evidence coming from Fox News or the National Review, or to their being ready to address
44. This is not the only conception of manipulation in the literature: others tie manipulation to deceptionor to pressure (Noggle 2020). I will briefly discuss pressure and deception, in the form of hiding evidence, below.
19 my objections to their arguments. Similarly, I would not find it objectionable if they decided, given the more resistant epistemic style I am likely to adopt if asked to con- sider significantly lowering taxes for millionaires, to focus on discussing not increas- ing taxes. In fact, I would take such an interaction to be much more valuable than a style-insensitive one: I would be much more likely to learn something about the world, and much more likely to come to understand them better. This said, sensitivity to epistemic style can be deployed in manipulative ways.For example, it can be used to discover what evidence is likely to lead our interlocutor away from our preferred view, and to then hide such evidence. This seems objection- ably deceptive. More generally, rational persuasion—style-sensitive or not—can be objectionably paternalistic: it can be guided by distrust in others’ capacities to think for themselves, and it may intrude in their deliberation in ways that disrespect their agency (Tsai 2014). And it can be used to discourage others’ rationality going forward: to close off options that should be considered, cultivate confusion, and promote the acceptance of unexamined beliefs. Further, one can rationally persuade others of false or morally or politically toxic views. position, To the extent that style-sensitivity facilitates rational persuasion, it can also be used to further any of these nefarious ends.
6.2 The sinister typing worry Another worry for sensitivity to epistemic styles comes from the fact that such sen- sitivity often involves typing others as having a certain (epistemic) character: as just a conspiracist, a stubborn old woman, a Fox News viewer, a Millennial social justice warrior, an angry Black woman.⁴⁵ I take this concern to subsume two worries. The first is that typing members of oppressed social groups on the basis of membership in such groups is problematic (Gendler 2011, Bolinger 2020). The second is that, in gen- eral, typing people seems to involve seeing them as mere tokens of a type, as lacking freedom or individuality (Blum 2004). In response to the first worry, there may be constraints on using certain kinds of demographic information in our interactions with others. Perhaps it is morally impermissible to make generalizations about oppressed social groups. This line has been explored at length in the literature on stereotyping and moral encroachment on belief, with some arguing that forming such beliefs constitutes doxastic wronging (Basu 2019, Schroeder 2018), incurs substantial psychological harms (Moss 2018), or contributes to harmful loss of opportunity for members of those groups (Bolinger 2020). At the very least, given these risks, one needs to form epistemic style models based on such demographic information with great care. Second, concerns about the way in which typing denies individuality may be over- stated (Beeghly 2018). Using such information does not imply seeing a person exclu- sively and deterministically in the light of the epistemic style we ascribe. Indeed, as discussed, it does not even require committing to their having the corresponding epistemic character. One can use epistemic style models to make predictions while recognizing that such models yield only probabilistic predictions that others can buck,
45. Thanks to Laura Callahan and Elise Woodard for raising this concern.
20 and while thinking of others as full, distinctive, agents.⁴⁶ More strongly, recognizing the role of social identities and affiliations can be an important part of recognizing people for who they are as socially embedded and socially molded agents. Going further, ascribing an epistemic style can be a matter of seeing others as highly distinctive agents. It need not involve classifying a person as sharing a style with a broader social group. Recognizing a person’s epistemic style can involve fine- grained knowledge of what they are like, and the ways in which they differ from others. For example, a model of an admired intellectual mentor’s epistemic style may not involve stereotyping, but taking their mental life as valuable for its distinctiveness. Finally, even if using an epistemic style model involves an attenuated sense of the other’s individuality, such a cost may be outweighed by the important benefits of constructing and employing an adequate epistemic style model. For example, a Black person talking with a white person about race and racism might benefit from expecting them to take up a defensive epistemic style, and from knowing which spe- cific epistemic style in that family they will adopt. This knowledge can beprotective in carving out conversational moves, and make it more likely that their interlocutor will learn something. Given that white people are not an oppressed group, and the important benefits of sensitivity to style, this kind of use of epistemic style models seems morally permissible. Again, the moral permissibility of some such uses does not imply that all uses are permissible. I have drawn on existing literature on stereotyping to constrain the use of epistemic style models, and to suggest that they can be a morally neutral or positive tool in some circumstances. Fully addressing worries about stereotyping in general would take multiple papers.
7 Conclusion
It is often difficult to understand and anticipate others’ responses to the evidencewe offer, and to offer evidence that they find persuasive. This encourages pessimism about using evidence to change others’ minds. Such pessimism can be assuaged by noticing that interactions with evidence are typically mediated by epistemic styles. Epistemic styles are unified, shareable ways of responding to evidence which express epistemic character, and which individuals take up in robust ways. By identifying our interlocutor’s epistemic style when inter- acting with them, we can anticipate their responses to evidence and therefore select evidence that is likely to rationally persuade them. Perhaps more importantly, sensi- tivity to epistemic styles fosters understanding of a range of alternative ways of being an epistemic agent.
46. That said, given our well-documented tendency to essentialize (Gelman et al. 2003), it might be psycho- logically very difficult to avoid such commitments.
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