THE PARALYSIS OF TRUTH IN PRACTICE

 

Epistemic vices which nullify epistemic virtues

In May 2020, I LIKE TRAINS the Leeds based indie band shared a brand new single, The Truth, which was the first single from their upcoming album, KOMPROMAT.

 The inspiration behind KOMPROMAT, is a social as well as a conceptual representation of the current and ongoing theme of post truth and the rise of ‘post-truth politics’, epitomised by the increasing trend towards ignoring inconvenient facts if they get in the way of a politician’s ideological commitments or ambitions.

 All of which erupted into public consciousness following Edward Snowden’s NSA leaks in 2013. The result is an album about the rise of populism, from Brexit to Trump, Cambridge Analytica to Russian interference, and for this recent release there is no more fitting introduction to this album than The Truth.

The lyrics as Dave Martin belts them out batter the ear with repeated definitions of the Truth, each seemingly taking you further away from actual reality, “the truth is no longer concerned with the facts”, “the truth is I hold all the cards here”, “the truth is I am the truth”.

A week or so ago the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPPC)delivered its latest report on the state of our planet. It was the gravest and starkest warning to date. António Guterres(the UN secretary general), called it a “code red for humanity”, adding that the “alarm bells are deafening”. The IPCC found that sea level is rising, the polar ice is melting, there are floods, droughts and heatwaves coupled to massive fires and undeniably it is human activity which is the cause.

But many still deny this truth, the same way that some insist coronavirus is a conspiracy theory hatched by right wing populist politicians or caused by 5G phone masts or aliens. All these groups are guilty of a deep form of denial and repeatedly fail to update their beliefs in the light of the evidence.
As the Guardian journalist Jonathan Freedland argues:

“There is another form of denial, what the philosopher Quassim Cassam calls “behavioural or practical denialism”. This is the mindset that accepts the science marshalled by the IPCC – it hears the alarm bell ringing – but still does not change its behaviour.”

And it operates at the level of governments and in individuals too. Freedland quotes the White House official who urged global oil producers to open the taps and increase production, so that motorists can buy gasoline more cheaply. And he links it to  individuals, who shrug their shoulders because they believe there is nothing a single person can do to halt the climate emergency.  According to Cassam. “The practical upshot is the same.”

Whether it’s the Covid pandemic or climate emergency, there is a common human shortcoming at work here. It’s wilful blindness, an intentional act of avoiding a reality that is too difficult to apprehend – and it influences much wider and diverse groups of individuals than those who noisily and publicly demonstrate on our streets. A US poll recently found that a summer of heatwaves, flooding, and wildfires – evidence that the planet is both burning and drowning – had barely shifted the public’s reaction to the climate issue.

The most often quoted definition of the word Truth is the property or state of being in accordance with facts or reality.  And one of the core and allied concepts in epistemology is belief. A belief is an attitude that a person holds regarding anything that they take to be true. For instance, to believe that snow is white is comparable to accepting the truth of the proposition “snow is white”

But as we are increasingly finding, particularly in politics and in practice- truth and belief are often at odds and this has significant impacts on how we collectively approach crucial decisions- like how to tackle wicked problems such as climate change or Covid vaccination-we are seeing increasing evidence of what has been described as epistemic myopia or even worse epistemic vices.

 The philosopher Quassim Cassam describes the latter in some extremely dramatic and troubling ways, particularly where they have a deeply biased impact on the practice of political and other forms of leadership.  He defines epistemic vices, as character traits, attitudes or ways of thinking that get in the way of knowledge. He asserts that Epistemic vices are bad for us as knowers because of the extent that they obstruct the acquisition, retention, or transmission of knowledge. He calls this theory of epistemic vice ‘obstructivism’. Standard epistemic vices include closed-mindedness, dogmatism, wishful thinking, prejudice, and intellectual arrogance. This is a quote from one of his blogs:

“The Washington Post recently reported that President Trump ‘bragged that he made up facts’ at a recent meeting with Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau. According to the Post Trump boasted about telling Trudeau that America has a trade deficit with Canada even though he had no idea whether that was true.
The dictionary defines insouciance as a casual lack of concern. What Trump displayed in his encounter with Trudeau was a casual lack of concern about the facts. His insouciance was what might be called epistemic insouciance. This looks like a straightforward example of an epistemic vice, though not one that until now has been named by philosophers.”