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CREDULITY AND CIRCUMSPECTION: EPISTEMOLOGICAL CHARACTER

AND THE ETHICS OF BELIEF1

SUSAN HAACK

The credulous man is father to the liar and the cheat.—W. K. Clifford2

My title tells you that in this paper I shall be continuing work on epistemological

character that I began a coupled of decades ago;3 but I need to register two caveats at the

outset. The first is that I shall focus primarily on the vice of credulity, and address the

virtue of circumspection only obliquely, by way of foil. The second is that my approach

to questions about epistemological virtue and vice shouldn’t be confused with what has

now come to be known as “virtue epistemology”; for, unlike the various enterprises now

classified under this heading,4 my epistemology doesn’t suggest that an account of

virtuous epistemological character could constitute, or substitute for, a theory of

epistemologically justified belief.

My motto comes from W.K. Clifford’s famous essay on “The Ethics of Belief,”

probably best known today as the paper to which William James was responding in his

even more famous essay on “The Will to Believe.”5 So another thing I should mention

right away is that, though a chief subject of dispute between Clifford and James was the

1 Plenary invited lecture, ACPA 2014. 2 W. K. Clifford, “The Ethics of Belief” (1877), in The Ethics of Belief and Other Essays, eds. Leslie

Stephen and Sir Frederick Pollock (London: Watts & Co., 1947), 70-96, p. 77. 3 See e.g., Susan Haack, “Preposterism and Its Consequences” (1996), reprinted n Haack, Manifesto of a

Passionate Moderate: Unfashionable Essays (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), 188-212; “The

First Rule of Reason,” in Jacqueline Brunning and Paul Forster, eds., The Rule of Reason: The Philosophy

of C. S. Peirce (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1997), 24-61; “Confessions of an Old-Fashioned

Prig,” Manifesto of a Passionate Moderate, 7-30; “The Ideal of Intellectual Integrity, in Life and

Literature” (2005), reprinted in Haack Putting Philosophy to Work: Inquiry and Its Place in Culture

(Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 2008, second ed., 2013), 209-20 and 307-309l; “Out of Step: Academic

Ethics in a Preposterous Environment.” in the same volume, 251-67 and 313-17. For a summary of my

work in this area, see Mark Migotti, “For the Sake of Knowledge and the Love of Truth: Susan Haack

between Sacred Enthusiasm and Sophisticated Disillusionment,” in Cornelis de Waal. Ed., Susan Haack: A

Lady of Distinctions (Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 2007), 263-76. 4 See. e.g., Ernest Sosa, “The Raft and the Pyramid: Coherence versus Foundations in the Theory of

Knowledge,” Midwest Studies in Philosophy 5 (1980): 3-25; Linda Zagzebski, Virtues of the Mind

(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996). 5 William James, “The Will to Believe” (1897), in Frederick Burkhardt and Fredson Bowers, eds., The Will

to Believe and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1979), 13-

33. See also Susan Haack, “‘The Ethics of Belief’ Revisited,” in Lewis Hahn, ed., The Philosophy of R. M.

Chisholm (La Salle, IL: Open Court, 1997, 129-44.

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legitimacy or otherwise of religious belief, this is not my present concern. I will call on

some of Clifford’s insights, and criticize some of his over-simplifications; but my focus

will be on epistemology, science, and education, not religion.

The plan is, first, to get clear about what credulity is, and why it’s an

epistemological vice (§1); then, to explore the various forms this vice takes, including its

perhaps surprising manifestation as a form of scientism (§2); next, to suggest why

credulity poses dangers not only to individuals, but also to society at large—including,

specifically, the legal system and the academy (§3); and, finally, to sketch some ways to

curb credulity and foster circumspection in ourselves and others, especially our students

(§4). As you’ll see, this topic turns out to be a rich one, bringing together many aspects of

the human condition and taking us to issues about the nature of belief, the determinants

of the quality of evidence, synechism, science, scientism, testimony, expertise, and

evidence-sharing as well as to questions about the ethics of belief and the demands of

education.

1. A Natural Human Failing

Here are some words that are part of my everyday vocabulary (and, I expect, yours too)

that my students just don’t understand: “pejorative”; “demeaning”;6 “tendentious” and—

you guessed it!—“credulous.” The first two aren’t completely foreign to these young

American adults, but they think they are synonyms; while the second two, apparently,

have never crossed their paths. There seems to be a pattern here: almost as if making

critical epistemological appraisals was felt to be offensive in some way. Perhaps, until

my class, these students had been shielded from the vocabulary of such appraisal: a

disturbing thought to which I’ll return briefly in my concluding section.

There are also words that are part of my everyday vocabulary that turn out to

have different meanings in British English and American—not only words like “lift”

(British both for “elevator” and for “ride”), “queue” (British both for “line” and for “line

up”), “rubber” (British for “eraser”), “ring” (British for “call”) and “knock up” (British

for “call on”), but also more epistemologically interesting words like “quite“ (which in

6 They have, for example, no clue that “demeaning” is related to “demeanor.”

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British English can mean “fairly, somewhat” as well as “absolutely”),7 and

“disinterested” (which in British English always means “unbiased, impartial,” and never,

as I now know it can in American English, “uninterested”). But it still came as something

of a surprise to find, when I went first to the Oxford English Dictionary and then to

Merriam-Webster to check out “credulous” and “credulity,” that “credulous” seems to be

another of those words that don’t have quite the same meaning on both sides of the

Atlantic.

The Oxford English Dictionary defines “credulous” as “too ready to believe”8—in

short, gullible; 9 and continues, “hence, ‘credulity.’” Merriam-Webster’s Dictionary,

however, though it defines “credulity” as “undue readiness of belief,” gives a more

neutral account of “credulous”: “ready to believe, esp. on slight or uncertain evidence.”10

So “credulous” in British English means roughly what “excessively credulous” or

“inappropriately credulous” means in American English. In both, however, “credulity”

refers to a vice.

An understanding of vices goes hand-in-hand with an understanding of virtues.

Briefly and roughly: a virtue, as I understand it, is a desirable character trait, a strength of

character; so a vice, correspondingly, is an undesirable character trait, a weakness of

character. (Spelling this out fully would require me to explain what traits of character are;

not an easy task. For now, I’ll just say that I take these to be standing, but not

unchangeable, dispositions to act, speak, feel, etc., in certain ways.) So credulity, which

is a weakness of character specifically with respect to a person’s handling of and

response to evidence, qualifies as a specifically epistemological vice.

Credulity is also a very natural human tendency. As the old Scottish psychologist-

philosopher Alexander Bain11 once put it, our mental development is a matter of “innate

7 I still remember trying hard not to be offended when, the first time I presented a paper in the U.S.,

someone in the audience told me it was “quite good”! 8 Concise Oxford English Dictionary (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1959), p. 282. 9 Id., p. 538. “Gullible,” of course, is related to “gull,” an old verb meaning to swindle, deceive, or trick

someone; and is probably a metaphor, I learned, reflecting the fact that gulls can swallow truly remarkable

quantities of stuff at one gulp, and aren’t very discriminating about what they eat! 10 Webster’s Ninth New Collegiate Dictionary (Springfield, MA: Merriam-Webster, 1991), p.304. 11 Alexander Bain (1818-1903) is known among scholars of pragmatism, because his observation that the

acid test of a speaker’s sincerity is his willingness to act on what he professes to believe was influential in

C. S. Peirce’s development of the Pragmatic Maxim of Meaning. C. S. Peirce, Collected Papers, eds.

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credulity tempered by checks”:12 meaning that we humans are by nature ready to believe,

to take what others tell us at face value, and learn only by painful experience that not

every informant can be trusted. That’s right; small children really are, as Richard

Dawkins once put it, “information caterpillars,” 13 hungrily and innocently absorbing

whatever they hear; but as we grow up we—or, at least, most of us—discover that we

need to curb our natural readiness to believe, that some people, and some sources, are

more reliable than others, and not all, certainly, can be trusted. Of course, to describe a

two- or three-year old child as credulous is not to criticize him; credulity is simply his

natural condition. So I’m tempted to say that credulity is essentially an adult vice—

what’s appropriate for caterpillars, after all, is not appropriate for butterflies. (Perhaps

this explains what seems at first blush like a tension in Merriam-Webster’s definitions of

“credulous” and “credulity.”)

We might conceive of readiness to believe on a quasi-Aristotelian spectrum.14

Rather as courage is the mean between the extremes of rashness or foolhardiness at one

end and cowardice at the other, so circumspection is the mean between credulity at one

end and something a bit more complex that we might roughly characterize as closed-

mindedness at the other. The initial idea might be:

being too ready to believe is the vice of credulity; and

being too ready to dismiss ideas is the vice of closed-mindedness;

being ready to believe when and only when your evidence is sufficient

is the virtue at the mean.

Clifford, whose key thesis is that “it is wrong always, everywhere, and for anyone, to

believe anything on insufficient evidence,”15 seems have been thinking along these lines.

But this way of looking at it is too categorical. The idea that there is some

quantum of evidence “sufficient” for belief is false to the gradational character both of

Charles Hartshorne, Paul Weiss, and (vols. 7 & 8), Arthur Burks (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University

Press, 1931-58), 5.12 (c. 1906). 12 “[R]eadiness to act is … what makes belief more than fancy”: Alexander Bain, The Emotions and the

Will (London: Longman’s, Green and Company, 3rd edition, 1875), p. 505. 13 Richard Dawkins, Unweaving the Rainbow: Science, Delusion, and the Appetite for Wonder (Boston:

Houghton Mifflin, 1998) p. 144. 14 Aristotle, Ethica Nichomacnea, in Richard McKeon, ed., The Basic Works of Aristotle (New York:

Random House, 1941) 935-1123, p. 959: “Virtue, then, is a state of character … a mean between two vices,

that which depends on excess and that which depends on defect.” 15 Clifford, “The Ethics of Belief” (note 2 above), p.77.

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evidential quality, and of belief itself. So a better formulation would be more gradualistic,

more synechistic16—more like this:

being too ready to believe, or being ready to believe more strongly

than your evidence warrants, is the vice of credulity;

being too ready to dismiss ideas, or being ready to disbelieve, or to

believe only less strongly than your evidence warrants, is the vice of

closed-mindedness;

proportioning your degree of belief to the strength of your

evidence17—which is what I mean by “circumspection”—is the virtue

at the mean.

As I noted, the vice at the other end of the scale from credulity, which I have called, for

short, “closed-mindedness,” is really quite complex, including unwillingness or inability

to come to any conclusion, outright skepticism, and a lazy readiness to dismiss new ideas

rather than thinking them through and checking out the evidence.

Exactly what “proportioning the degree of your belief to the strength of the

evidence” amounts to is a hard epistemological question; but at a first approximation we

can say that it means, at least, that you should believe more strongly the stronger your

evidence is, and more weakly, or not at all, the weaker your evidence is. Spelling this out

more fully obviously requires both a gradational account of the quality of evidence, and a

gradational account of belief. Fortunately, I have both in hand: my foundherentist

epistemology begins18 with the assumption that a person’s evidence with respect to some

belief may be better or worse;19 and my three-level explication of belief acknowledges

that a person may believe something in greater or lesser degree, because the multi-form

16 The term comes from Peirce. See e.g., Peirce, Collected Papers (note 11 above), 6.102-63 (1902). See

also Susan Haack, “Not Cynicism but Synechism: Lessons from Classical Pragmatism” (2005), in Haack,

Putting Philosophy to Work (note 3 above), 83-96 and 276-77. 17 “A wise man … proportions his belief to the evidence.” David Hume, Enquiries Concerning Human

Understanding, in Hume, Enquiries Concerning Human Understanding and Concerning the Principles of

Morals (1772), ed. L. A. Selby-Bigge (3rd ed., Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1975), X.I (p. 110). 18 And, unlike Alvin Goldman’s, sustains this assumption as the account is developed. See Alvin I.

Goldman, “What is Justified Belief?” in George Papppas, ed., Justification and Knowledge (Dordrecht, the

Netherlands: Reidel, 1979), 1-23. See also Susan Haack, Evidence and Inquiry (1993; second ed., Amherst,

NY: Prometheus Books, 2009), 195-97 (showing how Goldman sacrifices his initial gradualism); and 117-

39 (developing my own gradualist approach). 19 See Evidence and Inquiry (note 18 above), p. 38 and pp.117 ff.

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dispositions to verbal and non-verbal behavior postulated at the first level of the theory

may be stronger or may be weaker.20

If belief involves behavioral dispositions, readiness to believe must involve a kind

of disposition to form such dispositions. Though it doesn’t seem to have received the

philosophical attention it deserves, this phenomenon of dispositions-to-form-dispositions

is actually quite common. To say that paper becomes brittle with age, for example, is to

say that it is disposed to acquire over time the dispositional property of brittleness; to say

that a small child is disposed to adopt the speech-habits of those around him is to say that

he has a disposition to form speech-dispositions like theirs; and so on. Similarly,

someone who is very ready to believe is strongly disposed to adopt a new belief on

whatever grounds; i.e., has a strong second-order disposition to modify these first-order

dispositions of his. And he is too ready to believe if those second-order dispositions are

not appropriately sensitive to the strength, or more particularly to the weakness, of the

new evidence in response to which he is disposed to add to his stock of first-order belief-

dispositions.

Now, looking back at what I said about the mean of circumspection, some of you

may be surprised that I’m not more enthusiastic about virtue epistemology. “Wait a

minute,” you may say; “circumspection, as you have characterized it, is surely very

closely related to justified belief; so closely, in fact, that we could, after all, define

justification in terms of the exercise of this virtue specifically.” Indeed, we might note the

equivalence; but this would shed no real light on the concept of justification. It would be

a purely verbal definition (a “nominal” definition, as Peirce would have said),21 entirely

without explanatory muscle unless and until it was supplemented by an account of what

makes evidence stronger or weaker—and if we had that, of course, we would already

have an understanding of justification.

20 Belief, in my account involves: (i) a multi-form disposition to behavior, verbal and non-verbal; which (ii)

is realized in meshes of connections in a person’s brain; and (iii) is given its content by the semiotic

connections of these meshes to things in the world and to words in the person’s language, and the words’

connections to those things. This account was prefigured in Evidence and Inquiry (note 18 above), pp. 229-

36; and in See Susan Haack, Defending Science—Within Reason: Between Scientism and Cynicism

(Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 2003), pp.157-61. But its fullest formulation scan be found in Susan

Haack, “Belief in Naturalism: An Epistemologist’s Philosophy of Mind,” Logos & Episteme 1, no.1 (2010):

1-22; “Brave New World: On Nature, Culture, and the Limits of Reductionism,” in Bartosz Brozek and

Jerzy Stelmach, eds., Explaining the Mind (Kraków: Copernicus Center Press, forthcoming 2015). 21 Peirce, Collected Papers (note 11 above), 5.553 (1906).

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***

Circumspection doesn’t require that you recoil from belief, become a skeptic, or refuse

believe any claim you can’t check for yourself. We humans are social animals; and we

couldn’t survive, let alone flourish, without relying on each other for information.

Circumspection simply requires that you use your head about whom to believe, when, on

what subject, and to what degree. Clifford offers some useful advice:

In order that we may have the right to accept [someone’s] testimony as ground for

believing what he says, we must have reasonable grounds for trusting his veracity,

that he is really trying to speak the truth so far as he knows it; his knowledge, that

he has had opportunities of knowing the truth about this matter; and his

judgement, that he has made proper use of those opportunities in coming to the

conclusion which he affirms.22

It’s true, and important, that others’ testimony is trustworthy only if they are

honest, in a position to know what they claim, and competent to judge the evidence

available to them. And it’s also true, as Clifford also suggests,23 that people too often

imagine that sincerity alone is sufficient for trustworthiness. It isn’t. For one thing, the

danger isn’t just that informants may lie; it’s also that, however sincere, they may be

mistaken. For another—a point Clifford doesn’t mention—even when an informant really

does, in a way, believe what he tells us, his belief may be the result of self-deception—

more than likely, because he is at least half-aware that his evidence only weakly warrants

what he claims, or even points in the opposite direction.

How can we determine whether someone is telling the truth as he believes it to

be? Perhaps we look to his demeanor: is he matter-of-fact, or is he hesitant, or defensive,

or suspiciously emphatic and certain? (As Hume observed, we rightly distrust not only a

witness who is hesitant, but also a witness who is too vehement:24 his protestations about

how absolutely and completely certain he is may be a sign that he’s trying to convince

himself as much as his hearers.) Or we may look into whether our informant might have a

motive to deceive us: e.g., is he selling the product he praises, does he stand to gain from

our believing what he tells us, or to lose from our not believing him, is the gossip he’s

22 Clifford, “The Ethics of Belief” (note 2 above), p. 79. 23 Id., p.85. 24 “We entertain a suspicion …. when the witnesses … deliver their testimony with hesitation or on the

contrary, with too violent asseverations.” Hume, Enquiries Concerning Human Understanding (note 17

above), X.I (pp. 112-13).

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passing along deleterious to an enemy of his?—for, as we all know, when doing so is to

their advantage people are given to prevaricating, turning a blind eye, fudging, hedging,

evading, and lying.

How can we determine whether someone is really in a position to know what they

sincerely tell us? If a witness claims to have seen the crime or the accident, we may start

by asking whether this is even possible. How certain is it that he was present, that he

could see what happened, that he isn’t visually impaired? Or we may wonder whether he

might be mistaken: did he, for example, see the person he now identifies in handcuffs at

the police station before he made this statement? Or we might want to know whether he

has taken steps to sell his story to the newspapers or to a Hollywood agent, ort changed

his testimony when he heard what others said, …, or, etc., etc.25 And we may also ask

whether other, independent witnesses corroborate his report; and how probable what he

claims to have seen is, independent of his testimony (“the red car must have been doing

70 miles an hour” is one thing, “the red car must have been doing 300 miles an hour”

quite another).

And when we try to estimate the trustworthiness or otherwise of what we read,

again we may look to the way in which authors conduct themselves: e.g., do they readily

acknowledge where their evidence is weak or their conclusion speculative, do they tell us

what they don’t know, or what their sources are? We may also look to external factors,

such as the source and the reputation of the publication in which the material we read

appeared, and the date of publication; and if need be, to the author’s credentials, to what

body funded his study, and so on.

It should go without saying that such common-sense precautions against being

taken in by liars, cheats, scammers, charlatans, the self-deceived, the self-promoting, and

the simply confused or ill-informed can’t guarantee that we will never be misled. In

25 Now I think of two of the eye-witnesses who testified at the trial of Nicola Sacco and

BartomelmeoVanzetti: one of whom (Louis Pelzer) could have seen nothing if, as his co-workers swore, he

was hiding under a bench when the shots were fired, and the other of whom (Mary Splaine) had first

identified someone other than Sacco, and only picked Sacco out after she’d seen him in police custody and

in court. The story is told in detail in Felix Frankfurter, The Case of Sacco and Vanzetti: A Critical Analysis

for Lawyers and Laymen (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1927); and summarized in Susan Haack,

“Legal Probabilism: An Epistemological Dissent,” in Susan Haack, Evidence Matters: Science, Proof, and

Truth in the Law (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2014), 47-77.

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epistemology, as in life, there are no guarantees. But such precautions can reduce the

chances that you will be gulled, conned, cheated, stung, had, taken, or duped.

2. A Protean Vice

Perhaps some people are just temperamentally more credulous than others, across the

board. But it’s quite common, in my experience, even for people who aren’t naïve in

general to be credulous with respect to certain kinds of claim; some, for example, with

respect to political claims (or political claims of one persuasion or another); others with

respect to gossip (or certain kinds of gossip, or gossip about a certain kind of person);

some to claims about medical treatments, or dietary advice; some to claims about

investment prospects, or lottery odds; others to claims about supposed wonders and

miracles (such as stories about the “miraculous” likeness of Mother Teresa in a toasted-

cheese sandwich, Elvis Presley being spotted in the produce department at the local

supermarket, supposedly haunted houses, etc., etc.); and not a few to the self-promoting

claims made in universities’, and other institutions’, publicity materials.

And some people—in fact a good many, including some who describe themselves

as “skeptics,” or even as “scientific skeptics,” because they take pride in pooh-poohing

religious claims, urban myths, ghost stories, supposed sightings of the Loch Ness monster

or the Abominable Snowman, homeopathic remedies, chiropractic cures, quick, easy, and

risk-free diet drugs, etc., etc.—are credulous where the sciences are concerned. Such

credulity may take the form of accepting scientific ideas that are still highly speculative

as if they were well-established: e.g., taking the results of a single psychological,

sociological, or epidemiological study as definitive, when they may be no more than a

byproduct of the study design; or of treating recently-proposed but as yet wholly untested

hypotheses as if they were well-warranted; or taking the word of some well-known

scientist on questions far outside their field of expertise; and so on.

Credulity about scientific claims is a sign of scientism, i.e., of an inappropriately

deferential, too uncritically uncritical, attitude to the sciences; which is no more

defensible than its opposite, an inappropriately cynical, too uncritically critical, attitude.26

26 See generally Haack, Defending Science; “Six Signs of Scientism” (first published in Spanish and

Chinese in 2010) in Putting Philosophy to Work (note 3 above), 105-120 and 278-83.

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I must now add that this is the ordinary meaning of the word “scientism” today, and has

been at least since the late nineteenth century.27 For of late matters have been badly

confused by authors who use “scientism” to describe their own positions—as if scientism

were, not an undesirably over-deferential attitude to the sciences, but actually a good

thing.28 So while, at the time I wrote Defending Science,29 the biggest danger seemed to

be the post-modern cynicism about science that had infected many sociologists and

rhetoricians of science, feminist and post-colonialist “science critics,” etc., etc., now we

also need to be on guard against the scientism of philosophers like James Ladyman (who

tells us that all decisions on matters of public interest should be made exclusively on the

basis of scientific results),30 and—worse—Alexander Rosenberg (who tells us that, since

physics fixes all the facts, there’s no meaning, no values, no truth, …, etc.).31

Clifford is surprisingly confident that he is entitled to accept what a scientist tells

him, at least about something in his field. If a chemist tells him that you can make

substance C by combining substances A and B, Clifford writes, then—unless he knows

27 The English word “scientism” was once neutral—meaning, roughly, adopting “the thought and habits of

a man of science,” but gradually became pejorative. According to Friedrich von Hayek, although the

earliest example given by Murray’s New English Dictionary was dated 1867, this pejorative usage was

already coming into play by 1831, with the formation of the British Association for the Advancement of

Science. F. A. Von Hayek, “Scientism and the Study of Society,” Economica, August 1942: 267-91, p.267,

n.2, citing John T. Merz, History of European Thought in the Nineteenth Century (Edinburgh: W.

Blackwood and Sons, 1896), vol. I, p.89. See also the entry on “science” in the Oxford English Dictionary

online (available at http://dictionary.oed.com). 28 Alexander Rosenberg tells us he chooses “scientism” to describe his position because “atheism” would

characterize it negatively, and “Brights” might be thought “too clever or too cute” (apparently it doesn’t

occur to him that it might be too gratuitously offensive!). He acknowledges that he’s kidnapping the word

“scientism”; but suggests, falsely, that the pejorative use of this word is due to those who criticize positions

like his on the basis of a religious agenda. Alexander Rosenberg, The Atheist’s Guide to Reality: Enjoying

Life without Illusions (New York: w. W. Norton, 2011), p.6. 29 Susan Haack, Defending Science—Within Reason: Between Scientism and Cynicism (Amherst, NY:

Prometheus Books, 2003). 30 I rely here on a claim made by Ladyman in a talk given at a conference at the Free University of

Amsterdam in January 2014. The first chapter of James Ladyman and Don Ross, with David Spurret and

John Collier, Everything Must Go: Metaphysics Naturalized (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007),

written by Ladyman and Ross, is entitled, “In Defense of Scientism”; but I don’t find this claim in this

chapter, which is focused on ontology. 31 Rosenberg, The Atheist’s Guide to Reality (note 28 above). The following, from pp. 2-3, gives you an

idea of the tone and tenor: “Is there a God? No. What is the purpose of the universe? There is none. What

is the meaning of life? Ditto. … Is there a soul? Is it immortal? Are you kidding? What is the difference

between right and wrong, good and bad? There is no moral difference between them. … Does history have

any meaning or purpose? It’s full of sound and fury, but signifies nothing. …” And in his talk at the 2014

conference at the Free University of Amsterdam, Rosenberg added meaning and truth to his list of

supposed illusions allegedly banished once we recognize that “physics fixes all the facts.”

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something specifically against this chemist’s character, or his judgment—he is quite

justified in believing him. Why so? Because:

[H]is professional training is one which tends to encourage veracity and the

honest pursuit of truth, and to produce a dislike of hasty conclusions and slovenly

investigation. … I have quite reason enough to believe that the verification is

within the reach of human appliances and powers, and in particular that it has

been actually performed by my informant. [And h]is result … is watched and

tested by those who are working in the same ground.32

But this explanation is at best a considerable over-simplification. Indeed, I think it reveals

that Clifford himself is somewhat credulous about the “professional training” in science

in which he sets such stock.

It’s true that the sciences (at least, the natural sciences) have succeeded as well as

they have in part because, though they use essentially the same kinds of procedure and

essentially the same modes of inference we all use in our everyday empirical inquiries

into the causes of bad smells, delayed flights, etc., they have used them more carefully,

more precisely, more thoroughly—and more persistently, in a more organized fashion,

over many generations of workers.33 As Gustav Bergman put it, science is “the long arm

of common sense”;34 and by now it is a very long arm indeed. Since the seventeenth

century, generations of scientists have produced not only an ever-expanding mesh of

well-established, interlocking theories, but also—and in part because of—a whole vast

range of instruments, techniques, and tools, both physical and intellectual, devised to help

them explore and probe the world; in short, to inquire better.

But this remarkable human enterprise, like all human enterprises, is imperfect:

untidy, fallible, and susceptible to corruption. Even scientists in the most rigorous fields

are sometimes guilty of sloppiness, haste, carelessness, corner-cutting, exaggeration, or

fraud; the scientific peer-review system, by now under severe pressure because there are

so many desperate to publish, is at best a very crude filter;35 newspaper reports, and

32 Clifford, “The Ethics of Belief” (note 2 above), pp. 84-85. 33 Haack, Defending Science (note 20 above), ch.4. 34 Gustav Begmann, Philosophy of Science (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1957), p. 20. 35 See e.g., Susan Haack, “Peer Review and Publication: Lessons for Lawyers” (2007), in Haack, Evidence

Matters (note 25 above), 156-79. Hank Campbell, “The Corruption of Peer Review is Harming Scientific

Credibility,” Wall Street Journal, July 14, 2014: A15. John Bohannon, “Who’s Afraid of Peer Review?

Communication in Science,” Science 34 (Oct. 4, 2013): 60-65 (Prof. Bohannon submitted 304 versions of a

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sometimes even reports in scientific journals tend to play up exciting conclusions and

play down essential qualifications, caveats, and possible sources of error; scientific

witnesses paid and prepared by the parties to a case are notoriously given to over-

statement, “spin,” and fudging over inconvenient facts; and so on.

And, contrary to what Clifford says, most of what any chemist (or physicist, or

biologist, or, etc.) knows of his field won’t be the result of his own work, but something

learned from teachers or textbooks or journals, or from colleagues. For this reason, some

set great store by the idea that the scientific enterprise requires “trust.” If this means that

the progress of the sciences depends on a mesh of justified mutual confidence—

confidence in others’ competence and honesty, in the bona fides of credentials in the

field, in the reliability of instruments, in the soundness of textbooks, in the integrity of

journals, and so forth, then it’s true, and important. But if it disguises the equally

important fact that every thread of this mesh is fragile, and will break if, e.g., someone is

found to have committed fraud, lied about his credentials, spun or fudged his results, or

blown his statistical calculations, or if an instrument is found to be defective,36 or an

institution to be awarding degrees, or a journal to be accepting papers, simply on payment

of a fee,37 …, or, etc., then it’s quite misleading.

To be sure, no scientist could possibly test every relevant thread of this mesh

before he relies on others’ work. Rather, as Donald T. Campbell’s “fish-scale model” of

overlapping scientific competencies suggests,38 each scientist depends on others whose

expertise is close enough to his that he can justifiably rely on their input, people who in

turn justifiably depend on others with expertise close enough but slightly different from

theirs; and so on.

bogus paper that should have been manifestly incompetent to a reviewer with even a high-school

knowledge of chemistry to open-access journals, more than half of which promptly accepted them.) 36 A fine example is to be found in Peirce’s work on gravity measurements. Flexibility in the base on which

a pendulum stands, Peirce discovered, causes small differences in the resulting measurements. See

“Measurements of Gravity in America and Europe” (1876), in Peirce Edition Project, eds., Writings of

Charles S. Peirce (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1982—), 4: 79-144, pp. 129-33; and, for

context, “On the Flexure of Pendulum Supports” (1884), in the same volume, 515-28. 37 Bohsnnon, “Who’s Afraid of Peer Review?” (note 35 above), p.65 (reporting that a number of the

journals to which he sent his bogus papers requested payment for publication, in one case [the Journal of

International Medical Research] for as much as $3,100). 38 Donald T. Campbell, “Ethnocentrism of Disciplines and the Fish Scale Model of Omniscience” (1969),

in Sharon J. Derry, Christine D. Schum, and Morton Ann Gernsbacher, eds., Interdisciplinarityy: An

Emerging Cognitive Science: (Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 2005), 3-21. Campbell writes

(p. 3) of “a continuous texture of narrow specialties that overlap with other narrow specialties.”

13

So the first step towards a more realistic understanding of when, and why, we are

justified in accepting what scientists tell us is to acknowledge that we aren’t always

justified in believing scientists’ claims. And the next is to be aware that scientific claims

fall on a kind of epistemological continuum, ranging from some that are very-well

warranted by a dense mesh of evidence, through others that are fairly well-warranted, to

some that are plausible but as yet only minimally warranted, …, to the highly speculative

and the downright wild and woolly; and also that while, in some fields, there is a large

body of well-warranted theory, in less mature areas of science, especially of the social

sciences, there may be little or no such solid theoretical ground.

If we are to take scientific claims with just the right size pinch of salt, we need

some understanding of the kinds of thing that can go wrong in scientific inquiry: of the

dangers of experimental error, confirmation bias, tendentious study design, failure to

screen out possible interfering factors, …, etc., etc. (Think of the VIGO trial of Vioxx,

designed to track gastro-intestinal side-effects longer than cardiovascular ones, and in

consequence seriously underestimating the risk of heart attack and stroke in those taking

the drug.)39 We also need to understand that even very reliable evidence may be

misleading. (Think of Raymond Easton, arrested and convicted on the basis of a cold-hit

DNA match—when he was so severely incapacitated by Parkinson’s disease that it was

physically impossible for him to have committed the crime.)40 And we’d almost always

be wise, rather than relying, as Clifford seems to assume, on what one scientist tells us, to

seek a second and if need be a third, and, …, etc., opinion.

39 The original paper in Claire Bombadier et al., “Comparison of Upper Gastrointestinal Toxicity of

Rofecoxib [Vioxx] and Naproxen [Aleve] in Patients with Rheumatoid Arthritis,” New England Journal of

Medicine 342, no.21 (November, 2000): 1520-28. On the problems with the study, see, e.g., Eric Topol,

“Failing the Public Health—Rofecoxib, Merck, and the FDA,” 351, no.1 (October 21, 2004): 1717-09;

Editorial, “COX-2 Selective Inhibitors—Important Lessons Learned,” Lancet 365 (February 5, 2005): 449-

51; Susan Okie, “Raising the Bar—The FDA’s Coxib Meeting,” New England Journal of Medicine 252,

no.13 (March 31, 2005); David Armstrong, “How the New England Journal Missed Warning Signs:

Medical Journal Waited Years to Report on Flawed Article that Praised Pain Drug,” Wall Street Journal,

11 May, 2006, pp. A1, A10. For a summary, See Susan Haack, “The Integrity of Science: What it Means,

Why it Matters” (2006), in Haack, Putting Philosophy to Work (note 3 above), 121-39 and 283-88, pp. 134-

38. 40 Genewatch UK, The Police National Database: Balancing Crime Detection, Human Rights and Privacy,

available at

http://www.genewatch.org/uploads/f03c6d66a9b354535738483c1c3d49e4/NationalDNADatabase.pdf

(January 2005).

14

But now I need to add that life is short, and there simply isn’t time to check out

everything we hear or read. A reasonable strategy is to take the time to check, so far as

we are able, the information that is most important to us, whether as a matter of personal

concern (e.g., the benefits and risks of a medical treatment for ourselves or someone we

care about), or because it concerns something that it’s our special responsibility qua

physician, judge, attorney, airplane pilot, auto-mechanic, student advisor, professor, or

whatever, to know—though once again, there can be no guarantee that we get this exactly

right, either.

3. A Menace to Society

The credulous man is obviously a danger to himself, because he is easily duped by con-

men, crooks, fakers, cheats, charlatans, self-promoters and the self-deceived. Less

obviously, as Clifford insists,41 he is also a danger to society. For one thing,

epistemological habits, like other habits, can be infectious: credulous parents and

credulous teachers will likely encourage credulity in the young people in their care (and

similarly, of course, parents and teachers whose weakness is not for over-belief but for

under-belief will likely encourage closed-mindedness in the young people in their care).

Moreover, as Clifford observes in the passage with which I opened, the credulous

man is indeed “father to the liar and the cheat”; or, to put it less vividly but more exactly,

a credulous population creates the market for those “con-men, crooks, fakers, cheats,

charlatans, self-promoters and the self-deceived,” and for every kind of deceptive or

misleading claim. And the more people are easily duped, the more likely it is that

charismatic but crazy politicians will gain power, the more briskly well-advertised but

ineffective or even dangerous “cures” will sell, and the greater the chances are that juries

will convict, or acquit, on other grounds than the strength of the evidence, …, and so on.

I’ll start with some consequences of credulity in the legal system, and then move

to the academy, and specifically its philosophical arm.

***

We know that jurors are remarkably ready to believe eye-witness testimony, giving such

testimony significantly more weight than the now-considerable body of studies of the

41 Clifford, “The Ethics of Belief” (note 2 above), pp. 73-74.

15

(un-)reliability of such witnesses suggests it deserves. Many people think, an article in

the Scientific American reports, that human memory works much like a video recorder;

but psychologists have found that memories aren’t “played back” but are constructed, in a

process “akin to putting puzzle pieces together.”42 According to the Innocence Project,

mistaken eyewitness identifications are the leading cause of wrongful convictions,

playing a role in 72% of convictions subsequently overturned by DNA testing.43 The

consequences in terms of wrongful convictions are disastrous—both for the innocent

people who are convicted and, because they leave the real perpetrator at large, for society

in general.

Of course, it’s not only eye-witnesses about whose testimony jurors can be

credulous; they are sometimes unduly impressed by confident but dubiously-competent

expert witnesses. Psychiatrist Dr. James Grigson testified over and over in Texas capital-

murder cases that he could predict “to a psychiatric certainty” that the defendant would

be dangerous in future; and was believed over and over by the juries who dutifully

condemned the defendants to death.44 A Florida knife-mark examiner testified at the first

three of Joseph Ramirez’s trials for capital murder45 that he could identify this knife

(found in Ramirez’s girlfriend’s car), to the exclusion of all other knives in the world—

even if there were a million knives in the same manufacturing batch—as the one that

made the wound in the victim’s neck; and was believed, all three times, by a jury that

found Ramirez guilty on this basis.46

Michael Saks describes forensic scientist as having created a “culture of

exaggeration”; 47 and indeed, many forensic experts are too willing to testify that they’re

42 See, e.g., Hal Arkowitz and Scott O. Lillefeld, “Why Science Tells Us Not to Rely on Eyewitnesses,”

Scientific American, 1.8.2009, available at http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/do-the-eyes-have-it/,

last visited 9.11.14. The quotation is from psychologist Elizabeth Loftus. 43 Innocence Project, “Eyewitness Misidentification,” available at

http://www/innocence.project.org/understand/Eyewitness-Misidentification.php., last visited 9.11.14. 44 Barefoot v. Estelle, 463 U.S 880 (1983). See also Thomas Regnier, “Barefoot in Quicksand: The Future

of ‘Future Dangerousness’ Predictions in Death Penalty Sentencing in the World of Daubert and Kumho,”

University of Akron Law Review 37, no.3 (2004): 467-507. 45 Ramirez v. State, 810 So. 2d 836 (Fla. 20001). Apparently no traces of blood were found on the knife,

and it had no distinctive marks of use or damage; at least, there is nothing in the record to suggest either. 46 Id. 47 Michael J. Saks, “Forensic Identification: From a Faith-Based ‘Science’ to a Scientific Science,”

Forensic Science International 201, no.10 (September 2010): 14-170, p. 17.

16

100% sure, even that they never make mistakes.48 But my point here is that this culture of

exaggeration is encouraged in part by prosecutors’ and jurors’ credulity—without which

forensic witnesses couldn’t get away with over-stating and spinning their results.

Ramirez’s fourth trial illustrates the point especially vividly. In 2001 the Florida Supreme

Court finally ruled that tool-mark examiners’ testimony identifying a specific, individual

knife was too unreliable to be admitted.49 So at the fourth trial the prosecution produced,

instead, a photograph of a square of grey carpet from the crime-scene and a portable

lamp; and told the jurors that, if they looked carefully at the photo under this light, some

of the would be able to discern the faint traces of a bloody footprint—which the

prosecution would show matched Ramirez’s shoes. And sure enough, as soon as one

juror said he could see the footprint, others said they could see it too … . 50

Not only jurors, but also attorneys and judges, are sometimes credulous. Some,

for example, seem to believe that the scientific peer-review system provides something

like certification of the reliability of the work accepted, some even that reviewers repeat

authors’ experiments; others, that an epidemiological study’s being statistically

significant means—well, that it’s significant. Credulity about the sciences, in fact, is

apparent even at the highest level of our legal system, in Justice Blackmun’s ruling for

the majority in the landmark case on scientific testimony, Daubert v. Merrell Dow

Pharmaceuticals (1993).51 Having determined that Federal Rule of Evidence 702 (on the

admissibility of expert testimony) requires that judges screen proffered expert testimony

both for relevance and for reliability, the Court suggests that the reliability prong requires

that such testimony be “scientific.” But this is scientism; for, as only a moment’s

reflection would reveal, not all, and not only, scientific testimony is reliable.52

48 DNA-identification specialists, who routinely testify in terms of the probability that a match between this

DNA from the crime scene and this sample from the defendant is random, are an exception. 49 Ramirez (note 45 above). 50 I am relying here on what an Assistant Public Defender concerned with the case told me when she called

to ask what I knew about shoe-print identification (not much: except that we’d need to know how many

pairs of shoes just like these there were in Miami-Dade at the time of the murder). 51 Daubert v. Merrell Dow Pharm., Inc., 509 U.S. 579 (1993). 52 And Justice Blackmun compounds the confusion when he goes on the suggest that this means that the

testimony must have been arrived at by the Scientific Method; which he then characterizes in a muddled

amalgam of Popper’s and Hempel’s (incompatible) philosophies of science. Daubert (note 51 above), 592.

See also Susan Haack, “Trial and Error: Two Confusions in Daubert” (2005) in Haack, Evidence Matters

(note 25 above), 104-121; and “Federal Philosophy of Science: A Deconstruction—And a Reconstruction”

(2010), in the same volume, 122-550.

17

***

I hope it is unnecessary, before this audience, for me to offer elaborate arguments that our

universities, no less than our courts, are important social institutions, indeed, that they are

vital to the transmission of culture and the creation of new knowledge. As I argued in

“Out of Step,”53 however, recent changes in university administration are contributing to

a steady erosion of what I described as “academic virtues.” Circumspection wasn’t

explicitly on my list; 54 but now I see that it is another of the virtues under threat.

Universities are becoming, to borrow Benjamin’s Ginsburg’s term, more and

more “administrative”:55 now mostly managed—not, as in the past, by working

academics setting their research and teaching aside for a few years to carry the burden of

essential administrative chores—but by professional administrators who, even if they

were once professors, have long ago put that real work on permanent hold. One

consequence has been an ever-increasing emphasis on “promoting the institution”;

another, an ever-increasing reliance on such surrogate measures of the quality of

academic work as amount of grant money brought in, number of books and articles

published, the “prestige” of the publishers of professors’ books, departmental rankings,

and the like—all of which, in effect, defer judgment to unknown, and usually

unaccountable, third parties.

Sadly, many professors respond by internalizing these distorted values, coming by

imperceptible degrees to believe that these surrogate measures really are good indicators

of real achievement. It’s no wonder, then, that granstmanship, self-promotion, citation

cartels, and the like are on the rise; and no wonder, either, that this tends to erode

professional circumspection—circumspection, that is, on matters that are your

professional concern. Almost certainly, this is happening in other disciplines as well; but

here I’ll focus on philosophy specifically.

Philosophy professors may well be, on the whole, less credulous than most about

supposed wonders and miraculous sightings. But—especially of late, as the analytic

53 “Out of Step” (note 3 above). 54 Now, however, I see that when, in “Out of Step,” I listed “realism” (not in the sense of realism vs.

idealism or realism vs. relativism, but in the ordinary sense of being realistic about things) among the

academic virtues, I had in mind, among other things, what I have now learned to call “professional

circumspection.” 55 Benjamin Ginsberg, The Fall of the Faculty: The Rise of the All-Administrative University, and Why it

Matters (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011).

18

paradigm of philosophy-as-conceptual-analysis nears exhaustion—some philosophy

professors seem, in their way, quite as credulous about the sciences as some judges,

attorneys, or jurors; which is no doubt why Ladyman’s and Rosenberg’s misuse of the

word “scientism” comes to seem unremarkable, even acceptable, to some.

How many papers purporting to break new ground in philosophy, I wonder, rely

on an uncritical acceptance of results claimed in one, or a tiny number, of psychological

articles? And how often, I wonder, do philosophers simply cite those psychological

papers as authority, without making even the most minimal effort to check how the

studies were designed, how they were conducted, or what interfering factors might have

affected the result? How often do they ask whether the results on which they rely rest on

the work of only one person, or only one team? How often do they check whether the

study has subsequently been retracted, or whether subsequent work has thrown it into

doubt? To all these questions, I fear, the answer is: not nearly often enough.56 And how

often, for that matter, does one philosopher borrow citations from another’s paper without

even checking whether a study cited actually claims what it is said to? To this question, I

fear, the answer is: far too often.

I hasten to add that I don’t mean to suggest that it’s only psychological results

about which philosophers are sometimes credulous—as Raymond Tallis’s devastating

critique of “Darwinitis” and “neuromania”57 reveals, for example, not a few philosophers

are only too ready to draw unwarranted conclusions from as-yet highly speculative ideas

in evolutionary biology or neuroscience. And neither is it only scientific results about

which philosophy professors (and no doubt others in the academy as well) are sometimes

credulous.

The problem is much more general. Not to mince words, we are seeing the

gradual erosion of professional circumspection, and the gradual rise of a many-faceted

culture of professional credulity— about rhetoric, about references, and about

reputations, recommendations, and “rankings.” I will take these in turn.

56 Se, for example, Gilbert Harman, “Moral Philosophy Meets Social Psychology: Virtue Ethics and the

Fundamental Attribution Error,” Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, New Series, 99 (1999): 315-31,

where the extraordinary conclusion that there is no such thing as character, and hence no virtues, is drawn

from a tiny number of psychological studies—studies about the design and conduct of which we are told

little or, in some cases, nothing. 57 Raymond Tallis, Aping Mankind: Darwinitis, Neuromania and the Misrepresentation of Humanity

(Durham, UK: Acumen Press, 2011).

19

Quite often, I fear, when the authors of philosophical papers tell us that they have

established that p, this is at best an over-statement: they have perhaps offered some

considerations favoring the claim in question—or, quite often, they have just confidently

propounded it. The recent practice of prefacing every article with an abstract, and the

recent enthusiasm for proposals—which are inherently preposterous, since if you really

knew ahead of time what your work would show, it wouldn’t be research at all58—make

the problem of over-statement significantly worse. This wouldn’t be so serious if it

weren’t for the fact that, somehow, far too many people take these over-statements

seriously. I am sometimes asked, “but didn’t X already show that this idea is hopeless?”,

“but didn’t Y already show that p?”—and get puzzled looks when I reply, “well, no, I

don’t think so; did you actually read the paper, or maybe just take a look at the abstract?”

Sometimes the books and articles authors cite really do say what they are cited

for, but all too often, I fear, they don’t: they too perhaps offer some considerations in

favor of, or only assert, whatever-it is. And yet, somehow, far too many people borrow

these references and put them in their papers without ever checking. How many

philosophers of science, for example, equate Peirce’s idea of abduction with the

fashionable-but-feeble notion of inference to the best explanation, purely on the supposed

authority of others’ false equation of the two—none of them with any textual support?59

And as for references in the other sense, letters of recommendation: well, it’s

surely unnecessary for me to tell you that by now the currency of such letters, as of the

mutually laudatory book blurbs that one philosopher writes for another, and later the

58 This use of “preposterous” is due to Jacques Barzun, The American University (New York: Harper and

Row, 1986), p. 22. See also Susan Haack, “Preposterism and its Consequences” (note 3 above). 59 Briefly and roughly, abduction is, according to Peirce, the first stage of scientific inquiry; “inference to

the best explanation,” or “IBE,” however, is supposed to be the last stage. In view of this, the recent

literature is astoundingly inaccurate. See Gilbert Harman, “The Inference to the Best Explanation,”

Philosophical Review 74 (1965): 88-95, p.88 (claiming IBE corresponds roughly to what others have called

“abduction,” but giving no citations whatever). Paul Thagard, “The Best Explanation: Criteria for Theory

Choice,” Journal of Philosophy 75 (1972): 76-92, p.77 (claiming that the phrase “IBE” is new, but the idea

is old, found in, among others, Peirce, but giving no citation). Peter Lipton, “Inference to the Best

Explanation,” in W. H. Newton-Smith, ed., A Companion to the Philosophy of Science (Oxford: Blackwell,

2000), 184-93 (claiming that “Pierce” [sic] developed one version of the IBE model”; “Pierce” occurs

again in the bibliography, and the passages cited don’t support the identification of IBE with abduction).

Igor Douven, “Abduction,” Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy

http://plato.standford.eduentries/abduction/ (2011), writing of “abduction, or as it is also often called,

inference to the Best Explanation.” Douven acknowledges that “Peirce did propose … a fairly precise

statement,” but [as he will explain in a supplement to the article] “it does not capture what most nowadays

understand by abduction” (!).

20

other for him, is so inflated as to be virtually worthless, on a par at best with the

Argentine peso on a bad day. Mediocre books are praised as groundbreaking, brilliant,

magisterial, “glittering with deep knowledge”;60 quite ordinary candidates for tenure are

likened to Wittgenstein, or maybe Ryle; a professor writes of each and every one of the

several former students of his who are candidates for the same position that he or she is

“the best student I’ve had in 10 years”; even letters written on behalf of students hoping

to be admitted to graduate school are sometimes laughably exaggerated. And yet,

somehow, far too many people—many of whom are themselves guilty of such puffery

where their friends, or their students, are concerned—seem to take these inflated

recommendations seriously.

It should also be unnecessary for me to say that, while some reputations are well-

deserved, others are not. Reputations built by years of good work, or by a genuinely

groundbreaking idea, are one thing; reputations built by tireless self-promotion, by

skillful grantsmanship, by the cultivation of disciples, by association with a “prestigious”

department, etc., etc., are something else entirely. (Why the scare quotes? Frankly,

because the word “prestige” brings me out in hives: its etymological connection with

“prestidigitation” conveniently forgotten, by this point in time it is a paradigm of what

Jacques Barzun called the “foam-rubber public-relations words” to which university

administrators are especially addicted.)61 And yet, somehow, far too many philosophy

professors seem ready to assume that all those who have, by whatever means, become

“names” in the profession are worth listening to and writing about.

And then there are those rankings of graduate programs in philosophy. When,

early on, these were manifestly just an expression of Prof. Leiter’s assessment, more

people were at least somewhat inclined to circumspection about their reliability. But by

now—thoroughly institutionalized, with a Board and many contributors—these rankings

seem to be taken so seriously as to have something of a stranglehold on our profession.

To be candid, I find the importance given to them hard to credit. I’m not privy to all the

details of what goes on in this particular sausage-factory; but the glimpses I got through

the window on the more than one occasion I was given ten days to contribute my opinion

60 See, e.g., Susan Haack, “All that Glitters,” Time Literary Supplement, April 3, 2009, 27 (reviewing

Steven Shapin, The Scientific Life (Chicago: University of Chicago, 2009). 61 Jacques Barzun, A Stroll with William James (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984), p. 223.

21

on the relative quality of around 80 programs in three or four different areas were

downright scary. Surely we all know, if we are honest with ourselves, that it would take

much longer than that to make a serious assessment of even one program. And yet,

somehow, far too many seem to put far too much stock in these rankings, even to obsess

over them. Perhaps it is understandable that would-be graduate students should be

credulous on the matter; but it is their credulity, along with the much less understandable

credulity of those who advise them, that encourages the self-interested wheeling and

dealing of those who benefit, or believe they might benefit, from the rankings.62

4. A (Partly) Correctable Flaw

We speak of the “formation” of character; and, as this reveals, such virtues as courage,

fortitude, persistence, patience, kindness, and such vices as cowardice, lack of resolve,

impatience, cruelty, inconsiderateness, though no doubt in part a matter of inborn

temperament, are also in part learned. The same goes for epistemological virtues and

vices. This leads me to my last pair of questions: what can we do to curb credulity, and to

cultivate circumspection, in ourselves, and in our students?

Once again, I turn to Clifford:

“But,” says one, “I am a busy man. I have no time for the long course of study

which would be necessary to make me in any degree a competent judge of certain

questions, or even able to understand the nature of the argument.” Then he has no

time to believe.63

That’s right; and it suggests that the answer to the question, “What can I do to curb

credulity in myself?” should come in two (interrelated) parts: first, pick my battles, i.e.,

look carefully into the evidence with respect to those claims which, for personal or

professional reasons, are important to me; and second, with respect to claims I haven’t

looked into carefully, make a habit of acknowledging freely that I don’t know, I’m not

sure, I’m not really entitled to an opinion. Neither is easy; looking carefully into things is

62 Shortly after I presented this paper for the first time, we learned that Prof. Leiter had been ousted, and

new “co-editors” had taken over. Such evidence as I have suggests that the rankings are still based on the

same absurd procedure, and may be even more corrupt than before. (I should add, as a precaution against

misunderstanding, that my view of these rankings is emphatically not motivated by the belief that the

department with which I am associated isn’t ranked highly enough.) 63 Clifford, “The Ethics of Belief” (note 2 above), p. 78 (italics mine).

22

a lot of work;64 and acknowledging frankly that you don’t know, or were mistaken, can

be uncomfortable—especially for professors, because we’re supposed to know stuff,

right? But then, as Spinoza once wrote, “all excellent things are as difficult as they are

rare.”65

And I can testify that the more often, when it’s true, you say in class, “I’m not

sure; how could we go about finding out?”, the less uncomfortable it gets—and the more

you, and your students, learn. In a recent law school class, for example, a student asked

how the computer software for making fingerprint identifications works. Oh-oh; I had no

idea. But by the following week we all knew that fingerprint examiners must first mark

up the target print, to tell the computer what to look for; and that different crime-labs

sometimes use different computer programs, not mutually interoperable.66

And it you’ll allow me to continue in this anecdotal vein for one more paragraph,

I will add that my experience of publishing in law reviews, where the student editors who

double-check every footnote and citation will present you with a list of things you must

find proper references for—ouch!—made me acutely conscious of my failings in this

regard, and quickly embarrassed me into double-checking my own references. And my

conversations with law librarians, who are far more skilled than I at finding material,

tracking down well-known (but, as I now know, often misquoted) observations, etc., have

taught me a good deal about what sources are most trustworthy, and what too dubious to

be, as they say, “citable.”

And what can we do to help our students avoid, or overcome, credulity? For one

thing, we can talk to them about what credulity is, and why it’s undesirable. This can be

helpful, especially if it helps curb the tendency I noted earlier, to think that critical

epistemological appraisal is somehow demeaning. We can make a point of emphasizing

that to disagree with someone or, most to the present point, to criticize the flimsy

evidence on which he believes whatever-it-is, is not to say that he’s a bad person, and

certainly not to demean him. (That recent usage in which people ask, “are you

64 “Developing a worthwhile opinion is hard work. It takes time, discipline, and thinking against yourself.”

Ian Brown, “Courting Trouble,” The Globe and Mail (Toronto), September 6, 2014, F3. 65 Benedict de Spinoza, Ethics, in R. R. M. Elwes, ed., Benedict de Spinoza: On the Improvement of the

Understanding, The Ethics, Correspondence (New York: Dover, 1955) Part V, prop. XLII (p. 271). 66 See National Research Council, Strengthening Forensic Science in the United States: A Path Forward

(Washington, DC: National Academies Press, 2009), 269-75.

23

agreeable?” when they mean, “do you agree?” has a lot to answer for!) But this isn’t the

only thing we can do; and I suspect it may not be the most effective.

Let me go back, one last time, to Clifford—specifically, to the passage I earlier

described as “a considerable oversimplification.” It isn’t true, sadly, that all scientists

acquire that “dislike of hasty conclusions and slovenly investigation” of which Clifford

writes. Some, doubtless, achieve this, or come close—though none, probably, quite as

close as Sinclair Lewis’s fictional Max Gottlieb, the extraordinary chemistry professor

who teaches the young Martin Arrowsmith that the true scientist is an intensely religious

man, so religious that he “will not accept quarter-truths, because they are an insult to his

faith.”67 But Clifford’s description is a fine statement of what we should be aiming for

when we try to encourage our students in circumspection, and discourage them from

credulity.

We can help students understand what makes evidence stronger or weaker, why

you need to put your hopes or fears about what may be true aside, how to assess whether

a source is reliable, and so on. This may be more effectively done, not by instruction, but

by discussion of the websites students routinely rely on, and what their weaknesses may

be, the newspapers they read, and what their biases may be, and so forth. We can also

provide incentives to circumspection (in the form of praise, not to mention good grades,

for meticulous work); and corresponding disincentives for sloppy work. Perhaps this

sounds easy. It isn’t. For one thing, it requires courage to stand firm against the grade

inflation that now seems ubiquitous; for another, it requires subtlety to convey a sense

that taking care that your footnotes are sound isn’t the be-all ands end-all of good work,

but only one aspect of it.

But our own attitudes and values, as manifested in our practice as teachers, have

at least as much influence on students’ attitudes and values as what we preach.68 So if

we’re really serious about trying to instill a “dislike of hasty conclusions and slovenly

investigation,” we need, above all, to set a good example ourselves.69

67 Sinclair Lewis, Arrowsmith (1925: New York: Signet Classics, 1961), p. 278. 68 A point emphasized by Dewey. John Dewey, How We Think (Boston: D. C. Heath & Co., 1910), pp. 47-

50. 69 My thanks to Mark Migotti for helpful comments on more than one draft, to Jaime Nubiola for

information abut Peirce on the flexure of pendulum stands, and to Will McAuliffe for the careful term

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paper that drew the sloppy scholarship leading to the confusion of abduction with “inference to the best

explanation” to my attention.