← Intelligence Squared
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- [00:00]
Richella Shah
Hey, what's up, y'?
- [00:01]
Julian Baggini
All?
- [00:01]
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- [00:31]
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- [01:31]
Mia Sorrenti
Intelligence Squared, where great minds meet. I'm producer Mia Sorrenti. Today's episode is part one of our recent live event with philosopher and author Julian Bogini. Recorded live at Conway Hall, Bogini joined us to explore how philosophy explains our world. What would Aristotle make of Keir Starmer? Would Plato be a Republican? And what can ancient and modern philosophy teach us about today's turbulent politics? In this event, Virgini sets out why polarization isn't necessarily a dirty word. What distinguishes conspiracy theories from genuine skeptics? And why philosophical habits such as humility, evidence seeking and thinking for yourself, but not by yourself, matter more than ever. Your host for the evening was broadcaster Richela Shah. Let's join Richella now with more.
- [02:26]
Richella Shah
Thanks so much, Margarita. Now, often at these sort of events, I Begin by setting out the broad theme that we're going to be discussing. You know, how do we live with AI? What is the future for Israel and Gaza? But tonight's a little bit different because actually what we're going to be talking about is thinking itself about a way to consider the fractious and polarized world that we find ourselves in. How do we think about it? How do we think about it in a way that might make it a little easier to navigate? I'm delighted to introduce Julian Bogini. Julian's a philosopher and an author, co author or editor of, I think, more than 20 books. Julian, how did you find the time? That's all I want to know.
- [03:08]
Julian Baggini
Not doing much else.
- [03:11]
Richella Shah
So there's one of his books there, how to Think Like a Philosopher. And I think that some of those themes will come up tonight. He's also the founding editor of the Philosopher's Magazine. He's written for newspapers and think tanks. And Julian is also the former academic director of the Royal Institute of Philosophy and is currently an honorary research fellow at the University of Kent. I hope I've got all that right. I should have checked it with you.
- [03:31]
Julian Baggini
Yeah, pretty much. Right. Move from Kent to Leeds.
- [03:34]
Richella Shah
Oh, to Leeds. Okay. Well, from south to north. Well, welcome, Julian. Let's think about philosophy. I think many people, and I definitely put myself in this category, their immediate reaction is it's something a little bit academic, a little bit inaccessible. So give us the alternative view.
- [03:53]
Julian Baggini
Well, you know, there was some truth in that stereotype, certainly. I mean, when I went to study philosophy many moons ago now, in the late 1980s, it was still. It was pretty academic and there was a kind of an academic snobbery about public engagement, actually. And that's changed since I've been doing it. I mean, partly because some really big. I think the big change for me was Simon Blackburn. I don't know if you know Simon Blackburn. Simon Blackburn was a really serious, respected professor of philosophy at Cambridge, and he wrote an introduction to philosophy called Think. And it did really well. And the point there is that if you've got one of the most respected academics in the country writing a popular book that does really well, and it was very, you know, there's nothing dodgy about it. You can no longer be snobby. And these days, actually, as well, younger academics are really keen to engage. So why shouldn't it be something that's simply removed? Well, I've always thought, I mean, you should change your mind over your lifetime. But one thing I haven't changed My mind about is that for most people at least, philosophical questions at some point become inescapable. Most people ask them, not all of them. I know people who haven't got a philosophical bone in their body. In fact, some of those people are some of the nicest people I know. You know, they're just into what they do and they're nice. But most of us either big questions like how should I live? What's it all about? But also other things about, you know, a big theme at the moment is truth. You know, what is the truth? You know, what is true, what is opinion, what do we believe? How can we know anything? These are foundational philosophical questions that have been asked since, you know, ancient times. So I don't think we can avoid doing philosophy. And I think that what helps is when people become more self conscious about what's philosophical in how they're thinking, and then get clearer to do it better.
- [06:00]
Richella Shah
You've begun to explain this, but just really give us a sense of why in life, then would thinking like a philosopher help us? Give us an example of something that if you're facing a crisis in your life or if facing a tough decision, how does philosophy help?
- [06:17]
Julian Baggini
Oh, okay. Well, actually, before I do that, I'm going to say that originally I wanted the subtitle of the book, how to Think Like a Philosopher to Be and When not to. Right? Because the thing is that, I mean, and also people sort of say we're thinking like which philosopher? You know, it's about the right time, in the right place. Philosophical thinking isn't always the best way of thinking, Right. So I'm not saying we should all be thinking like philosophers all of the time, but it has its place. Well, let's go back to, I think, a fundamental thing about truth, actually. You know, what is the truth? Who is telling the truth? And it's very easy to sort of like slip into some kind of skepticism about that, you know, well, who's to say what the truth is anyway? Or, you know, there is no such thing as truth as a capital T. There's only truth for you, truth for me, et cetera, et cetera. And the moment we start thinking these thoughts, I mean, those thoughts in summary, are summaries of positions that people would defend at length, but it's understanding properly what they mean. And I think the problem is that a little bit of bad philosophy can really lead us astray. So a typical thing is that people learn to be a little bit philosophical and they come to realize, for example, that there is no One account of the world which captures everything is entirely true. There's no way of entirely escaping your subjectivity. But then often they end up concluding that therefore, really there's no truth to be found at all. Right? So it's being a bit more sophisticated about that and accepting the fact. There are all sorts of limitations on what we can know about the truth, et cetera, et cetera, but there is still important things, difference between truth and falsehood, which have to be held onto all these things is once we start talking, we could go on for a whole hour just about that one thing, you know.
- [08:25]
Richella Shah
Well, I'm going to bring you back to that point in a moment. But I do want to think about positive thinking philosophy in a very positive sense in how to think like a philosopher. You have this lovely little acronym, acdc, which has got nothing to do with the band. And you talk about attend, clarify, deconstruct and connect as the kind of important things about thinking. Well, just give us a little bit more about that.
- [08:50]
Julian Baggini
Yeah, I had that at the end of the book. Because the point is, if you're anything like me, if you read a book which is. Which has got loads of things in it and you come to the end and someone says, what was that book about? You can struggle to put together a paragraph to summarize it. I think that it's a simple little acronym to try and remember the most important things. But I think it is important that you have gone into those things in more depth. If you just only have the acronym, you haven't really understood what it stands for. But I think the thing I'd want to start with is the first one, the A in ACDC is attend. Right? Now, I think that when people think about good thinking, I don't know, I'd rage a bet that a lot of people would think that's to do with your ability to construct arguments, your skill at logic. It's a kind of those kind of skills of argumentation and analysis, right, which are kind of about your brain processing power and your analytical skills. Now, I'm not saying those things aren't important, but actually I think one thing is that it's very, very clear to me that there are people who are very, very good. They've got those skills in their head, but they don't think well, right? Because they don't have the right kind of attitudes. So I think everyone in this room, I should ask, hands up if you know someone, hands up everyone in the room who knows someone who has got a really, really clever brain. But all they're trying to do with it most of the time is show how clever that they're right and other people are wrong. Who knows a person like that, right? Most of us, yeah. And if you're sitting next to that person, then whatever, kick them. Yeah. I mean, the point is that people have great processing power, their brains, but you've got to have. One of the things I talk about in the book is what sometimes called epistemic virtue. Nice sort of like term. And what that means there is that. And Bernard Williams, who is a very great 20th century British philosopher, wrote about this. The attitudes we bring to our thinking often determine the quality of the thought. So he talked about accuracy and sincerity. If you want to think about something and you are determined to be accurate, to get the facts right and you are sincere in wanting to know how things are and not just defend your own view, just simply having those attitudes in the first place is going to improve the quality of your thinking. And the thing about attending is it's simply paying attention very closely to whatever it is you're thinking about. That's where I think most good thinking starts. And most of the time, how many times again, if you think about it, you say, I was so stupid, I should have known, etc. It often isn't because you made a deductive error, it's because you weren't paying attention to something you really should have noticed. You, you know, you weren't really attending to that. So I think the close paying of attention is really important. And if you read the great philosophers in any tradition, often you find that actually it's not that they have very clever, elaborate arguments, it's that they've been able to notice something really significant which sheds light on whatever it is they're thinking about. So think of Descartes. People think Descartes is a rationalist philosopher. Clever arguments, but you know, his most famous argument was about what it was possible to doubt or not doubt. And he basically just went through things I said, can I doubt this, can I doubt this? And the one thing he couldn't doubt was his own existence. Right. Because in thinking, can I doubt my own existence? Obviously something is existing to doubt it. That's paying close attention to what you can and can't doubt. There's not a single logical argument in that. Right. So attending is a key thing. Maybe we'll leave C and DC till later.
- [12:40]
Richella Shah
Okay. But. So we've already gotten to this sense of philosophy and thinking. There are ways of thinking that can help us navigate what Sometimes feels intractable, difficult to go back to something you began to touch on. People often say, think for yourself. But I think we all also probably know one or two people who've thought perhaps a little bit too much for themselves. And there is a way down into a rabbit hole of conspiracy theories and of when, where there are no facts, where there is nothing that is real. What are the dangers then in thinking for oneself? And how does one avoid it within the framework that you've begun to describe?
- [13:24]
Julian Baggini
Yeah, I mean, thinking for yourself, you should think for yourself. But if you think for yourself badly, that's worse than not thinking for yourself in a way. I think there's a kind of a hierarchy here. So the people who tend to get things most right, the people who think really carefully and slowly about things, and the second down the list, the people who tend to get things right. Behind them are the people who don't think too much, but they kind of trust the people who should know. And then the bottom are the people who get things most wrong are the people who, who don't just take what the experts say, but they don't think very high as well, but they think for themselves, right? And that leads down to all sorts of things. In fact, I've got a quote in the book from someone who says something like, check the facts, think for yourself. Don't take anything on trust. All this advice that we're told a good thinker should have. This person is a flat earther, right? They're a flat Earther. They simply don't believe what they're told by NASA and things like that. They've thought for themselves, but unfortunately they're thinking themselves quite badly, and that's leading them to absurd, absurd conclusions. So the point about thinking for yourself is, you know, you should use your own brain the best you can. But I think one of the things that's under stressed in the Western tradition of philosophy at least, which tends to kind of, you know, the works of individual thinkers, is that the way to best use your own brain is in conjunction with others, right? So I have this motto, actually, I've got fridge magnets made with it. It said, think for yourself, not by yourself, right? When you just sort of like think only within the confines of your own mind, you tend to sort of end up with craziness. And there's a lot of good evidence in psychology as well that we think better with others. And actually, despite the fact that the stereotypical philosopher is somebody who sits in their study or their garret writing and thinking or The Rodan, like that. If you look at the history of philosophy, all the great philosophers, pretty much all of them have done it in collaboration with people. So in ancient Greece we had Plato's academy, Aristotle's lyceum, like minded people debating all day. The classical Indian schools of philosophy were famous for their kind of like debates which would go on for days, they'd be a bit mythical, where people wouldn't sleep for three days or something and just chat away. Even Descartes again, you know, whose Meditations is written as though it is a single person thinking for themselves. That was published along with a set of objections and replies. He sent out his manuscript to people all over Europe and they came back with their replies. He replied to them, so thinking for yourself should also be thinking with others. And as I say, there's a lot of evidence in psychology that people perform better in all sorts of cognitive tasks if they can think about things together than if they think about them just by themselves.
- [16:25]
Richella Shah
Is that different from the wisdom of crowds?
- [16:27]
Julian Baggini
It is different from the wisdom of crowds in the sense that this is the tricky one because there is this danger of group think, right? And that's why you need both aspects, thinking for yourself, but not by yourself. Because the problem with groupthink is the sort of phenomenon whereby a group of like minded people come to sort of like, you know, agree on certain things, they take things for granted, they assume things are right and that leads to that kind of a bad way of thinking. So the trick is to sort of like not rely on your own brain to think with others. But you need to have that kind of constant challenge within the group. A group that doesn't challenge its internal members will end up in all sorts of trouble with its thinking. You need to have that challenge. And again, it's quite interesting too that in like corporate world where group think can often be a problem, there are some companies which actually in meetings will nominate someone to be the sort of naysayer deliberately because they know they need that challenge. And it's a problem that, you know, a lot of people have in leadership positions as well, that people don't want to criticize them. A lot of political leaders, if you read their sort of downfalls, like Thatcher, classical example, a lot of people would say the problem with Margaret Thatcher was that towards the end of her, I want to say her reign, because she was kind of a little bit monarchical, you know, people wouldn't challenge her anymore, you know, so good thinkers always want good challenge.
- [18:02]
Richella Shah
Do you accept then that criticism that you get from the right towards the left, and particularly the left in academia, that there is groupthink. There is an unwillingness to challenge certain ideas. Most famously, you see it in America right now with the Trump administration and arguments around diversity and things like that. Do you think that is an example of groupthink, where people are no longer challenging these established ideas?
- [18:30]
Julian Baggini
I think no group is immune from groupthink. Right. So, I mean, no matter where your kind of political alignment is, there is going to be unhelpful groupthinking anywhere on the political spectrum. This is something which.
- [18:46]
Richella Shah
Is.
- [18:46]
Julian Baggini
It's not an ideological problem. So, yes, you can have a group of right wingers who have their own kind of group think, all ones that are very open to debate. And on the left, similarly, you can get that kind of group think and stasis. And I think one of the problems is, I think that on the left, the danger comes often from moral conviction. Right. So I think the point is when you become convinced that your cause is just and you're on the right side of history, you're in the angels. Then it's very easy to sort of like, take any challenge to that as being a moral challenge as well as an intellectual one. So that can lead people to kind of not take seriously objections that maybe their policies aren't right. So if you think around things around equality and diversity, et cetera, I am very, very worried that there is an attack on that agenda. I think we still do have to think a lot about diversity and equality, et cetera, and it shouldn't be diminished. But I think that a lot of people who promote those causes have not helped themselves by not being open to the fact that some of the things they've done may not have actually had the effect they wanted to have. Right. So they take the challenge against the diversity program as an attack on the value of diversity, and they don't stop to think. Well, actually, maybe there is something counterproductive about that. And I think, seriously, I think it's the problem with a lot of what we might call left or progressive politics that there's not enough willingness to question certain policies which are actually were devised as pragmatic means to achieve certain aims, take on a kind of untouchable status because they're assumed to be necessary for having those values. I hope I've been clear.
- [20:55]
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- [21:29]
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- [21:36]
Mia Sorrenti
In tulum.
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- [22:27]
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- [23:32]
Richella Shah
One last thing before we start talking about kind of the political situation now in more detail. Facts. Facts are disputed. As we've established, philosophers actually rarely agree. Part of the role of a philosopher is to challenge what might be perceived as a fact. But how do you deal with facts? Is there a methodical way to think about facts and statistics without becoming a conspiracy theorist?
- [24:01]
Julian Baggini
Well, yeah. I mean, there are such things as facts. I think we shouldn't dispute that. I think that the problem is though that, well, there are two or three things you have to do. First of all, you have to work out if something is a genuine fact or not. Right. So it might sound obvious, but I find it very dispiriting how often on things like social media, which I engage with less and less these days, how people who should know better will repost something as though it's a fact and it turns out that it is not, because people are very keen. So people, people are very easy to believe something to be true if it fits what they're expecting to be true. So they hear that Donald Trump or Kemi Badenot has said something terrible and they think, oh, that's the kind of thing they like to say. They repeat it without checking it. So there is that fundamental question of making sure the fact is a fact. And one thing you need to think about there is simply, where does it come from? But the other thing is, what does the fact mean? I think the problem is we have this expression that facts speak for themselves. Actually, a lot of the time they don't. You've really got to ask, what does that fact really mean? I mean, actually, in a book I wrote many years ago, I gave an example. There was a little bit of a Ferrari about what proportion of employees at the BBC came from ethnic minorities. It was very low. But actually the strange thing was at that time that proportion was higher than the ethnic minority population in the uk, Right. So it's really weird, people were like, you know, again, this was coming from probably sort of progressive press or something. Always very similar, at least to that figure. It was being presented as though it were a low figure. But you need to know the context and understand whether it was a good figure or not. And again, even then you then got to dig deeper and, right, okay, where are these positions? You might find that. So again, you might say, oh, no, no problem with diversity. 20% of our employees are ethnic minorities, which is higher than that in the population. Where are they in the company? If it turns out that those 20% of ethnic minority people are working in the cleaning job, security doors, they're not senior management, then that fact, which is supposed to speak for itself, doesn't speak for itself at all. And I think that so often it's very actually difficult to come up with a one sentence fact which doesn't merit further examination to understand exactly what it means. And, you know, we're all kind of, you know, psychologists have this term, cognitive misers. Yeah, we don't want to think more than we really have to. So when presented with a Fact, which looks like it's stark and ends the debate, we jump on it. So I think anytime, any statistics in particular, every time you find a statistic, if you just get into the habit of stop and think, what does it actually mean? Does it mean what it seems to mean? So often just doing that will lead you to understand it better. So one thing I say, the introduction to that book actually, was that we're living in a world where people are always on the out. Look out for hacks. You know, you want health hacks, diet hacks. Yeah, all things you think little quick things you can do that can get you to where you want to be quicker. Right. We're always looking for shortcuts. And I think the key thing about good thinking is there are no hacks. And it's the opposite. You don't want cognitive hacks, you want cognitive speed bumps. You need to slow down if you want to think properly. The most important thing you do is take your time, think, ask the extra question. And that's not really in the spirit of the times. And it's not really easy to do when our attentions are being attacked all the time. So it really isn't easy.
- [28:02]
Richella Shah
That is quite a big thing. There is no hack, there is no shortcut. Gosh. Okay, but look, philosophers are not immune to bias. And when we're thinking about facts, I mean, how do you know that your own biases aren't making you misconstrue facts? It's quite possible, isn't it?
- [28:22]
Julian Baggini
Yeah, of course it is. Now, so this is. This is the thing where. How do you get out of this? So the point is you might then lead to this great skepticism about, you know, oh, well, you know, so. So we're all biased, aren't we? But then what follows from that? We're all biased. It's true. We've all got our blind spots, We've all got our biases, we've all got our prejudices. That's true. What follows from that? Well, it just means that no one person is going to get everything right and that we have to pay extra attention to try and be aware of those things. The point is that given we all have these biases and weaknesses, et cetera, you've got a couple of choices here, which is either that you try to become as aware of them as you can and to do your best to overcome them, or you just go with them. That's the choice. There's no option of eliminating them. We can't eliminate them. But you can work hard to try and overcome them. And so this thing about self questioning. So one of the chapter headings is I think, question everything. And one of the most important things is to question yourself. So again, this goes. This is another epistemic virtue, right? It's about character. I do think character is important to so many things in life. And to have a philosophical character, you've got to have that constant sort of habit, if you like, of questioning yourself, seeing. Have I really got that right? Recognizing what your biases might be and not because by that process you can ever become perfectly objective, but you want to just do better. And I think that's the point. The absence of the impossibility of perfection is not an argument for trying to do better. Right? And so when people say there's no such thing as absolute truth, there's no such thing as certain knowledge, there's no such thing as totally unbiased thinking, all those things are true. But it doesn't mean that we shouldn't do our best to get as close to those as. As we can, knowing that we're going to fail. And that also leads to humility, the other virtue. You need to have that certain element of humility, recognizing the fact that you're not immune from all the weaknesses that other people have. So have that little bit of humility to accept the fact that you could be wrong about anything.
- [30:42]
Richella Shah
Okay, so we thought about thinking a bit, unpacked it a little bit. But polarization is the word of our age. Just think about what that means. Do you actually agree that it is as destructive as people are saying? And are we living in a particularly idiotic or polarized time?
- [31:01]
Julian Baggini
Well, yeah, I mean, this question bothers me a lot. I mean, I'm actually, it's what I'm writing a book about at the moment is about trying to overcome polarized thinking. It's quite interesting this, because we say almost instinctively we're becoming more polarized as a society. And it's not quite as straightforward as that. If you look at politics, for example, let's go back to when I came to political awareness, right back in the 1980s. There were kind of, for a long time in the uk there was Labour and the Conservatives and most people voted for the same party their entire lives. And you could predict who was going to vote for on the basis of their background. Things were, there was a real rigid polarity in that system. Today what we see is greater voter volatility. People are changing who they vote for more than ever. So that doesn't quite fit the Neat polarization thesis, does it? And there was a great study, I can't remember all the details. A bunch of people from the LSC did quite recently, which looked into this, and they were really good. They were saying what's increased actually is that the polarization is only at the extremes. At the extremes you've got polarization. But the point is that two things are happening. First of all, those polarized voices are dominating the debate thanks to things like the Internet, social media, more than they used to. So we see the world as being more polarized simply because the more polarized voices are getting stronger. But what they say, what's really increased is not so much polarization as hostility. People are increasingly hostile to those that they disagree with. And they've done all sorts of social scientific sort of studies on this. Interesting enough, people are even more hostile to people within their own political group. In fact, even more so. They find that people are most hostile to people. If you're a Democrat, for example, in the US you're more hostile almost to people within the Democratic Party who disagree with than you are to other people. This is a typical kind of thing. So the discourse is getting more polarized and the atmosphere is getting more hostile. But actually most people are not stuck at a rigid extremes of opinion at all. And that's kind of a reason for a little bit of hope, I think. But the reason why polarization is a bad thing in general is that polarization is an instance of a kind of binary worldview in which, you know, things are always black and white and it's either, always either or. And as we know, so many things just aren't like that. You know, most things. You know, the book I'm writing about is really about what I call spectrum thinking. It's like it doesn't always work, but for most things, if you find yourself in a situation where people saying A or B, don't think of them as two binary choices, think of a spectrum where you've got A at one end and B at the other and every shade in between. And that's a more nuanced way of thinking, but it generally leads to a better, I think, more clarity.
- [34:12]
Richella Shah
Another buzzword then that we talk about a lot right now is post truth. Does that work? Does that even make sense in a philosophical context?
- [34:22]
Julian Baggini
Well, I mean, again, this is a very interesting one, and this again may come out of some bad philosophy. I think the interesting thing here is that a lot of the kind of philosophers, French, German philosophers, whatever, who kind of attacked truth with a capital T they saw that as an emancipatory thing. They thought the problem was actually, in a way, they didn't really ever think there was no such thing as truth. They were against the idea that what passes for truth was often a reflection of power, that a certain elite determined what the truth was for other people. And so they thought the attack of truth was part of an emancipatory project of liberating people. And then years later, what happens is actually post truth becomes a way of casting doubt on everything and that people don't have to prove their views anymore. What's true is just what you believe it to be. But again, I think that can be exaggerated. I don't think when people say, oh, well, what's the truth anyway? Or what's true for you? You know, I'm entitled to my truth, et cetera, et cetera. People do say these things, but if you look at what people do rather than what they say or. And some of the things they say, no one seriously believes that. So let's go back to when people got really cross with Tony Blair. He was blier was the thing, wasn't it? People felt that the government lied to them and they were angry about that. People were angry with the Johnson government because of what they thought were their lies about how they behaved during COVID et cetera. The fact of the matter is that in practice, you can see that people are very, very capable of recognizing there's a difference between truth and falsehood. And they hate being lied to and get very, very cross when they're lied to. So the idea that we're generally in some post truth world doesn't ring true for that. I think what is significant though, is that confidence in certain sources of truth, that's what's become problematized. People, I think, are struggling to sort of understand what is a reliable source of truth. A lot of people don't trust the mainstream media anymore. They don't trust a lot of experts, scientists, et cetera. So I think the crisis of truth is more crisis of, as it were, authority about where people will accept their truth from. And the reason that's important is because it goes back to what we were saying earlier about thinking for yourself. There is no way in which you can establish all truths for yourself. Truth relies on the fact that we take certain sources of truth as being generally reliable. Not blindly, not infallibly, but you need to be able to trust certain things as sources of truth in order to get on in the world. And people are increasingly finding what source do I trust? And I think that's the real problem.
- [37:17]
Richella Shah
Well, and they're being encouraged to doubt sources by people in whose interest it is to do that.
- [37:22]
Julian Baggini
Yes, I think that's exactly right. And so, you know, I think when people think about Trump, I mean, I don't like talking about Trump because it's very easy to get into a kind of making the assumption that everyone around you for someone like me, that everyone thinks Trump is an idiot and no one agrees. And that's simply not true. Right. Plenty of people have defenses of him, but people who oppose Trump listen to a lot of things he said and go, you know, it's obviously not true. Why is it that the people who vote for him believe him? Right. And I think there are different answers to that. But I think partly it's the case that actually for a certain group of people, they don't believe anyone's telling the truth. Right. They don't take everything Trump says at face value, but they certainly didn't believe what Kamala Harris was saying either. So in a sense, all bets are off. It's not really someone. It's not whether someone's telling the truth or not. It's, are they standing for me or are they standing for someone else? Right. So they don't even expect him to be truthful. They vote for him on the basis that he stands for them. But also, there's another element, and again, not everyone's the same, of, you know, a certain feeling that in a world in which you can't establish the truth independently because it's all too confused, the only way, therefore, to go is with your gut. So you know what I mean. And if you think about it, this would rationally make sense. If it were genuinely the case that there was no way of establishing the truth independently, then how would you decide what was true or false? The only thing left would be your gut. So in a weird way, people are being rational given their premise. If their premise is I can't trust anybody, then they are relying on the only thing left for them, which is their gut.
- [39:14]
Mia Sorrenti
Thanks for listening to Intelligence Squared. This episode was produced by Margarita Volpatto and it was edited by Mark Roberts. For ad free episodes and full length recordings, you can become a member@intelligencesquared.com membership and to join us at future live events, just head over to intelligencesquared.com attend to see our full events program. You've been listening to Intelligence Squared. Thanks for joining us.
- [39:57]
Julian Baggini
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