Hrishikesh Joshi (Bowling Green State University), “The Epistemic Significance of Social Pressure”

Canadian Journal of Philosophy, 2022

Joshi, Hrishikesh. 2022. “The Epistemic Significance of Social Pressure.” Canadian Journal of Philosophy 52 (4): 396-410.

By Hrishikesh Joshi

Epistemology is undergoing what we may call a “social turn.” Traditionally, philosophers like Descartes or Locke focused on the individual when they explored the concept of knowledge. In the past couple of decades though, many philosophers have been keen to emphasize that we are socially situated knowers. Among other things, we can’t verify everything by ourselves—so much of what we know results from our trusting the testimony of others.

This observation itself raises several underexplored problems, however. The recent COVID-19 pandemic has made us keenly aware that supply chains can malfunction or be disrupted. As there are supply chains of physical goods, we can fruitfully think of epistemic supply chains as well. Evidence makes its way to us from others, and part of what we do as individual thinkers is make up our minds based on that evidence.

Consider scientific evidence. A researcher may have an idea, convey that to her group, which then sets up an experiment. They then write up a paper, which then goes to peer review, is subsequently published, and perhaps you read a snippet about it in the news. Many different stages and individuals are involved in this process.

One thing to note here is that as individuals we do not and could not possess all the evidence out there, even on specific matters. Much of the evidence is going to be distributed across different people all over the world. So, given that our evidence is bound to be partial, how can we ever have justified beliefs or knowledge?

A plausible thought, developed in detail by Nathan Ballantyne in recent work, is that our evidence in some sense has to be representative. Consider political polling. Everyone knows that you can’t poll the whole voting population. Many reliable polls just manage one or two thousand. Now suppose, of a particular poll, it revealed that all the surveys were conducted in rural Kansas. Or Berkeley, California. This would (and should) immediately cause us to take the poll less seriously. For the poll to tell us something meaningful, it has to be representative of the general voting population.

We can make a similar point about evidence in general—our unavoidably partial subsets must be representative. What processes can make them un-representative? There are several possibilities. One is that individuals can be biased evidence gatherers. Easy examples include: a political partisan who consumes news from sources on only one side, or a father who purposely avoids evidence that his son committed the crime.

My paper explores a particular factor which can cause our evidence to be un-representative, even if we are not biased in the above sort of way. This factor I discuss under the heading of “social pressure.” What claims are likely to be the subjects of such pressure is a highly context dependent matter—it varies by time, place, social standing, professional circle, etc. Now it is a banal point that as a highly social species, we depend on others for our material and psychological success. So, we are often on the lookout for what sorts of opinions, perspectives, etc. are popular within our social groups. And when there is sufficient pressure not to consider or offer certain types of evidence, many people (it need not be everyone) will act in line with this incentive.

This can cause problems with the epistemic supply chain. What can arise is a situation whereby we only have a filtered or lopsided subset of the total evidence, as illustrated in the diagram below.

Imagine that the red dots support claim X and the green dots support not-X—and imagine each dot has equal weight. Given the evidence this individual has, the (first-order) rational thing to conclude is that not-X is true. However, the total evidence suggests that X is true.

The presence of social pressure of a certain kind, then, is a type of defeater. It is evidence about our evidence. When we observe such pressure, it behooves us to reduce confidence in the claims that are the subject of said pressure.

This, I believe, is a kind of rational reconstruction of John Stuart Mill’s chief argument in On Liberty Chapter 2 where he says, “If even the Newtonian philosophy were not permitted to be questioned, mankind could not feel as complete assurance of its truth as they now do. The beliefs which we have most warrant for, have no safeguard to rest on, but a standing invitation to the whole world to prove them unfounded.”