Epistemic Hubris

ABSTRACT

It is common nowadays for laypeople to take public stances on complex issues, such as the effectiveness of a vaccine or the seriousness of anthropogenic climate change, without any kind of disciplinary expertise. Yet those who do so act as if they were experts in the field, disseminating their thoughts and sometimes also spreading their advice. Scholars have ascribed this phenomenon to various kinds of individuals, such as conspiracy or contrarian thinkers, science denialists, know-it-all experts and celebrities. This paper aims to argue that behind such different manifestations lies a common, independently identifiable epistemic disposition that will be called epistemic hubris that will be fully explained in relation to other epistemic vices already discussed in the literature. Epistemic hubris includes, but is not limited to, overconfidence; it may or not entail arrogance; it is similar to yet distinct from hyper-autonomy and conspiracy thinking. Its peculiarity is that individuals who develop it seem to believe that they can easily become experts, even without special training. This disposition negatively affects individuals’ epistemic conduct, hindering knowledge and true belief formation, and can generate morally relevant consequences when people who falsely consider themselves experts begin to share their mistaken beliefs.

KEYWORDS:

• Epistemic vices
• expertise
• trust
• testimony

Acknowledgments

I wish to thank three anonymous referees for their comments and thoughtful critiques, that forced me to rethink, and rewrite more clearly, some of the main arguments presented. I am also grateful to many colleagues for discussing this paper with me and providing recommendation for improving it. I am especially thankful to the audience of the SIFA conference 2023 for their feedback and to my colleagues of the Practical Philosophy Lab at the University San Raffaele. I am also grateful to Eleni Orfanidou for her useful bibliographical references in cognitive psychology. Part of the research in this paper is connected to the MUR-FISR project ‘CoRC – Covid Rules and Compliance’, FISR2020IP_04500.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Lynch argues that intellectual arrogance is the attitude behind the whole phenomenon of the know-it-all society, and although he primarily discusses its impact on public political discourse, he believes that the same attitude is theoretically visible in other contexts and cases as well. I will discuss later, in Section 3.1, why I do not think that this epistemic vice can explain the phenomenon in all its manifestations but only in some.

2 A similar epistemic revolt is found to some extent in another epistemic vice that will be described in this paper: hyper-autonomy. However, hyper-autonomy leads to a complete rejection of epistemic dependence and of any form of testimony; epistemic hubris, instead, leads merely to believing that experts can easily be replaced after a few hours in front of a PC gathering material, assessing evidence and reading from multiple sources. Thus, the kinds of epistemic revolt entailed respectively by the two flaws are somewhat different.

3 It is important to add a consideration here. This example is not meant to imply that all concerns about vaccines are necessarily a sign of some epistemic flaw. Sometimes concerns are justified, as well as the desire to have more information about the vaccines themselves, their possible side effects, and even the way in which the efficacy of a vaccine is being tested. However, obtaining this information can be extraordinarily difficult because of the judgmental and dismissive attitude of many physicians (see Goldenberg 2021; but also Kärki 2022). This attitude on the part of experts can lead laypersons, who wish to clarify some doubts, to attempt to engage with first-order evidence. This reaction is entirely understandable and not in itself blameworthy. However, it should be pointed out that this practice might lead into treacherous terrain if non-experts become convinced that they have understood complex scientific mechanisms that require years of in-depth study to be truly grasped. What is even more problematic is when, on the basis of the information thus acquired, laypeople express their dissent while believing that they have reached greater understanding than official scientists, or, worse, that the scientists have deliberately covered up or failed to communicate relevant information.

4 The association, no longer active, is at the center of an investigation into the death of a man who, after falling severely ill with COVID-19, followed the advice given over the phone by its members instead of going to the hospital. The news story can be found at https://corrieredibologna.corriere.it/bologna/cronaca/21_ottobre_09/no-vax-morto-le-cure-ippocrateorg-mirino-medico-reggiano-5963678e-28dc-11ec-94a9-c63848a9c50c.shtml.

5 For the full text (in Italian), see: https://ippocrateorg.org/chi-siamo/.

6 I realize that, especially in the case of celebrities or know-it-all experts, other salient character or personality traits may come into play, such as narcissism. Further investigation would be needed to identify the possible presence of character traits predisposing individuals to epistemic hubris, along with possible correlations of this vice with gender, education or political beliefs.

7 There is one aspect that needs to be pointed out here, in order to avoid confusion between the phenomenon of improvising expertise and other forms of interaction between the world of experts and the world of ordinary people. In a 1996 book, Stephen Epstein describes the crucial role played by AIDS activists during the early years of the epidemic, when there was still little research and knowledge about the disease. The activists, composed mostly of people who knew they had contracted HIV and who were tired of passively enduring the few or otherwise generic recommendations of doctors, transitioned from ‘disease-victims’ to ‘activist-experts’ (Epstein 1996, 8). These were still laypeople with no scientific expertise, but who had acquired a wealth of knowledge about the disease through their direct experience, wanted to be heard by experts and constituted credible representatives of their community (25). The relevant aspect to emphasize, however, is that they did not claim to replace scientists, but they demanded interaction and discussion with them, given that they were directly affected by their choices. At a time in history when research for effective AIDS treatments was taking various paths, activists managed to get involved in crucial processes: the FDA meetings in which drugs are considered for approval, review panels that evaluate research proposals for funding and review boards that approve clinical research at hospitals and in academic research centers (32). The fact that they were demanding involvement in the world of ‘official experts’, without being themselves experts, does not mean that they were acting out of epistemic hubris. They were entitled to this exchange, because it allowed the perspective of the patient to be expressed as well. Epistemic hubris does not move individuals to seek this kind of involvement: rather it seems to make them think that they can work out an alternative science that adheres to different rules.

8 I postpone the discussion of the similarities and differences between epistemic hubris, contrarian thinking and hyper-autonomy until Section 3.2. I can anticipate the belief that the practice of ‘doing one’s own research’ is more pervasive and is adopted by a broader group of people who neither necessarily aim to work out an alternative to the mainstream view nor are science deniers but simply think they can get to the bottom of complex issues through independent research.

9 It may be useful to add a few more details about the way experts are conceived by people who act with epistemic hubris. In the wake of Michel Croce’s (2019) analysis, we can distinguish between research-oriented and novice-oriented definitions. The former defines experts on the basis of the progress to which they contribute in a domain D, progress made possible through an overall better understanding of D and research-oriented abilities (18–19). Doctors in national health institutions and researchers working within the scientific community are therefore ‘experts’ according to the research-oriented view. Thomas Grundmann’s view of ‘expert’ is somewhat close, as he defines S as an expert in a domain D at time t if and only if: i) S is superior to the majority of people insofar as S possesses both more relevant domain-specific evidence than the majority about D at t and better domain-specific reasoning skills and ii) S forms sufficiently reliable beliefs about D (Grundmann 2022). Clearly, those who make the mistake mentioned in the text adopt, not this view of expertise, but one that seems closer to the so-called novice-oriented view. This view focuses on the function of the expert in relation to common people, for whom the expert is the one who, being in possession of some knowledge, helps laypeople, who do not possess it, to improve their epistemic condition in a given domain (Goldman 2018, 2). According to Goldman’s novice-oriented view, what defines S as an expert in a domain D is ‘the capacity to help others (especially laypersons) solve a variety of problems in D or execute an assortment of tasks in D which the latter would not be able to solve or execute on their own’ (Goldman 2018, 4). According to Goldman, furthermore, expertise is not reputational, and possession of specialized training is not important. Finally, being an expert is a comparative state of affairs, although Goldman then adds that the expert must possess a ‘substantial number’ of true beliefs in a domain D, to lend some form of objectivity to his definition (4–5). Such a principle, however, has a certain component of subjectivity, since the idea of what it means to have a ‘substantial number of true beliefs’ will likely show some variation from person to person. And so anyone who meets the criteria identified by Goldman can be identified as an ‘expert’ and thus become an epistemic authority in someone’s eyes. Individuals who act with epistemic hubris implicitly adopt a novice-oriented view of expertise. They identify their personal epistemic authority following criteria that are less objective than those needed in the research-oriented view of expertise.

10 This greater facility with terminology has also been described by Levy as characteristic of contrarian thinkers (see Levy 2022).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Francesca Pongiglione

Francesca Pongiglione is an Associate Professor at the Faculty of Philosophy of Vita-Salute San Raffaele University, where she is also the director of the European Centre for Social Ethics - ECSE. She obtained her PhD at the University of Bologna and held visiting positions at Feem – Fondazione Eni Enrico Mattei, Collegio Carlo Alberto, the University of Glasgow and Boston University. Her current research lies at the interplay between ethics and epistemology, with a focus on climate change. Her latest publications include “The Epistemic Requirements of Solidarity” (Critical Horizons, 2024), “Climate Change and Human Rights” (Springer Handbook of the Philosophy of Climate Change, 2023), “Climate Change and Culpable Ignorance: The Case of Pseudoscience” (with C. Martini, Social Epistemology 2022). She is local PI of the research project ENCOMPASS – “Engaging and orienting the young in the complexity of climate change and Sustainability to foster agency and deliberation in Societally relevant choices” funded by MUR (Italian Ministry for University and Research).