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- [00:01]
Katherine Elgin
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Carrie Figdor
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Katherine Elgin
I'm freaking out.
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Katherine Elgin
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Katherine Elgin
the New Books Network
- [00:35]
Sarah Tyson or Blaine Neufeld
hello and welcome to New Books in Philosophy, a podcast channel with the New Books Network. I'm Carrie Figdor, professor of Philosophy at the University of Iowa. I'm co host of the channel along with Sarah Tyson and Blaine Neufeld. Together we bring you conversations with philosophers about their new books in a wide range of areas of contemporary philosophical inquiry. Today's interview is with Katherine Elgin, professor of Philosophy of Education at Harvard University. Her new book, Epistemic Ecology, is just out from the MIT Press. Humans are highly inquisitive, yet fallible and cognitively limited. How can we improve our epistemic lot despite our limitations in epistemic ecology? Elgin develops a model in which individuals learn to rely on communal epistemic resources, such as communally endorsed standards, for correcting ourselves, and in turn, we contribute to those resources through our active epistemic agency. In this way, she shows how epistemic autonomy and epistemic interdependence are mutually reinforcing rather than intention. Elgin also distinguishes between belief, which entails truth, and acceptance, an active epistemic attitude that constitutively involves reflection and assessment. This capacity for reflection is learned, but we use it widely in sports bars, for example, just as much as in academic context. Let's turn to the interview.
- [02:15]
Carrie Figdor
Hello, Katherine Elgin, welcome to New Books in Philosophy.
- [02:18]
Katherine Elgin
Oh, thank you. It's nice to be here.
- [02:21]
Carrie Figdor
So I'm really looking forward to our discussion about epistemic ecology. Before we get to the book, tell me a bit about yourself. You know, how you became a philosopher or philosopher of education and how the book came about.
- [02:37]
Katherine Elgin
Okay. The deep background to how I became as a philosopher, I don't really know because I kind of think I always was. I remember when I was in high school, I was taking geometry and I demanded to know, first, why do we have to prove things if we already know them? And secondly, why should we trust the proofs if we have to rely on axioms I felt, after the fact, kind of sorry for my poor math teacher who had to answer these questions, but that was my sort of ordinary take on things. So I got to college. I didn't even know what philosophy was, but I sort of thought it was like religion without God, which is to ask the questions that religion asks, but don't defer to God for the answer. So I took a philosophy course, and that was it. That was it forevermore. So my interests are mainly in epistemology, but is epistemology quite broadly construed? Because it also includes the way that the arts advance understanding. So it's not focusing on S knows that P or anything like that. And mainly my interest is on the nature and scope of understanding and that we can bring to. How does it bring us to this book? And again, we can go kind of deep history. I'm married to a scientist, and I've been married to him for over 50 years, so it's been a while. And it occurred to me over time that he and his friends did not talk the way epistemologists seem to think they ought to be talking. They didn't talk about truth when they had a success. They didn't talk about finding the truth. And it didn't seem as though this was just a terminological difference, because the metrics for success that they used did not seem to map onto truth. So eventually I kind of decided to ask, well, what are they doing? And that led. Well, it led first to my 1996 book Considered Judgment, and then beyond that to the 2017 book, true enough, where I took very seriously the importance of models and idealizations in science that aren't true and don't purport to be true. And nobody thinks they're true, but they're core to scientific understanding. And among other things, just as just a slight footnote, to get back to the bit about the arts, it seemed to me that that's very much the same thing that was going on when we say of a work of art. I really learned something from it. I mean, it was false. What could you have learned? But the answer is you really did. So that was the kind of running start to the theory of understanding that I developed, which basically decenters epistemology, looks for systematicity. It requires answering to the evidence, but it doesn't claim to be true. So finally we get to epistemic ecology, the latest round in this, where I build on what I did in True Enough and say that basically there's a kind of ecological story where there are three elements. First there's the individual, then there's the community, and then there's the world. And as with a regular ecology, these are all mutually supportive. So the organism adapts to its environment and the environment changes to accommodate the organism. And if the organisms are social animals, part of adapting to the environment is adjusting to each other to form a community, that the community adapts to the environment, to the individual, and so forth and so on. So we've got this three way thing and you might think, you know, this is going to blow up in your face because the world is resistant to the will. The world is just out there and we can adjust any way we please. But actually, I want to argue that there's something aside from the fact that there's a lot of the world that we do things with, there's the fact that the world as we know it isn't that passive. So we form the categories or systems of kind in terms of which we understand things, and they change with our understanding. So for example, when I was young and studying physics, electrons were particles. Now they're said to be clouds of charge. They're not particles at all. We've changed our conception of an electron, as with the growth of our understanding. And I think this is really critical. The world as we know it actually does change as we change our categorization and change our modes of access to the world. So the world also changes as something that we can understand when we devise new methods or new devices for finding stuff out. So that's the basic running start. And what I'm trying to do in this book is understand how this plays out. And one of the ways it plays out is a kind of fundamental change in the conception of the subject of epistemology. I construe us as epistemic agents where agency involves a capacity to do something. It's not Histology when you look at Descartes and kind of the whole thing that followed from Descartes has us being spectators. We're trying to look as carefully or as exactly or as accurately as possible at something in the world. And we get it right when we do that correctly. But I'm saying that we're agents. So issues like what can you do with what you purport to understand? What inferences can you draw? What activities can you engage in that you couldn't if you hadn't understood it that way comes to be much more significant.
- [09:34]
Carrie Figdor
Okay, let me. I mean, there's a lot there. So you sort of ran through a lot of the themes of the book, but also pushed it in a more anti. What I would take to be more of an anti realist direction that I got from it. And you may disagree with that, but
- [09:52]
Katherine Elgin
I do disagree with it because, I mean. Yeah, let me try this. In my view, all extensions are equally real. The ones that constitute what we call natural kinds. The extension of gru, the extension of green, the extension of everything on my desk except the telephone. They're all real. And the question is, among all the real ways that you could accurately describe reality, which ones are worth using? So you can be a realist about science or about whatever else you want to be a realist about, if that means that we're just trying to discover the way the world is and we succeed when we discover it, but that does not entail that the world is only one way. And so if you want to describe the world in terms of waves, you can do it. If you want to describe it in terms of particles, you can do it. There are going to be truths under each framework, but it's not at all anti realist. I think that at least, I mean. Okay, let me also say that realism has so many different descriptions, it's really hard to know what it is to be an anti realist anymore. But I think that this is consonant with many positions that take themselves to be realist. It's also consonant with many positions that don't. So I think that actually my position is completely neutral on this, largely because it doesn't do much metaphysics.
- [11:31]
Carrie Figdor
Yeah. I guess when you said the world changes as we change our categorization, that struck me as, you know, the world depends on us.
- [11:44]
Katherine Elgin
Well, I mean, it does. I mean, it doesn't exactly. I mean, the world as we understand it depends on us.
- [11:50]
Carrie Figdor
That can be true. Yeah.
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Katherine Elgin
And part of it is just because the, you know. Okay, take a very easy example, biological taxonomy. Here's a question for you. Why is it that coyotes aren't dogs? They're much more like some dogs, like, say, huskies and German shepherds, than huskies. And German shepherds are like Chihuahuas. But we draw a line. And actually the reason we draw that line is because coyotes can't be domesticated. It's not about something about their genetic structure that makes this a sharp line and the other one's less sharp lines. It's because we very much want to know which of these canines can be domesticated, because you wouldn't want to get a coyote for a sheepdog. And so there are facts, but there are way too many facts. And we just have to partition the world into the ones we care about.
- [12:53]
Sarah Tyson or Blaine Neufeld
Okay.
- [12:55]
Katherine Elgin
All right.
- [12:55]
Carrie Figdor
Well, I want to get to the. Were a number of things that you brought up about, you know, being an epistemic agent and, you know, the sort of the. The idea that we're active, we're not just passive spectators, you know, sort of a roughly Cartesian ish sort of view. And the. Of course, the book itself is about these interactions between us and, you know, individuals and the community as well as the world. So let me. Let me. I want to focus on the. The world, the. Sorry, the community bit, because a lot of that, A lot of the book has to do with how we interact with the community, you know, epistemic community and vice versa. So let me just. Let me ask specifically. I mean, one of the important points to. To me anyway, that you defend is the idea that we are both autonomous epistemic agents. So we're agents and that we have our autonomy, but also that there's an interdependence, a mutually. What you call mutually reinforcing, that the sort of autonomy and the interdependence that we have epistemically kind of go together. And I was wondering if you could explain that because it's not the usual way of. Usually these are things, these are seen as somehow intention. So can you explain a bit how this interview.
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Sarah Tyson or Blaine Neufeld
Yeah.
- [14:43]
Katherine Elgin
Okay. The easiest way is to sort of go back to Kant. I will say I am not a Kant scholar, and so if you want to yell at me for getting Kant wrong, that's okay with me. But here's something Kant does when he's describing autonomy. It's not in terms of doing whatever you please. It's in terms of setting yourself ends that you think are worthy of following. And I think that's right. The notion of autonomy is kind of built on the notion we have in political science of self governance, where a nation is self governing, roughly speaking, if it gets to make the laws that bind it and its citizens. So the conception of an autonomous agent is someone who is not kind of driven by his desires, but. But can assess his desires and see whether they're worthy of satisfaction. And this is going to be true in the epistemic realm as well. So one of the things, if we think about ourselves as epistemic agents, here's one of the things you might notice about us. First of all, we have all sorts of inputs on our central nervous systems, most of which we ignore. This is what William James called the booming, buzzing confusion that a baby confronts. And we ignore it because we learn what to pay attention to. And one of the things we learn is about ourselves as epistemic agents. So, for example, we learn to ignore or maybe marginalize considerations that we don't think are worthy of attention. So if you had a dream, why don't you take that seriously? Well, in my experience, dreams, although they're presentations of how things are, are not trustworthy, therefore, and so forth and so on. You have an irrational spark of fear that you forgot to lock the door. And as soon as you realize it's irrational, you just keep going. So we self monitor, but I suggest that our self monitoring is actually to some extent largely a function of having become part of a community that collectively teaches each and all of us which of our takes on things are worth taking seriously. And so if you, okay, if you have bad eyesight, which I do, you learned not to trust your visual inputs until you put your glasses on. You didn't just find out that you saw things differently when you put your glasses on. You had a sense that you saw them better. And I don't think you could get that on your own because there's nothing in the world itself that tells you why shouldn't the world look like an impressionist picture? I mean, it didn't promise you sharp edges. But when you find out how there are standards of correctness that people have constructed and you reflectively endorse them, then you trust some of your judgments and you don't trust others. But that means you have to defer to the community. Can get even more problematic than just putting your glasses on. People can't tell by themselves that they're colorblind because their color vision is consistent. It's just not consistent with what anybody else sees. So in all of these ways, we become dependent on larger communities, but not just on any community. Community that we have reason to trust. And we collectively design these communities to say trust this, don't trust that, do this, don't do that. These inferences are valid. That's question begging and so forth.
- [19:04]
Carrie Figdor
Okay, so can you say a bit more about how these communities are constructed? I mean, one of the things that you raise, not, you know, in somewhere in the middle of the book, is the idea that, you know, communities might have standards that, that, that actually don't
- [19:35]
Sarah Tyson or Blaine Neufeld
promote their epistemic aims. Maybe they promote other aims instead.
- [19:42]
Carrie Figdor
How, how do communities, you know, epistemic or I guess epistemic communities, how do they form, what makes them promote understanding as opposed to promoting other goals of human communities?
- [19:57]
Katherine Elgin
I'M not sure I like the as opposed to in that. But we'll leave that aside for a minute. But here's what happens. We can imagine the sort of proto community of the sort that people like Bernard Williams talk about where you have a bunch of individuals who are interdependent and we can be our hunter, gatherer ancestors or something, and they have, let's say, common goals, but they realize that some people are better than others at promoting those goals, so they come to defer to those people. Maybe somebody can see further than the other, maybe somebody can shoot better than the other. I don't know. And aside from just deferring to some other person, they also therefore start developing standards about what they would like in someone who can do that. You can see better than I can, maybe just because you're taller than I am. So you can see over things that I can't see over. So I'd like to see further. So that's a good making property. Maybe there are people who are better at inferences. If this is so, then that isn't so, which can promote your hunting and gathering. And so we find out which inferences do that and we endorse them and don't endorse the ones that spend too much time with wishful thinking. We start out maybe appealing to the oracle at Delphi and then realize it's not reliable and develop another standard for predicting the future because asking the oracle just hasn't worked. And so we devise our standards sort of in tandem with our judgments. This is the bit about what I called epistemic iteration. And it's very beautifully explained in Hassat Kang's book on temperature where you have something that kind of works and then you try and figure out ways to use your successes and failures to get something better. And this is a relentless process. It just keeps going. Now, does it always work? No, it doesn't. Sometimes you make little mistakes, sometimes you make big mistakes, and then you have to backtrack. And I think that that's just the way things are for finite individuals. We don't end up with things that we can consider fail safe.
- [22:40]
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- [23:09]
Katherine Elgin
Well, that's.
- [23:10]
Carrie Figdor
Yeah, so I think this was one of the concerns I had. You know, overall, as I was as I was reading the book. And I'll put it in terms of what you just sort of mentioned, you know, sort of the oracle at Delphi is, you know, not reliable. So we should, you know, or, you know, stop asking your uncle because he's not reliable. This assumes that there is a key role for truth. To me, at least that's what it sounds like to me, because I can imagine easily, I mean, a situation where you have an epistemic community where the oracle is reliable because they are satisfying various communal goals and standards, and the reliability judgments adjust to those standards and those goals rather than the other way around. And so one question is, you distinguished understanding from knowledge or truth seeking, but it seems like truth does play an important core role there for directing things in a particular direction, even if we don't, you know, get there. So that's sort of one. One question. Okay, well then take that and then I'll follow up.
- [24:55]
Sarah Tyson or Blaine Neufeld
Yeah.
- [24:56]
Katherine Elgin
First of all, I'm not against truth. I am against saying either that we get it or we've got it. So if you want to say that truth is like the pole star, you can do that. I'm not sure it's right because I think we change our goals as we progress. But the issue that you're talking about is I don't think about truth versus other stuff. I don't know, getting along. Let's just call it social accommodations of some sort. It's about something like having cognitive ends, wanting to understand how things hang together. That's Sellers phrase. And that may be very different from some sort of social and political aspirations you could have. But the problem or a problem. Okay, a couple of problems with truth. Number one, I like truth. Partly I like truth because I'm a real fan of classical logic. And classical logic is truth preserving. So whenever you have truths, you can deduce truths from them beautifully. It's just that a lot of the stuff that we epistemically credit isn't true. And then therefore you can't do it. You can't, you know, if you say P is true and Q is true, then P and Q is true, you're home free. If you say P is approximately true or P is proto true and Q is proto true, it does not entail that their conjunction is. So some of the powers of truth, the ones I really love, don't transmit. When we relax our standards, and because of our finitude and fallibility, we always are, often using more relaxed standards. Now the thing about, there's another point about reliability that I'd like to bring up reliability is a statistical notion and trustworthiness isn't. Trustworthiness is something you can reasonably count on. Now, why does this matter? Well, how reliable something is, okay, the famous example of the atom bomb that actually showed up in Oppenheimer, but is actually true. They predicted that the first time they tested a hopefully controlled nuclear reaction, there was a 5% chance that the atmosphere would blow up. Normally, if you say 95% probable that this is going to succeed, you say, just do it. But when you look at that case, you say, that's crazy to do it with that big a chance of disaster. And that means that just testing the reliability wasn't good enough. Because you also have to have this judgment, a human judgment, and not just another mathematical factor about is this good enough? And that's the part where I think that something more needs to be said than just, what's the probability that this statement is true, that that statement is true, the other statement is true? Because that won't give us what we want. We have to ask how does it hang together? Which means how do we validate our standards of evidence? How do we calibrate our instruments? How do we vindicate our judgments of importance? And it all has to go together or else we're not doing justice to our own take on reality.
- [28:51]
Carrie Figdor
Okay, well, let me follow up with the other part of the question that I was having, which was one of the. One of the worries I kind of had was the there, there's a sense, and maybe I completely got this wrong, but my, my sense was that the epistemic agents that you describe is. Is sort of an ideal. And I kind of worried about how this ideal epistemic agent is related to the actual epistemic agents, like, you know, real human beings. And one, you know, I can stop there, but I mean, some of the questions were about, you know, you know, when we, you know, when we allow an authority to preempt our own,
- [30:08]
Sarah Tyson or Blaine Neufeld
you
- [30:08]
Carrie Figdor
know, acceptance or thinking about a particular
- [30:12]
Katherine Elgin
problem
- [30:15]
Carrie Figdor
or the various virtues that an epistemic agent should follow. And I kind of had the idea that, you know, people who are
- [30:33]
Sarah Tyson or Blaine Neufeld
not
- [30:33]
Carrie Figdor
so reflective about their beliefs or their. Or the. The propositions they accept or their standards. Right. So you mentioned, you know, adopting the standards of the community. I kind of wondered if there were. There was a little bit too much, you know, idealization or maybe just a really high bar for an epistemic agent who, you know, in the epistemic community, you know, in this ecological relationship, that these were a Bit too idealized, even when taking into account our finitude, you know, and fallibility. So is. Do you think that the ideal, the epistemic agent that you describe in the book is a bit idealized, or do you think this is the way most people are? Because I look around and I see a lot of people who don't seem to satisfy a lot of the reflective sorts of activities that an agent is supposed to do.
- [31:50]
Katherine Elgin
Okay, this is good. First of all, it is idealized. But I want to say two things about idealization. One is this sort of. One that we think about sort of in ethics, about perfectionism. But the other one is like the ideal gas law, which is not a perfect gas in any sense. It's merely an ideal in the sense that it has marginalized considerations that don't bear on the questions that you might use it for. So it's certainly an ideal in the second sense in that I didn't say anything about what happens if somebody who is supposed to be reflectively endorsing for cognitive ends also has a toothache. I didn't say anything about that. And I think. And I don't actually think that it's bad that it's an ideal, because I'm saying that epistemology is a normative theory. It's not about what people do. It's not a descriptive theory. This is how people act. But it may be a theory that aligns with how people act when we think they're acting well, as cognitive agents. In the same way, there's an ethical theory in isn't about how people act. It's about how they should act and sometimes come some pretty close to acting. So I don't think that that's actually all that worrisome. But I think you're lurking on a point that is very important. And that's something that comes up sort of in the middle of the book that has to do with the fact that I am teaching in a school of education, and that's that people have to be educated to be capable of the sort of reflection and reflective endorsement and stuff that I'm talking about. And if they're not, then they're not in a position to do this. Now, I actually think people are better at this. I mean, I talk a lot about scientific communities because science is kind of the enterprise, does the most about putting its cards on the table. It says, this is our methodology. These are our standards, these are our metrics. So there's a lot more clarity there than in, let's say, ordinary life or Literary criticism or something like that. But one of the things that I do in the book that I actually. I mean, this is actually pretty important, is I try to make it clear that it's not just about learned societies or something. I talk about sports bars, which I think are absolutely fascinating places, because the people who go to sports bars are extraordinarily knowledgeable about what they're watching on television. And they make judgments and they argue with each other. And the arguments are really quite refined. And they appeal to evidence and they appeal to background considerations. They appeal to vast numbers of things. Cause they know a lot about the sport and how it's played. And these are not nuclear physicists. But in a particular domain, they're very, very knowledgeable. And in another case, when I talk about the Hassa Chang's bit about epistemic iteration, I then go on to explain how it's used in devising a recipe for soup. So again, that's very ordinary where people are being thoughtful and they know how to be thoughtful about a particular topic. But as you can also say, look, there's a lot of time when we aren't thoughtful. We just kind of wander through life not giving stuff a bunch of thought. And that's true too. And I think, you know, I mean, a lot of things are reasonably entrenched. Maybe in Aristotelian terms, you'd say they become second nature so you don't have to think about them anymore. I mean, you drive to work and don't think about your route because you know it so well. And unless you know there's some impediment, you don't need to. You know, that isn't that you're not being reflective, it's that you've done the reflection necessary so you can get on with something else.
- [36:25]
Carrie Figdor
Yeah.
- [36:27]
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- [36:56]
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- [37:18]
Carrie Figdor
Well, I think, I think my worry, you know, because this is epistemic ecology and because of the central of the community, my worries were more from the community.
- [37:33]
Katherine Elgin
Yeah.
- [37:33]
Carrie Figdor
Okay, good. You know, that, that, that. Yeah, I mean, that's really okay.
- [37:39]
Katherine Elgin
One of the things you're pointing to that I don't do much with and maybe I should be doing a lot more with is pointing. I mean, I, I do say what the community has to be like, and I say, you know, I characterize it in terms of legislating members of a realm of epistemic ends, which certainly that's idealized. But it's quite clear that there are a lot of other communities and a lot of them that we could point to that are corrupt. They're corrupt in the sense that, you know, there are power dynamics or corrupt in the sense that they have other goals that may conflict with the goals of understanding how the world is. And that's true. And that's actually. I mean, this is a real life problem. And it's a real life problem because aside from all the other stuff, when somebody says something and you ask, is this something I should rationally endorse, is this something I should accept, Maybe we should spend more time attending to why is this piece of information being given to us? And maybe we should think that he's got some motivation that I don't really trust, so I shouldn't take him at his word. And that's surely right. And we should probably be a lot more skeptical of a lot of the stuff that we just kind of take for granted. I think that's surely right.
- [39:14]
Carrie Figdor
But that, that sort of tells against the whole, like the. See, this was, you know, to go back to what we talked about earlier with the. In with the mutual reinforcing right of the autonomy and the interdependence. Now you seem to be bringing up, which was a worry that I had, which was. I do think that often these are intention. And this is one of the cases in which it is intention.
- [39:46]
Katherine Elgin
Sure. I mean, in a lot of places it is intention. I mean, this goes back to your point about is this idealized? I'm saying it doesn't have to be intention if we form the right kinds of communities, and we sometimes do. So I'm not saying this is the norm. It is an ideal theory. And I'm saying this is some and it's an ideal that makes sense of, I think, the way we can claim to make epistemic progress. There's a lot that goes against epistemic progress and there's a lot of stupid stuff we do and it's not my fault, but it is. But simply saying somehow or other we've made some progress here. And if to some extent the individuals and the communities worked in something like this way, then we can make sense of this. And if we think we want to make further progress, we can think about areas where now we desperately need to make progress, like climate change, and ask what kind of community should we have and what kind of epistemic agents should be involved in that community if we're going to actually make progress here? Then you can say, but aren't all these forces working against it? I say, yes, that's why we have such a horrible time. It's not like the human race has sort of said, okay, now we got to stop all this craziness and just get on with it. Because that would make it easier, wouldn't make it easy, because it's a really hard question, but we wouldn't have to worry about being co opted by capitalist forces or political forces or need to do other stuff. And I think that's just a fact. This is not me. But if the ideal is a community like this could do something like that, then we can ask how close can we come to having this kind of community and how would that enable it to do something like that? I think that's not a bad question.
- [42:07]
Carrie Figdor
Okay, no, it isn't. And I'll just one question along this vein again. So I'm thinking, you know, you did, you know, it is an ideal theory. And I'm thinking, you know, kind of along the lines of Charles Mills, you know, against, you know, for non ideal theory. So assuming, you know, if you were to relax one idealization or what strikes me as an idealization, which is, you know, when you talk about power dynamics as, you know, playing a role, but you sort of characterize them as, you know, maybe there's some sort of corruption or something like that. And I kind of wondered what your epistemic ecology would look like if you relaxed the assumption that the epistemic community is between, you know, basically free and equal epistemic agents and you built the power hierarchy into that.
- [43:15]
Katherine Elgin
Okay, I think that's really important because here's what you would lose. Suppose we have a hierarchy and I mean, there are hierarchies of expertise that make perfectly good sense but if we say, well, I mean, actually, the best example of this is the one I give about in Valjeant, where the hierarchy was the knowledgeable geologists who said, don't worry, the land is stable. There's no problem. And the people who were at the lower end of the hierarchy, who were basically ignored were the people who lived in the area and said, no, it's not. We have landslides. And the people in power who had all of these scientific models that reassured them that if there were no surface problems with this kind of limestone, there were no problems. It was a disaster in the sense that thousands of people got killed because there was, in fact, a landslide. And the people at the bottom of the hierarchy were silenced or their voices were just not taken seriously because they didn't speak the language of the academy. They didn't have models, they didn't have equations. They just had stories of landslides in the area. And so what happens when you give up on Free and Equal is voices get silenced and information doesn't get transferred or doesn't get given its due. And that's. I mean, that's epistemically a very bad thing. And so saying I know better. Just shut up is really not a good idea from a strictly epistemological point of view. Because sometimes, I mean, this is Sandra Harding's point about positionality. Sometimes people who are at the outer edges actually know stuff that people in the center don't. And if you want to understand something, you really better find out what those people know, too.
- [45:24]
Carrie Figdor
Okay, well, let me ask. Let me move to. There was an interesting point that you made sort of in the latter half of the book about disagreements where, you know, you can have people with different expertises, and when do you, you know, when do you defer to them and all, you know, that kind of stuff. But what was. What was interesting was how you defended the idea that, you know, even when you have, like, peer disagreement, apparently irreconcilable, or at least for now, there's still value to be gotten out of those situations. Could you say a bit about that? Because I thought that was, to me, a new sort of point.
- [46:14]
Katherine Elgin
Oh, okay. This is okay. Standardly, when people talk about disagreement, the assumption is, if there's a disagreement, someone has made a mistake, and then we start arguing about whose mistake it is. Now, obviously, if there's a disagreement, you say P, I say not P. At least one of us is wrong. So in terms of the truth value of P, it's either P or not P. And that's it. But it doesn't follow that anybody has made a mistake. Because when it comes to how you come to the conclusion that P, there's a lot of stuff you're taking into account. You have evidence. Maybe you say P, I say not P. We have different evidence. Well, now we're going to. That one is always covered. But then there's the weight of evidence. How much significance do you attach to the evidence? Well, there's no algorithm for saying how much significance you attach to the evidence, so you might attach more significance to it than I do. There's a question about what methods you think are the best methods to use to establish whether P. And within limits, there can be reasonable disagreement about whether this method is better than that. I mean, there's all sorts of disagreement in empirical social sciences about qualitative versus quantitative measurements, about one kind of qualitative measurement over another. So we could disagree about that. We could disagree about how good the evidence has to be before you're in a position to conclude the P. And all of these are totally legitimate and they're totally reasonable because we don't actually have anything like an algorithm that says exactly these standards have to be met along exactly these dimensions. And then you get to say that P. We don't have that. So there's reasonable disagreement. And I also say that I think this is a good thing because I think that we learn from it. We learn, for example, how much you're depending on a particular standard of the weight of evidence. If you say, that's good enough for me. So it's not that the evidence kind of hit you over the head and said, now you have to believe me. Rather, it's that you had some evidence and you decided it was good enough. And communities can really differ over this, and I think reasonably differ over it.
- [49:09]
Carrie Figdor
Okay, I think I have time for one more question. So let me go back to. At the very beginning of our conversation, you mentioned gaining understanding from art, for example. And you also have an assessment here of the epistemic role of aesthetic features, for example, in science, famously, when a theory is elegant. I mean, that's one of the words that is usually taken to be an aesthetic judgment about an equation or a theory or maybe a experimental design or something. And can you explain your idea that such judgments play a sort of a gatekeeping role in, you know, being, you know, leading or helping us towards understanding?
- [50:18]
Katherine Elgin
Sure. The. Okay, we have, you know, people do talk about beautiful theories, elegant theories, elegant equations, all of this stuff. And typically, I mean, I think It's a real question. So you know, why should we care about that? And some people think Ivanova is one, that it's conducive to truth. A beautiful theory is more likely to be true. I think that's a complete non starter. There's no reason to think so. And there are lots of historical examples where it's manifestly false. I mean, you can't do better than Aristotle on the truth of physics, on the beauty of physics. But it doesn't work. But I don't want to say therefore that these things are just sort of idle asides. So what I suggested is this, that what they do is this is tentatively fallibly can be overridden. But they set desiderata for what we're looking for in an understanding of a certain sort. And we can see why they do so. So let's take elegance, because that's actually the best example. Think about elegance as a property of, I don't know, I don't know, fashion. The little black dress is elegant. Why? Because it has just what's needed and nothing more. That applies equally to scientific experiments. So one of the things I talk about is the Miller Urey experiment, which is a totally beautiful, elegant experiment because it includes everything that's needed and nothing more. Basically the idea they wanted to ask how life could have evolved. So the Miller Urey experiment took chemicals that were believed to be around in prebiotic times, sealed them in the proper proportions, sealed them in a device and basically they put a few sparks to mimic lightning and set the thing going. And chemicals interacted, causing other chemicals which interacted, which causes other chemicals which interacted in this sealed device and came up with 13amino acids. Now what makes it a beautiful experiment is it is so clean there are no complicating factors that you could even think of. There was no way that this could have been done by anything but the interaction of these chemicals. It is just an elegant experiment because there's nothing superfluous there. And it's beautiful by the way, the apparatus looks like something you could have done for your high school science project. So it's not even kind of weird complicated thing where you think something's sneaking in. It's really very pristine. And the idea that I talk about there is that the elegance of it is a reason to think that this result is reliable because we can't think of any other way that this result could have come about. And a more baroque apparatus or experiment. You have a lot of yeah, but, yeah, but, yeah, but that would make you not Trust it as much. So I think that the idea that elegance is a desideratum is because it's going to promote our epistemic ends now. It's not. You can't always get it. You do have that large hadron collider, which is awfully complicated. And saying, I don't like it because it's too complicated, you're going to sacrifice too much. But when you can get it, you want it.
- [54:24]
Carrie Figdor
Okay, well, I think we're about out of time. Was there anything you wanted to add? You know, there was a lot going on in the book. We didn't get to all of it, obviously. Was there some important point that you want to make that we didn't cover?
- [54:43]
Katherine Elgin
Okay. One thing I think I probably should say is I changed from talking about belief to acceptance.
- [54:50]
Carrie Figdor
Yeah, we didn't do that.
- [54:51]
Katherine Elgin
And the reason I do that, I think is important because to believe that P is to believe that P is true. And so you immediately, if you say we're talking about understanding in terms of beliefs, you've built truth in, but you can accept things as working hypotheses, you can accept them as approximations, you can accept them as idealizations, and you're not committed to their truths. And I think that that actually turns out to be a very important change because instead of truth being carried along for free, you're going to have to justify saying this is all acceptable. And by the way, it's true, you're not going to get that one for free. And I think that actually turns out to be really important and really important for the growth of inquiry, because I think we always start and end in the middle. We always want more, we're always dissatisfied. And that actually is a great thing.
- [55:55]
Carrie Figdor
Okay, good. Okay, I'm glad you got it. You added that in because I did want to ask about that, but we are out of time. So as a last question,
- [56:11]
Sarah Tyson or Blaine Neufeld
what's on
- [56:11]
Carrie Figdor
your agenda for the. For the short term or medium term future?
- [56:17]
Katherine Elgin
Well, I mean, one of the things I've found in doing all this work is there are always things that I haven't done enough yet. And one of the things that I recently discovered is I say that understanding is a comprehensive theory that answers to the evidence and fosters the advancement of inquiry. And the last phrase, the bit about the advancement of inquiry, I didn't do enough on. So I'm looking more at issues of epistemic iteration. One of the things that I realized is if you say that a theory isn't just a closed, complete thing, in itself, but it's got to foster further inquiry. That inquiry might feed back and challenge it. So there's going to be a reflexive element. Again, I think this is really wonderful because I think the advancement of inquiry regularly does challenge what we've already accepted, and that's part of the way we make progress. So that's what I'm working on. Who knows if I'll get anywhere.
- [57:29]
Carrie Figdor
Well, excellent. Yeah, that's kind of an important topic, I would say, so I look forward to seeing your work on that, but we are, for now, out of time, so I want to thank you again for taking the time to talk with
- [57:46]
Sarah Tyson or Blaine Neufeld
New Books in Philosophy about your book.
- [57:48]
Katherine Elgin
Thank you. Well, this was fun.
- [57:50]
Carrie Figdor
Okay, bye.
- [57:51]
Katherine Elgin
Bye.
- [57:52]
Sarah Tyson or Blaine Neufeld
You've been listening to an interview with Katherine Elgin, professor of Philosophy of Education at Harvard University. We've been talking about her new book, Epistemic Ecology, which is just out from the MIT Press. I'm Carrie Figdor. This is New Books and Philosophy, a podcast with the New Books Network.
- [58:13]
Carrie Figdor
I hope you enjoyed the podcast and
- [58:16]
Sarah Tyson or Blaine Neufeld
thank you for listening.