![Sample our Humanities journals, sign in here to start your FREE access for 14 days]({"type":"image" , "src" : "/sda/5939/TOC-Subject-Sample-2021-Humanities.jpg"})
ABSTRACT
This article advances a new analysis of stupidity as a distinctive form of cognitive failing. Section 1 outlines some problems in explicating this notion and suggests some desiderata. Section 2 sketches an existing model of stupidity, found in Kant and Flaubert, which serves as a foil for my own view. In Section 3, I introduce my theory: I analyse stupidity as form of conceptual self-hampering, characterised by a specific aetiology and with a range of deleterious effects. In Section 4, I show how this proposal meets the desiderata and I clarify how it diverges from existing accounts. My position is close to a ‘public health approach’, in contrast to the virtue/vice framework employed by Engel or Mulligan.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes
1. This is a common journalistic trope: to take another recent example, Janet Daley has lamented ‘the Age of Stupid’, citing both Trump and Labour’s Jeremy Corbyn (Daley Citation2016).
2. ‘Dumbness’ is close to Engel’s ‘intellectualist’ model of stupidity (Engel Citation2016, 200).
3. I use the standard A/B pagination for the first Critique and the standard Akademie pagination for other Kant texts.
4. Related ideas can be found in Adorno and Horkheimer amongst others (Adorno and Horkheimer Citation2002, 173).
5. Any exegetical discussion would need to address the complex role of examples in Kant’s philosophy of mind: see Kant (Citation1998, A175/B134, Citation2007, 7/198–9).
6. The comparison with Flaubert also highlights another way in which the Kantian model of stupidity differs from some others. For in Flaubert’s own Dictionary of Received Ideas we find a different form of stupidity: stupidity as cliché, the thoughtless recycling of stock phrases and thoughts (one entry gives the flavour – ‘BASILLICA: Grandiose synonym for “church”. Always “majestic”’). Kantian stupidity is not the same: the stupid ‘physician, judge or ruler’ may be conceptually innovative; where they fail is in applying those concepts.
7. A key reason, stemming from his broader philosophy of mind, is that it demonstrates the necessity of separating judgement and understanding. Although discussing stupidity only briefly, Nuzzo captures this well:The crucial point is that from the fact that one may lack judgement but not understanding it follows that the two faculties of understanding and judgement are not reducible to one. (Nuzzo Citation2014, 255, original emphasis).
8. There is a vast exegetical literature on the determinative/reflective distinction (see Ginsborg Citation2006 for an overview).
9. A similar suspicion to Hamilton’s features prominently in Clark’s polemic The Donkeys (Clark Citation2011, 19).
10. I assume that such goals are construed using a description under which the agent themselves would value them: to borrow a famous example, my aim is to turn on the light rather than to alert the prowler. Generally, I try to avoid substantive assumptions about the underlying notions of an aim or goal: my account should be compatible with whatever the reader’s preferred stance is. I return to the issue at the end of §3.
11. Such an individual will likely be subject to higher order stupidity insofar as deeper conceptual failings, for example in his conception of <responsibility>, prevent him from recognising these lower order conceptual problems (a role but likely not an exclusive one – first order stupidity can be abetted by a whole range of failings from stubbornness to cowardice).
12. My thanks to Julien Dutant and anonymous referee for pressing me on the issues in this paragraph, particularly around ‘silly’.
13. Is allowing impatience to systematically undermine me stupid? Again, not necessarily: It all depends on the aetiology. An impatience rooted in akrasia is not rooted in stupidity; an impatience rooted in an inadequate conception of leadership, for example, might be.
14. It is also the case that not all true beliefs are non-self-hampering: think of illusions supporting an individual’s confidence.
15. How much difference is there between a case in which an individual has never possessed the relevant concept and one in which it is subject to extreme ‘rust’? I cannot address this here: it takes us to far into the question of concept possession itself, but an obvious move would be to argue that the potential remedies will differ.
16. My thanks to an anonymous referee for discussion of this point.
17. Engel (Citation2016, 206) raises a similar objection to Elgin.
18. Compatible with this, my account does particularly stress understanding where that is read in a broad hermeneutic way. My position here has links to Deleuze’s where stupidity consists in an ‘inability to constitute, comprehend or determine a problem as such’ (Deleuze Citation2010, 159).
19. ‘Close to’ because whilst my approach shares the rejection of moral vocabulary and the focus on the population–level, it lacks the stress on quantitative data characteristic of public health models: it is not obvious than conceptual maladaptation can be well measured by quantitative metrics.
20. This article has been greatly improved by comments from Alexander Bird, Julien Dutant, audiences in Durham, London and Oxford, and an anonymous referee for this journal. My sincere thanks to all of them.