New paper forthcoming: "The Seductions of Clarity"! The paper is about the seductive *feeling* of clarity, and how that feeling might be faked - and how our cognitive vulnerabilities might be manipulated.
Thread-summary:
philpapers.org/rec/NGUTSO-2
Thread-summary:
philpapers.org/rec/NGUTSO-2
It's about the *sense* of understanding - not actual, genuine understanding, but the *feeling* associated with understanding. I propose: we use this sense of clarity as a thought-terminating heuristic.
We cognitively limited beings actually need a heuristic to end our investigations. But this creates a huge vulnerability. If an epistemic manipulator can fake the sense of clarity, then they can get us to end our investigations too early - and swallow a flawed belief system.
What's that like? I borrow some stuff from Phil Sci. Over there, *genuine* understanding consists of the grasping of a coherent whole. *Real* understanding grants cognitive facility - a newfound power to categorize, explain, and communicate.
So: to fake that, we'd want a belief-system that gives people an exaggerated sense of grasping a coherent whole. We'd want it to give them a powerful feeling of facility, to fill you up with a sense of your newfound power to categorize, explain, and communicate.
Case Study 1: Conspiracy theories. You accept a conspiracy theory and suddenly it all makes sense, and everything is connected! You can suddenly explain everything, and categorize all sorts of events and make them fit neatly into a bigger picture!
Case Study 2: Bureaucratic language. Once you accept a standardized, engineered set of institutional expressions, it becomes easy to categorize things, and offer explanations and justifications in ways that you know will be received and acted on.
I also get to give a name for what I've been doing: "hostile epistemology", the study of environmental features which take advantage of our cognitive vulnerabilities. To be contrasted with vice epistemology, which is the study of our epistemic character flaws.
This paper is, I think, the finale to a... tetralogy? It connects with my papers: "Echo Chambers and Epistemic Bubbles," "Moral Outrage Porn," and "How Twitter Gamifies Communication".
PS This was retro-converted from a scholarly paper to a more public-facing paper, for this special issue. So it should hopefully be readable to all! But also, there are some... excessive footnotes, for which I apologize.
PPS This is connected to a public lecture for the Royal Institute of Philosophy, which covers a big-picture version of these ideas in a more wild and hand-wavey way.
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