10 Conclusion

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Epistemology is a normative enterprise. This means, in part, that it aims

to give direction to our cognitive lives. Certain parts of psychology also

aimto give direction to our cognitive lives. Our primary goal in this book has

been to marry these normative endeavors, or better yet, to remarry these

endeavors. For much of the intellectual history of the West, from Plato to

Kant, it is not too much of an overstatement to say that psychology was a

branch of philosophy. But in the mid-nineteenth century, psychology filed

for divorce, and the divorce was finalized in Wundt’s lab. Since then, philosophy

has behaved like many a jilted lover and erected barriers between

itself and psychology. But it is psychology that has thrived. Psychology has

proven that it can offer effective reason-guiding advice without input from

philosophy; epistemology has shown no comparable talent. Nonetheless, we

have argued that both epistemology and psychologywould benefit fromcloser

collaboration. Gin is better than vermouth, but they’re still better together.

The history of science shows that humans have a tremendous capacity

to learn how to better learn about the world. We can discover and adopt

new and better ways of reasoning. In the past half-century or so, psychology

has made dramatic advances in this area. We can learn to reason

so that there are fewer violent recidivists on the streets, so that graduate

and professional schools accept higher-quality students, and so that

medical decisions are made on the basis of more accurate diagnoses of

psychiatric conditions, of cancer prognoses, and of the location and cause

of brain damage. Most Standard Analytic Epistemology proceeds as if

these sorts of empirical findings can have no effect on the outcome of

normative theorizing. This book stands as a repudiation of this assumption.

When we take these findings as the starting point of our epistemological

theorizing, we end up with a theory completely unlike the theories

of Standard Analytic Epistemology.

There is still much for a reason-guiding epistemology to do. For as

with so much in life, our knowledge of our defects far exceeds our ability

to correct them. We know, for example, that because people took a good

story to be a causally accurate story, mothers were led to feel guilty about

and responsible for their children’s autism (chapter 2, section 4.2).Weknow

that the regression fallacy has led countless parents to be overconfident

about the effectiveness of punishment in molding their children’s behavior.

We know some of the dangers of the fundamental attribution error

(i.e., the tendency to explain behavior primarily in terms of dispositional

factors, such as motives, capacities, and personality traits, and to underestimate

the causal influence of situational factors, such as whether the

subject is pressed for time or is in an uncomfortably warm room [Ross

1977]). The fundamental attribution error can lead to unfairly harsh views

of the poor, explaining poverty primarily in terms of negative personal

attributes and radically underestimating situational causes. We also know

that we commonly exhibit the regression fallacy, overconfidence and hindsight

biases, and a host of other less-than-ideal forms of reasoning. No one

can tally the needless burdens these habits of mind have inflicted upon us,

but they are likely to be substantial. We need a reason-guiding epistemology

that has something to say about these matters.

The dramatic divide between the discipline that studies reasoning (psychology)

and the discipline that is supposed to assess that reasoning (epistemology)

has harmed epistemology. But it has done psychology no good

either. Psychologists occasionally disagree, sometimes strongly, about the

normative status of some instance of reasoning. These disputes cry out for a

clear, compelling epistemological framework for thinking about such normative

issues. We think that Strategic Reliabilism is such a framework.

While we would not presume that it is the final word on the subject, it is a

subject that merits quite a few more words from philosophers. We are not

above appealing to philosophers’ prodigious sense of pride: It must be galling

to you that when people and institutions look for normative, reasonguiding

advice, they ignore epistemology and turn to psychology. If you

think you can do epistemology better than the psychologists (and you know

you do), then why not prove it in the marketplace of ideas?

The views developed and defended in this book replace the subjective

judgments of the traditional epistemologist with objectively tested material

of documented integrity. They transform epistemology from a quest for

justified belief into a demand for meaningful action. This is a deeply

interdisciplinary project, and it is in its infancy. If we are to achieve a powerful,

reason-guiding epistemology, there are a number of important

projects we have not sufficiently emphasized. Let’s briefly explore three of

these. First, and most obviously, an effective epistemology needs to continue

to discover handy new heuristics that help us reason reliably about

significant matters. To do this, however, we need a firmer grasp on significance.

This leads to a second project that is essential to a mature,

reason-guiding epistemology: We need to better identify what is involved

in human well-being. There is a wealth of literature on the conditions that

promote human welfare, and it is pretty clear already that at least some of

these conditions are so counterintuitive that they cannot be discovered by

a process of introspective philosophical analysis. This literature is far outside

most epistemologists’ comfort zones (e.g., Wilson and Gilbert 2003).

Indeed, it has thus far only received modest attention from ethicists, and

social and political philosophers, the fields most likely to draw on these

findings (but see Goldman 1993, Harman 1998, and Doris 2002). A third

project essential to the development of a prescriptive, reason-guiding

epistemology is social epistemology (see, e.g., Goldman 1999). The robust

reliability of a reasoning strategy owes much to the environment, including

the social institutions that are so important to our well-being.

There are policies, programs, and institutions that if implemented can

foster significantly improved reasoning. For example, Gary Wells has

offered a number of practical recommendations about how to make eyewitness

testimony more reliable. Among other suggestions, Wells recommends

that any lineup contain only one suspect and that lineups be

sequential, where individuals or their photographs are shown to the eyewitness

one at a time, rather than simultaneous, where all are shown to the

eyewitness at the same time (Wells et al. 1998; Wells 2001; Wells, Olson,

and Charman 2002.). What is so powerful about this kind of example is

that it shows how we can dramatically improve the reasoning of eyewitnesses

about an extraordinarily significant problem without the eyewitnesses

incurring any start-up costs. In other words, the eyewitness

doesn’t have to learn a new way to think about anything. The ameliorative

work is all done with the implementation of a new law enforcement policy,

a policy that costs almost nothing to implement.

The aim of philosophy might be self-knowledge. But there is reason to

doubt that self-knowledge can be achieved by an introspective study of our

selves. There was a time, not so long ago, that a philosopher might soberly and honestly claim that he had learned pretty much everything that there

was to know, as Descartes did in the Meditations. Philosophers could

construct their philosophical theories confident that they were informed

by the best science of the day—sometimes because they were among the

best scientists of their day. No more. We have argued that an explicitly

naturalistic approach can yield a useful, reason-guiding epistemology; and

we believe that this approach promises to make epistemology far richer

than the standard twentieth-century fare. But it also promises to make

epistemology considerably more demanding. A reason-guiding epistemology

must be a deeply interdisciplinary affair, and philosophers who want

to play a role in the development of a usefully prescriptive epistemology

will have to have a grasp of some science—of at least some economics and

psychology. Further, given how philosophy is done, philosophers will not

be the dominant figures in the development of a reason-guiding epistemology.

We are likely to be theoreticians trying to make sense of a kind of

normative engineering—we’ll be sometimes useful but seldom central.

Some philosophers might find that relinquishing our perch as Queen of

the Sciences is much too bitter a pill to swallow. In response, we would ask

for a moment’s indulgence: Imagine philosophers playing a useful, and

perhaps even essential, role in the development of a reason-guiding

epistemology that brings significant tangible benefits to people’s lives. If

this role is less central than some philosophers had dreamed, so be it. No

discipline, including philosophy, can have more noble a goal than to fully

and honestly explore and execute the charge that nature defines.

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Appendix

Objections and Replies

1. Skepticism

2. Circularity worries

3. Is Ameliorative Psychology really normative?

4. The grounds of normativity, or Plato’s Problem

5. The relative paucity of SPRs

6. Counterexamples, counterexamples

7. Reliability scores

8. Explanatory promises

9. Abuse worries

10. The generality problem

11. Strategic Reliabilism and the cannon

We address objections we expect to be leveled at our view. We identify

the objections of our imagined critic with italicized type. We won’t pretend

to have addressed all the serious objections to our view; and we won’t

pretend to have given conclusive answers to all the objections we do

consider. Our goal is to give the reader some sense of the resources

available to Strategic Reliabilism for dealing with some important issues,

many of which articulate longstanding epistemological concerns.