False polarization: debiasing as applied social epistemology

False polarization (FP) is an interpersonal bias on judgement, the effect of which is to lead people in contexts of disagreement to overestimate the differences between their respective views. I propose to treat FP as a problem of applied social epistemology—a barrier to reliable belief-formation in...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Synthese (Dordrecht) 2014-07, Vol.191 (11), p.2529-2547
Main Author: Kenyon, Tim
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Abortion
Bias
Contrafactuals
Critical thinking
Education
Empirical evidence
Epistemology
Focalism
Hindsight bias
Judgment
Logic
Metaphysics
Philosophy
Philosophy of Language
Philosophy of Science
Reasoning
Social biases
Social epistemology
Social psychology
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Summary:False polarization (FP) is an interpersonal bias on judgement, the effect of which is to lead people in contexts of disagreement to overestimate the differences between their respective views. I propose to treat FP as a problem of applied social epistemology—a barrier to reliable belief-formation in certain social domains—and to ask how best one may debias for FP. This inquiry leads more generally into questions about effective debiasing strategies; on this front, considerable empirical evidence suggests that intuitively attractive strategies for debiasing are not very effective, while more effective strategies are neither intuitive nor likely to be easily implemented. The supports for more effective debiasing seem either to be inherently social and cooperative, or at least to presuppose social efforts to create physical or decision-making infrastructure for mitigating bias. The upshot, I argue, is that becoming a less biased epistemic agent is a thoroughly socialized project.
ISSN:0039-7857
1573-0964
DOI:10.1007/s11229-014-0438-x