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Civility, Testimonial Injustice, and Commitment to Philosophy

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The American people are extremely politically polarized. Polling shows that this divide is only increasing, particularly on issues of race and gender. Recent revelations that have come out as a result of whistleblowing about the practices of Facebook confirm what many of us probably already expected based on our own personal experiences — social media makes these chasms even wider by contributing to the spread of false information and creating echo chambers for groups of like-minded extremists to speak to one another at the exclusion of any dissenting voices or disconfirming evidence.

The state of politics today has many people longing for an imaginary past in which those who disagreed did so respectfully. In this utopia, we focus exclusively on the merits of arguments (the good kind) rather than simply attacking people. We recognize that dissent is healthy, and we appreciate the insight of John Stuart Mill in On Liberty when he said,

the peculiar evil of silencing the expression of an opinion is, that it is robbing the human race; posterity as well as the existing generation; those who dissent from the opinion, still more than those who hold it. If the opinion is right, they are deprived of the opportunity of exchanging error for truth: if wrong, they lose, what is almost as great a benefit, the clearer perception and livelier impression of truth, produced by its collision with error. 

Here, Mill illustrates a certain kind of learning process — one that is employed by Socrates in his conversations with the citizens of Athens. To understand which conclusions we ought to adopt, we ought to listen to the arguments that people make. If we identify an error in reasoning, we can calmly point it out and everyone involved will be the better for it, as it might bring us all that much closer to truth. Perhaps, like Socrates, the finer points of our arguments will be met from even the staunchest dissenter from our position with a “that is undeniable” or “that is perfectly true” for good measure.

So, is it “philosophy to the rescue!”? One way of responding to our current predicament is to insist that everyone needs a strong education in logic and critical thinking. People need to develop the ability not only to recognize the commission of a fallacy when they see it, but also to frequently (and in good faith) reflect on their own body of beliefs and attitudes. We need to collectively get better at checking for cognitive bias and errors in reasoning in both ourselves and others.

On the other hand, we might ask ourselves whether the above account of Plato and Mill is an accurate description of the circumstances in which we are likely to find ourselves. A more compelling insight might be one from 18th century philosopher David Hume who famously said, “reason is, and ought only to be the slave of the passions.” Hume makes the argument the reason alone does not and cannot motivate us to act — it is our passions that do that. If this is the case, then if we want to arrive at a common understanding or come together in motivation toward a common cause, we need to understand the complexities of one another’s psychologies; we need to recognize the common forces that might potentially move us to action. We might have arguments for our positions, but is it really those arguments that motivate us to act in the ways that we do?

Moreover, to insist that what’s needed now in contemporary culture is more civil discourse may be to fail to recognize certain obvious facts about the way that the world works. In an ideal world, it might be the case that we could all offer arguments, and expect to be heard and understood. However, the non-ideal world in which we find ourselves is a world characterized by power dynamics and replete with testimonial injustice. Groups with power are more likely to be listened to and believed than groups without it. The claims of the rich, for instance, are often given a considerably larger platform than the claims of the poor. What’s more, those on the desirable side of the power dynamic are more likely to describe themselves and to be described by others as “rational.” Often, these descriptions confuse the category of the “rational” with the category of “positions held by the powerful.”

Philosophers from antiquity have identified the capacity to reason as the essence of a human being, but, just as reliably, the concept of rationality has been weaponized to create “us” and “them” groups which are subsequently called upon to insist on “rights for me but not for thee.” Consider, for instance the Cartesian philosopher Nicolas Malebranche’s description of the way women’s minds work:

…normally they are incapable of penetrating to truths that are slightly difficult to discover. Everything abstract is incomprehensible to them. They cannot use their imagination for working out tangled and complex questions. They consider only the surface of things, and their imagination has insufficient strength and insight to pierce it to the heart, comparing all the parts, without being distracted. A trifle is enough to distract them, the slightest cry frightens them, the least motion fascinates them. Finally, the style and not the reality of things suffices to occupy their minds to capacity; because insignificant things produce great motions in the delicate fibers of their brains, and these things necessarily excite great and vivid feelings in their souls, completely occupying it.

Indeed, many figures in the history of philosophy who argue that rationality is the essential human function are also quick to insist that not all human beings participate in this essence. For Aristotle, for example, groups that are not capable of engaging in the kinds of practical deliberations requisite for virtue, namely women and “natural slaves,” are the kinds of beings that are rightly ruled over.

In light of the weaponized history of the very concept of rationality, it is no surprise that there might be barriers to genuine rational discourse and debate — people may not recognize the biases they bring to the discussion and they may not be self-reflective enough to understand that there may be voices to which they are less likely to listen or to treat as credible. If this is the case, we run into another problem for civil discourse. When people have been the recipients of testimonial injustice often enough, they may no longer be calm about it. They may be angry, and that anger may be justified. Demands, then, for “rationality” may just be tone-policing by the group to which people have always listened.

What lessons should lovers of philosophy learn from all of this? Evaluation of arguments is, after all, what we do. Should these considerations encourage us to give up our most deeply-held convictions as philosophers? Probably not. But it should prompt us to be more reflective about the broader social and political landscapes in which we make and, perhaps more importantly, listen to arguments.

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UFOs and Hume on Miracles

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UFOs appear to be having a cultural moment. A Pentagon report laying out what U.S. intelligence agencies know about UFOs — or, to use the government’s preferred acronym, UAPs (unidentified aerial phenomena) — is expected at the beginning of June. A recent “60 Minutes” segment included interviews with two former Navy pilots who described their encounters with a UFO. The New Yorker ran a long piece about UFOs in its May 10th issue. And last week former Nevada senator Harry Reid penned a long reflection in The New York Times about his interest in the phenomenon.

It is relatively common to see UFOs, such as those tracked by Navy fighters’ infrared weapons cameras, described as “defying the laws of physics”; for example, flying at many times the speed of sound and then coming to an abrupt halt, without any visible means of propulsion. Being woefully ignorant about those laws, it is difficult for me to tell whether this is journalistic hyperbole or a claim to be taken literally. But if we do take it literally, then we can call on the great Scottish philosopher David Hume to help us decide what to believe.

Hume famously defined a “miracle” as a violation of a law of nature. For Hume, a law of nature obtains only when we have an extensive, and exceptionless, experience of a certain kind of phenomenon: for example, our extensive experience of human beings dying “establishes” the law that all human beings die. (As this example suggests, violations of laws of nature are not impossible or inconceivable; they are simply counterinstances to our extensive, exceptionless experience.) If UFOs really defy the laws of physics, then they perform miracles in the Humean sense.

Hume argued that no testimony — i.e., a person’s statement that something is true — can establish the existence of miracles. His argument can be summarized as follows:

1. The evidence against the existence of a miracle is as strong as it possibly could be.

A law of nature is established on the basis of experience, which is the only kind of evidence we can have for a causal proposition. And our experience is both extensive and exceptionless, so it furnishes evidence that is as strong as experiential evidence could be.

2. The evidence for the existence of a miracle from testimony, while perhaps very strong, is weaker than the evidence against the existence of a miracle.

Hume avers that it is always more probable that testimony is false — that the person giving the testimony “either deceive[s] or [has been] deceived” — than that a miracle has occurred. Put another way: to constitute stronger evidence than that which we have against the existence of a miracle, testimonial evidence for a miracle must be such that its falsehood would itself be a miracle — in fact, would itself be a greater miracle than that which the testimony is evidence for.  But for any given piece of testimony, there is always a non-miraculous possibility of its falsehood.

3. We ought to proportion our belief according to our evidence, and evidence for contradictory conclusions cancels out.

Hume here appeals to “evidentialism,” the commonsense idea that we ought to proportion our belief in a proposition to the evidence we have for it. In addition, he says that evidence for a proposition and evidence for its negation “destroy” each other.

4. Therefore, whenever our evidence for a miracle is based entirely on testimony, we ought to believe that it did not occur.

Since the evidence against the existence of a miracle is always stronger than testimonial evidence for it, when testimonial evidence is all the evidence we have for a miracle, we ought to believe that the miracle did not exist or did not occur.

We can now see how the argument can be applied to UFOs. If UFOs really perform miracles, then any testimonial evidence for the existence of UFOs is always weaker than the evidence against their existence. Therefore, we should reject the existence of UFOs if the only evidence we have for them is based on testimony.

It might be objected that we have non-testimonial evidence for UFOs, such as the infrared camera videos. However, these videos are by themselves difficult for most people to interpret or understand, as are most of the alleged photographs of UFOs. The layman must instead rely on the testimony of experts to interpret the videos or photographs for him or her. Thus, even when photographs or videos are held up as evidence of UFOs, it is really the testimony of experts, who provide authoritative interpretations of these materials, that is doing the evidentiary work. And this leads us back to Hume’s problem.

Of course, Hume’s argument is not without its many detractors; objections are legion. One objection revolves around what Hume says about the “Indian prince, who refused to believe the first relations concerning the effects of frost …” The Indian prince had an extensive, exceptionless experience of water in a liquid state. Frost is a counterinstance of the “law” that water is always liquid. Does it follow, then, that the Indian prince could not justifiably believe in frost on the basis of any testimony, no matter how strong? Hume’s response is that solid water is an experience that is not contrary to the prince’s experience, although it is also not conformable to it. The more general problem is that Hume needs to allow for progress in the sciences, including the revision of our understanding of the natural laws. Like many of Hume’s arguments, his argument about miracles set the agenda for much of the succeeding discussion, but left many questions unanswered.

Still, Hume’s argument against miracles is undeniably compelling. As applied to UFOs, the argument shows us the limits of testimony, however well-intentioned or authoritative.

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Testimony, Conspiracy Theories, and Hume on Miracles

abstract painting of two faces without eyes facing away from one another

In his Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, David Hume reports a local rumor from a town in Spain conveyed to him, with a healthy amount of skepticism, by a cardinal. The story was about a man who had undergone a rather miraculous recovery from an ailment. As Hume describes it,

“He had been seen, for so long a time, wanting a leg; but recovered that limb by the rubbing of holy oil upon the stump; and the cardinal assures us that he saw him with two legs.”

The townsfolk were all ardent believers in the miracle, and it was accepted by “all the canons of the church.” The story spread and was believed on the basis of testimony, and was able to pass and be sustained as easily as it was, in part, because of a shared trust among members of the community. Nevertheless, the cardinal himself gave no credence to the story. Despite the fact that many people were willing to testify to its truth, a story about such an event is just not the kind of thing that has any meaningful likelihood of being true. The cardinal “therefore concluded, like a just reasoner, that such an evidence carried falsehood upon the very face of it, and that a miracle, supported by any human testimony, was more properly a subject of derision than of argument.”

Hume relates other stories, common at the time he was writing, of people offering and accepting accounts of miracles. He argues that to adjudicate these matters, our evidence consists in our set of past observations. Miracles are violations of the laws of nature. When we consider whether we ought to believe in miracles on the basis of testimony, we must weigh our past observations of the workings of the laws of nature against our observations regarding the veracity of testimony. The former will always win. We will always have more evidence to support the idea that the laws of nature will remain constant than we will to support the belief in eyewitness testimony which reports that those laws have been broken. As Hume himself states, “the knavery and folly of men are such common phenomena, that I should rather believe the most extraordinary events to arise from their concurrence, than admit of so signal a violation of the laws of nature.”

Hume is not just reporting historical fact but is also prescient (though he might object to that characterization) when he says, “men, in all ages, have been so much imposed on by ridiculous stories of that kind.” More than 250 years later, we’re contending with elaborate conspiracies such as shape-shifting reptilian overlords, 5-G towers that transmit coronavirus, vaccines that implant microchips, and wild accusations of widespread voter fraud sufficient to change the outcome of the election. The Q-Anon conspiracy theory even has representation in the House of Representatives. Believers in this conspiracy think that a powerful cabal of pedophilic baby-eating democrats is secretly running the world, and a child-sex ring. A secret whistleblowing governmental agent — Q — is conveying all of this information to true patriots on internet chat rooms. Q-Anon spread in much the same way that the story about holy water being used to grow new limbs spread — through testimony.

Hume points out that the practice of coming to know things on the basis of testimony depends on certain enduring features of human nature.

“Were not the memory tenacious to a certain degree, had not men commonly an inclination to truth and a principle of probity; were they not sensible to shame, when detected in a falsehood: Were not these, I say, discovered by experience to be qualities, inherent in human nature, we should never repose the least confidence in human testimony. A man delirious, or noted for falsehood and villainy, has no manner of authority with us.”

Society couldn’t function if we couldn’t rely on testimonial evidence. The present political climate elicits feelings of impending existential dread — a sense that truth and meaning are bleeding off the page like amateur watercolor, leaving no visible boundaries. The characteristics that Hume describes are being worn down. We’ve been told not to rely on our memories; it is unpatriotic to pay too much attention to the past. There are no behaviors that should make anyone feel shame; to suggest that someone ought to feel ashamed for deceiving and misleading is to “cancel” that person. In an environment immersed in “alternative facts,” there is no inclination toward truth or “principle of probity.” It is little wonder that in this environment people favor the likelihood of the existence of liberal pedophilic cannibals over the likelihood that anthropogenic climate change is occurring.

With the possible exception of the lizard people who can transform into humans, these conspiracy theories aren’t violations of the laws of nature. That said, a similar kind of inductive argument is possible. Most of these conspiracy theories require a level of seamless complicity among many, many people, who then leave behind no compelling evidence. Election fraud conspiracies, for example, require complicity across states, political parties, and branches of government. So, we’re left with two broad options. Either every person played their role in this flawlessly, leaving behind no trace, or the theory is false, and it arose from “the knavery and folly” of human beings as has so often happened throughout human history. There is a much stronger inductive argument for the latter.

All of this has a moral component to it, but it is difficult to know exactly how to identify it. As Hume points out, humans have certain dispositions that incline them toward truth. On the other hand, they also have strong tendencies to believe nonsense, especially if that nonsense is coherent with what they already believed or might otherwise make them feel good. We could say that everyone ought to have higher epistemic standards, but ought implies can — it makes no sense to say that a person ought to use better methods to form their beliefs when their psychologies prevent them from having any control over such things. There may be no ultimate solution, but there might be some chance that things could improve. Making things better might not be a matter of changing individual minds, but, instead, altering the environments in which those minds are formed. Education should be a high priority and well-funded. We must have policies that reward honesty among public officials and there must be serious consequences when our public figures tell lies.