When psychology undermines beliefs

Abstract

This paper attempts to specify the conditions under which a psychological explanation can undermine or debunk a set of beliefs. The focus will be on moral and religious beliefs, where a growing debate has emerged about the epistemic implications of cognitive science. Recent proposals by Joshua Greene and Paul Bloom will be taken as paradigmatic attempts to undermine beliefs with psychology. I will argue that a belief p may be undermined whenever: (i) p is evidentially based on an intuition which (ii) can be explained by a psychological mechanism that is (iii) unreliable for the task of believing p; and (iv) any other evidence for belief p is based on rationalization. I will also consider and defend two equally valid arguments for establishing unreliability: the redundancy argument and the argument from irrelevant factors. With this more specific understanding of debunking arguments, it is possible to develop new replies to some objections to psychological debunking arguments from both ethics and philosophy of religion.

Keywords:

• Belief
• Cognitive Science of Religion
• Debunking
• Moral Psychology

Acknowledgements

would like to thank Jonathan Hricko, John Waterman, Jeff Maynes for their helpful comments and suggestions on earlier drafts. Thanks also to Martin Rice and the audience at a faculty seminar at the University of Pittsburgh, Johnstown in November, 2011.

Notes

Notes

[1] I wish to emphasize that these proposals are taken as mere examples from two large fields where not all researchers are interested in either supporting or debunking moral or religious beliefs. Also, since my task is not to provide a review of work in these fields, this section will necessarily be superficial and will skim over a large body of work and many distinctions (i.e., the by-product versus adaptation debate in the cognitive science of religion) that would require much more space to properly discuss.

[2] This allows for Greene to be skeptical about deontological beliefs and still be a realist about the contents of utilitarian beliefs, since he maintains a non-intuitive basis for these beliefs.

[3] There are many varieties of the “is/ought” distinction depending on what you take “ought” explanations to be. Traditional versions usually take the distinction to be a semantic or epistemic one, where moral claims are imperatives or emotional expressions and thus derive no consequences from factual descriptions. Since we are specifically targeting a cognitivist and realist approach to moral claims, the “is/ought” distinction mentioned here is a metaphysical claim that the content of moral beliefs is metaphysically distinct from facts about human psychology.

[4] A careful reading of Greene and Bloom reveals that they have this consideration in mind. In the quotes used in the introductory section, Bloom clearly states that “nothing from empirical study of human psychology can refute religious belief,” although the empirical work can “challenge [their] rationality” (2009, p. 125). Greene also talks about “casting doubt” (2007, p. 36) on deontological beliefs rather than directly refuting or falsifying them.

[5] Thanks to an anonymous reviewer for this suggestion.

[6] Although arguably this is the “sensus divinitatus” position proposed by John Calvin and defended by Plantinga (2000).

[7] This is weaker than the claim that confabulations are caused by unreliable mechanisms. Also, it is not sufficient to define confabulations, since we can imagine many cases of good beliefs dependent on unreliable mechanisms. Consider a detective trying to solve a crime who has a dream which gives him an idea leading him to investigate a suspect and crack the case. Dreams are unreliable for the task of solving crimes, and the reasons the detective gives have nothing to do with the dream itself except that they were inspired by, and thus would not exist without, the dream.

[8] Rey actually goes even further than this, and doubts whether people actually endorse the beliefs at all. He claims that “at some level they [the well-informed theists] believe this claim is false” (2007, p. 245). It is not necessary for the present purposes to follow Rey this far in order to establish the more modest (but still bold) claim that many reasons for religious beliefs are confabulations.

[9] I have attempted to remain relatively neutral about the necessary and sufficient conditions for a psychological explanation, except for the broad claim that it somehow involves identifying a mechanism which (along with other initial conditions) produces the explanandum. However, I wish to leave the details of this vague as to leave the door open to future work in the nature of explanation. Even the brief description provided here may be incorrect. While I have been assuming a metaphysical (or ontic) version of explanation, I do not wish to deny that there is an important epistemic and pragmatic aspect to explanation of any kind in the sciences. Therefore, the first condition of this position should be understood to claim: “however psychological explanation works, a mechanism explains the endorsement of p.”