Instinct and epistemic luck

On Wed, Jan 12, 2011 at 22:13:08
Sydney asked this question:

I had my first class in critical thinking earlier today and my professor was unable to tell me if instinct was epistemic luck. I was wondering if you might be able to help answer this question?

Reading Sydney's question, my first, somewhat unkind thought was, 'No-one likes a smartass.' But then the question immediately came to mind, Why wouldn't someone qualified to teach critical thinking be able to answer Sydney's question? There is an answer: The term 'epistemic luck' is a piece of technical jargon, coined in the debate over epistemological theories following Edmund Gettier's landmark 1963 article, 'Is Knowledge Justified True Belief?' If you aren't trained as an academic philosopher (or studying for a degree in philosophy) it is fairly unlikely that you would have come across that term. Sydney has obviously been doing a lot of extra-curricular reading.

The curious fact is, you don't need to be a trained philosopher in order to teach critical thinking, at least the way this subject is often taught at colleges and universities. I'm not offering comment on whether that is a good or bad thing.

(Ignorance cuts both ways. My lack of knowledge of the current state of debate in critical thinking leaves me totally unable to answer the question what view critical thinking takes about instinctive knowledge generally, knowing but not being able to explain how you know, etc. I can live with that.)

If you want to get up to speed with the debate over epistemic luck, you could start by Googling "Rocking Horse Winner" or "chicken sexer", plus Epistemology. These are standard examples of cases where we might be inclined to say that someone 'knows' even though they are unable to explain how they know (the little lad who mysteriously predicts the winners of tomorrow's horse races, workers trained to sort newborn chicks into male and female by subtle differences in their look or feel — or is it?).

I am somewhat bemused by these debates, even though I regularly mark essays sent to me by my students taking the University of London BA module in Epistemology. Epistemology is one of those areas of philosophy that has increasingly acquired the aspect of chess opening theory, with every possible avenue of inquiry, every argument and counterargument explored and elaborated on ad nauseam. No better evidence could be put forward that current academic philosophy has drifted into a new age of scholasticism, driven in part by the incessant need to publish or lose tenure.

However, whenever I begin to feel sick, or bored, I remind myself of things that matter to me in relation to the question of knowledge. Then it all gets real again. Knowledge matters, no more so than to the philosopher pursuing knowledge.

I rely a lot on my instincts. I have hunches. I will pursue an investigation, expending many days, weeks or even months on a question because I have a feeling that it might lead somewhere. What wasted effort, if that feeling could not be relied upon, or did not at least promise some probability of success! Then there are issues in philosophy which I take a strong position on, where I am sure that i am right, even though I know that are those who take the completely opposite view who are just as sure that they are right and I am wrong. How is that possible?

Human beings, like other members of the animal kingdom, have instincts which we have acquired through the process of Darwinian natural selection, although because we are language users and reasoners, the instinctive side of human knowledge has been pushed very much to the sidelines. Instincts are much less useful to us than they are, say, to a pair of nesting birds or a pride of lions. I guess my direct answer to Sydney's question would be that if you believe something 'on instinct', say, that beneath the false smile of the person extending their arm and hand in greeting there lurk aggressive intentions, and that instinct is a genuine biological instinct, with an aetiology, an explanation of its reliability, then that isn't a case of 'luck' epistemologically speaking. It is not an accident when the person who roused your suspicions turns out to be a thief or confidence trickster.

The problem is, there are many, perhaps many more examples where one 'feels something on instinct' where there is no valid explanation that a more knowledgeable observer could provide. Then is it just mere guesswork? If you turn out to be right, was that just luck? I'm not sure that it is, always. Maybe I've watched too many American TV detective shows, but it seems to me that hunches can be valid, even if there is no explanation of how you could possibly know, or what it was that gave you the hunch. There is an art to judgement, which no amount of methodological analysis will ever unravel. This applies, in different though related ways, to police work, sports like golfing and archery, or the judgement of a scientific researcher or philosopher.

Of course, one has to exercise caution here. It's so easy to persuade oneself that one's hunch is valid (it wouldn't be a hunch if it didn't feel that special way). But how can you possibly know? More to the point, why should anyone else, who doesn't feel the hunch that you feel, believe you? (How many TV detective plots have followed that theme!)

I've alluded to the question of reliability in Epistemology. One of the main contrasts in current debates is between Epistemologists who consider 'acquiring a belief through a reliable means' as sufficient for knowledge, provided that the belief is true, and those who require something stronger, say, the ability to defend your belief with persuasive reasons when challenged. The problem is, it's too easy to defeat a knowledge claim just by asking an innocent question (see my Answer to Demetreus). My own tentative view would be that we need to shift the focus away from the question of defining knowledge and onto the question why we are interested in identifying the 'one who knows' the answer to a particular question.

To make a factual statement, any statement, implies that one has the authority to speak. At any time, you can be legitimately challenged. But the inability to meet that challenge doesn't necessarily undermine your right to state your view. 'I just know,' can be a sufficient answer. Say, for example, when one is a very experienced golf caddy who just 'sees' that the number 5 iron would be too heavy for that shot, even though according to the book that's the correct iron to use. Trust your caddy, he does know.

At Oxford, I was lucky to have a term of supervision by P.F. Strawson for my B.Phil paper on Kant. In our conversations, it very quickly became clear that when Strawson told me, 'no, you are wrong', it was no use arguing. I was wrong. It wasn't arrogance on Strawson's part, just the voice of experience.

Strawson wasn't claiming to be right about everything. Just about some things. I don't do this too often (my students wouldn't let me). But the philosophical point is about authority. Authority is established, granted, defended, or challenged and defeated. Our interest in knowledge, as a concept, hinges on the question of authority: Whose authority do you trust on a particular topic? when do you accept a piece of advice or testimony and when do you reject it? This isn't about a definition of knowledge in terms of necessary and sufficient conditions, but rather about the place of the concept of knowledge in the social matrix. The simplest example: 'How do you know?' 'I saw it with my own eyes.' End of discussion. This is how language (to use Michael Dummett's happy phrase) 'extends the range of human perception'. Your eyes become my eyes, through the authority which being a witness of the event in question grants you.

I'm coming up to my 60th birthday (next Monday, as it happens). Having been in philosophy for the best part of four decades there are one or two things that I know. In saying this, I hope you will believe me but the decision is yours. Judge me on my work. Right now, I am pursuing a line of investigation (in my other blog Hedgehog Philosopher) where feelings and hunches are playing a somewhat larger role than I would like. I know there's 'something there' which I can't articulate. In the past when I've had that feeling, it turned out to have substance, but not always. Down the years, I've been down many blind alleys, took many wrong turns and there's no saying for sure that I haven't taken a wrong turn this time. But, in the end, it is a matter of judgement and one has to trust one's judgement.

Good luck with your course, Sydney. Don't blindly accept authority, but don't become a boring sceptic either. Strive to find a balance, that way you will grow.