Social Epistemology: Process vs. Outcome

How to think vs. what to think

Dan Williams argued that the natural state for humans is to hold wrong beliefs.

The deep question of social epistemology—the genuine puzzle—is not why people hold false beliefs. It is why people sometimes form true beliefs.

B.P.S. seems to disagree.

why does Williams insist that the notion of a truth era is nonsensical? I’m baffled by his claiming that both (1) our epistemic well-being is contingent on fragile norms and institutions, and (2) worrying about deviation from those norms/institutions is historically illiterate.

I take it that B.P.S. is willing to defend the war on misinformation, whereas Williams is not. I think of the issue in terms of outcomes vs. process.

The epistemic outcome is what people come to believe. The process is the mechanism by which they come to believe it.

What Williams could say, and what I would say if I were him, is that social epistemology has made progress in terms of processes. The Enlightenment norms, including freedom of speech and the scientific method, are important tools. So are institutions in which beliefs are contested, such as courtrooms, markets, elections, and academic journals and conferences.

These norms and institutions have helped rescue humanity from the ignorance that we would suffer in the absence of such institutions. All praise is due them. Again, I must cite Jonathan Rauch’s book, The Constitution of Knowledge.

But when we observe bad outcomes, in the sense of many people holding unsound beliefs, what should we do? Williams seems to say we should not do anything, and just be grateful for the true beliefs that people do hold. Against Williams are the people who want to explicitly intervene in social media to fight misinformation.

The disinformation fighters, perhaps including B.P.S., would argue that there is such a thing as truth. So we should censor falsehood. From an outcomes perspective, that makes sense.

From a process point of view, are attempts to censor misinformation a useful tool? I would argue that, on the contrary, giving some elite group the authority to silence other points of view is not a process that improves social epistemology. As a process, it breaks down, ultimately failing to achieve the desired outcome. Where you have viewpoint suppression, you end up with the triumph of dogma and the loss of truth.

The Enlightenment norms and institutions which have been so valuable do not include viewpoint suppression. Instead, they emphatically reject it. Let all viewpoints be heard, and let them be contested.

Accordingly, there is no contradiction between Williams expressing gratitude for the epistemic gains from the Enlightenment and expressing distaste for attempts to suppress viewpoints that some elites believe to be false. The misguided beliefs are bad outcomes, and it is natural for there to be bad outcomes. But the process of improving social beliefs is served by not giving anyone the authority to suppress someone’s viewpoint. You fix the outcomes by sticking to the Enlightenment process, not by taking shortcuts that undermine that process.

Note that this distinction between process and outcome also applies in economics. Modern mainstream economics often studies markets in terms of outcomes, with some outcomes labeled as “market failures.” Instead, Austrian economics emphasizes the market as a process, one which evolves over time. As a process, the market tends toward improved outcomes, overcoming the market failures identified by mainstream analysis. Hence my saying, “Markets fail. Use markets.”

Note: I am continuing to feed content to the “clone” of myself at delphi.ai. If you want to have a conversation with it about market failure or other economic topics, say so in a comment below and I will authorize you to take a look. The clone is conversational, not unlike Inflection’s pi (which fell victim to Microsoft’s semi-takeover).

It won’t give you a lecture. Instead, it will give you a few paragraphs, ending with a leading question.

I don’t think it can help me to write a book. That is not the use case for which it is designed.

I believe that you have the option to “call” my clone, meaning that it will use a voice interface. It does a decent job of sounding like me.

substacks referenced above:@

Turning Over Explanatory Inversions

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Why do people believe true things?