Joseph Shieber (Lafayette College), “An Idle and Most False Imposition: Truth-Seeking vs. Status-Seeking and the Failure of Epistemic Vigilance”
Philosophic Exchange, 2023
The theory of epistemic vigilance is one of the most successful social psychological theories of the past two decades. Cited thousands of times, the theory posits that -- to quote the eponymous paper that introduced the notion -- “humans have a suite of cognitive mechanisms for epistemic vigilance, targeted at the risk of being misinformed by others." (Sperber et al. 2010, 359) Despite the widespread acceptance of the theory of epistemic vigilance, however, I argue that the theory is a poor fit with the evidence: while there is good reason to accept that people ARE vigilant, there is also good reason to believe that their vigilance is NOT epistemic. Rather, the evidence actually supports an alternative theory, one that I dub the theory of "Machiavellian vigilance": humans have a suite of cognitive mechanisms for Machiavellian vigilance, targeted at tracking others' relative social status and maintaining or enhancing one's own status.
In the paper, I pursue a dual strategy, presenting evidence against epistemic vigilance and evidence in favor of Machiavellian vigilance. The evidence against epistemic vigilance stems from multiple sources: (a) social psychological data demonstrating that people are terrible at detecting honesty or competence, (b) evolutionary psychological data demonstrating that our vigilance is phylogenetically prior to the development of homo sapiens, and therefore was not designed to be sensitive to linguistic communication, (c) data from the theory of complex networks demonstrating that people's sources of information are distributed, and not detectable through individual vigilance, and (d) evidence against the idea that conversational interactions are primarily directed toward informational exchanges.
The evidence in favor of Machiavellian vigilance is the mirror image of the evidence against epistemic vigilance. That evidence includes: (a) neuropsychological data demonstrating that people are very accurate at detecting status, (b) evolutionary psychological data demonstrating that social species, including bonobos and chimps, track the social status of their conspecifics, (c) data demonstrating that people can quickly track status even in new social groups, (d) evidence suggesting that conversational interactions are directed toward maintaining or enhancing the conversational participants’ social status.
The failure of the theory of epistemic vigilance is of interest not only in its own right, but also because of its implications for social epistemology. Many philosophers appeal to the theory of epistemic vigilance to motivate the idea that people do – albeit, perhaps, nonconsciously – monitor their interlocutors for trustworthiness and competence. This idea of monitoring forms the basis for many of the positions regarding the epistemology of testimony. This is most obviously the case with so-called reductionist views, according to which people are only epistemically justified in accepting the testimony of others when they have positive reasons for taking that testimony as reliable. However, even many anti-reductionist views rely on nonconscious monitoring as a way of guaranteeing that testimony is epistemically justified.
The failure of epistemic vigilance and the success of Machiavellian vigilance suggest that such appeals to monitoring in the epistemology of testimony are misguided. I hope that this can steer the discussion into what I take to be more profitable directions – particularly towards attempts to explain testimonial justification, warrant, and knowledge by focusing on the socially distributed cognitive networks in which we find ourselves.
Read more in the paper here: http://hdl.handle.net/20.500.12648/10523
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Cannot but love a paper that brings together epistemic vigilance, Melville, Nietzsche, and The Elephant in the Brain! However, it seems to me that the argument for abandoning epistemic vigilance theory for machiavellian vigilance theory (instead of, perhaps, embracing both sets of mechanisms as interactive parts of our evolved endowments for navigating the complexities of social life) is predicated on neglecting the massive amount of evidence that Hugo Mercier masterfully synthesizes in his book Not Born Yesterday, which enjoys only a passing citation on p. 4. In the book, Mercier also sharpens the theoretical upderpinnings of epistemic vigilance.