Or, Personal
Epistemology, the Perils of Education, and Two Ways of Not Being a Relativist
Knowledge is always uncertain, but some ideas are better
than others. Evidence for propositions exists, but doesn’t that require claims about evidence for which we cannot have
evidence? One-size-fits-all-answers usually fit no one but the person who made
them, but then physics decided to go and be all universal; if everything is
just physics on a super-complicated scale, shouldn’t there be universal answers
to all questions? I used to think the way to address these questions sat
somewhere between
modernism and postmodernism, or maybe through postmodernism and out to the
other side, but that approach wasn’t generating very many answers for me and it
certainly wasn’t working for any of my interlocutors. And then I discovered personal
epistemology through my work as a research assistant and thought it was a
helpful—though perhaps only modestly helpful—way
of framing issues of knowledge and uncertainty and relativism and
absolutism and people being not just wrong but annoyingly wrong.
So I chose personal epistemology as the topic for a class
assignment.* Specifically, it was a literature review (in academics,
a literature review is a summary of the published research on a topic: you review the scholarly literature). I learned a lot: my
understanding of personal epistemology is a lot more nuanced now, but more to
the point I read a study that almost destroyed my fledgling faith in the idea,
but then I realized there was a flaw in the study design (I think); still, even
if the study design is flawed, there’s an interesting implication which I want
to explore here.
But first, I should do a better job explaining personal epistemology.
1.
Personal epistemology refers to the beliefs a person has
about knowledge and knowing. William Perry coined the term in his 1970 Forms of Ethical and Intellectual
Development in the College Years, a longitudinal study of college students’
epistemologies. Most versions of the concept retain some element of Perry’s
emphasis on the development of these beliefs across a person’s life. That said,
there are a lot of competing ways of modelling personal epistemology. I’m going
to focus on my favourites; there are some models (see King and Kitchener, for
instance, or Elby and Hammer, at the bottom) which are prominent enough in the
field but which I don’t know well enough to discuss.
Barbara Hofer, sometimes in collaboration with Paul
Pintrich, has a more synchronous model, which looks at specific beliefs people
have about knowledge at one time. You can think of it as a photograph rather
than a video: higher definition, but only for a single moment. Hofer in
particular looks at two aspects of two dimensions, for a total of four epistemic beliefs: complexity of
knowledge and certainty of knowledge (paired under nature of knowledge), and source of knowledge and justification for
knowledge (paired under process of
knowing). Any given person can hold a naïve
version of these beliefs or a sophisticated
version. For instance, a naïve belief about the complexity of knowledge would
be, “Knowledge is simple”; a sophisticated belief about the complexity of
knowledge would be, “Knowledge is complex.” You can also consider what’s called
domain specificity: a person might
have naïve beliefs about mathematics but sophisticated beliefs about
psychology, or vice versa. (I italicized the jargon terms so you can identify
them as jargon and not my own interpolation.) Hofer and others usually imply
(or state outright) that sophisticated beliefs are truer and/or more desirable
than naïve ones.
Hofer’s model shows a lot of interesting differences between
populations. Men tend to exhibit somewhat different epistemic beliefs than
women do (men tend to hold more naïve beliefs than women do), and students in
different academic disciplines also tend to exhibit different epistemic beliefs.
There are also cultural differences; indeed, as I understand it Hofer is
currently working on epistemic beliefs in different cultures.
Deanna Kuhn, on the other hand, is a scholar who looks more
at the developmental side. Her scheme, like Perry’s original scheme, has stages
that a person would ideally move through over the course of his or her life. That
scheme looks like this:
Realists think
assertions are copies of reality.
Absolutists think
assertions are facts that are correct or incorrect according to how well they
represent reality.
Multiplists think
assertions are opinions that their owners have chosen and which are accountable
only to those owners.
Evaluativists think
assertions are judgements that can be evaluated or compared based on standards
of evidence and/or argument.
Realists and absolutists agree that reality is directly
knowable, that knowledge comes from an external source, and that knowledge is
certain; multiplists and evaluativists agree that reality is not directly knowable, that knowledge is
something humans make, and that knowledge is uncertain. However, things start
to get more fine-grained when it comes to critical thinking: realists do not consider
critical thinking necessary, while absolutists use critical thinking in order
to compare different assertions and figure out whether they are true or false.
Meanwhile, multiplists consider critical thinking to be irrelevant but
evaluativists value critical thinking as a way to promote sound assertions and
to improve understanding.
(There are actually six stages, but I’ve conflated similar
ones for simplicity’s sake, as Kuhn does fairly often. The six stages are named
and numbered thus: Level 0, Realist; Level 1, Simple absolutist; Level 2, Dual
absolutist; Level 3, Multiplist; Level 4, Objective evaluativist; Level 5,
Conceptual evaluativist. The differences between the two kinds of absolutist
and two kinds of evaluativist are less marked than the differences between the
larger groupings.)
There is a certain amount of work in education psychology
trying to move children from lower stages to higher ones, but there are several
challenges to this: for instance, teachers don’t have much training in this
area, since traditional pedagogy is pretty thoroughly absolutist; there’s also
the chance that children will retreat to a previous stage. Ordinarily, people
develop because their beliefs about knowledge are challenged: when confronted
by competing authorities, an absolutist worldview cannot adjudicate between
them and so the person will be forced to adopt new beliefs about knowledge.
However, each stage is more difficult than the previous one, and there’s always
a chance that a person will find their new stage too difficult and retreat to a
previous one (Yang and Tsai). So if you’re trying to move children along from
realism to absolutism to multiplism to evaluativism, you need to push them, but
not push them too hard.
Kuhn does account for domain-specificity, too. People tend
to use one stage for certain kinds of knowledge while using a different stage
for another kind of knowledge. In fact, people tend to attain new levels for
the different knowledge domains in a predictable sequence, though I’m sure
there are exceptions: people first move from absolutist to multiplist in areas
of personal taste, then aesthetic judgements, then judgements about the social
world, and finally judgements about the physical world; they then move from
multiplist to evaluativist in the reverse
order, starting with judgements about the physical world and ending with
aesthetic judgements (but not judgements of taste, which rarely become non-relativist).
Both of these models have pretty good empirical backing as
constructs and can predict a number of other things, such as academic success,
comprehension of material, and so on. I’ll talk about how they might interact
later. For the moment, though, I’ll let it rest and move on to that study I was
talking about before.
2.
Braten, Strømsø, and
Samuelstuen found in a 2008 study that students with more sophisticated
epistemic beliefs performed worse at
some tasks than students with naïve epistemic beliefs. They were using Hofer’s
model, as described above, and looked at college students with no training in
environmental science. These students were given a few different documents
about climate change and asked to read and explain them. Students with
sophisticated beliefs about the certainty or complexity of knowledge performed
better than students with naïve beliefs about those same concepts, as
predicted. However, students with sophisticated beliefs about the source of knowledge—that is, students
who believe that knowledge is constructed, that knowledge is something people make—performed worse than students with
naïve beliefs in this area—that is, students who believe that knowledge is
received.
This finding seems to be a
pretty major blow to the idea that we should be trying to get people to adopt
sophisticated epistemic beliefs. Specifically, Braten, Strømsø, and Samuelstuen
suggest that sophisticated epistemic beliefs about the process of knowing are
more appropriate to experts; non-experts in those areas would do better with
naïve epistemic beliefs. Even if sophisticated epistemic beliefs are right, they tend to make people wrong.
At first glance, this makes a
sort of sense. A lot of people making bizarre claims about the physical
world—creationists, anti-vaxxers, and climate change deniers all come to
mind—rely pretty heavily on a constructivist view of science in their rhetoric.
Is it possible that these people all have sophisticated beliefs about
knowledge, but since they are non-experts in these areas they tend to evaluate
the evidence really poorly? Would they
be better off with naïve beliefs about knowledge? I’m going to be honest: this
bothered me for a few days.
And this isn’t just a small
problem. As Bromme, Kienhues, and Porsch point out in a 2010 paper, people get
most of their knowledge second-hand. Personal epistemology research has so far
focused on how people gain knowledge on their own, but finding, understanding,
and assessing documents is the primary way in which people learn things. So if
sophisticated beliefs wreak havoc with that process, we’re in trouble.
However, I think there’s a
problem with the 2008 study.
Hofer’s model of epistemic
beliefs has just two settings for each dimension: naïve and sophisticated. But
Kuhn’s model shows that people are far more complicated than that.
Specifically, multiplists and evaluativists both believe knowledge is
constructed, but they do significantly different things in light of this
belief. As Bromme, Kienhues, and Porsch point out, the multiplists in Kuhn’s
study have little or no respect for experts, even going so far as to deny that
expertise exists; both absolutists and evaluativists have great respects for
experts, though for different reasons. Multiplists tend to outnumber
evaluativists in any given population, however, and not by just a little bit.
(The majority—in some studies the vast majority—of
people get stuck somewhere in the absolutist-multiplist range.) So if you take
a random sampling of students and sort out the ones with sophisticated
epistemic beliefs, most of them will be multiplists rather than evaluativists
according to Kuhn’s scheme. It therefore shouldn’t be at all surprising to find
that most of them will have trouble understanding documents about climate
change: they aren’t terribly interested in expertise, after all. But evaluativists may still be perfectly
good at the task; they’re just underrepresented in the study.
Of course, this is conjecture
on my part. It’s conjecture based on reading a lot of these studies and, I
think, a sufficient understanding of the statistics involved, though feel free
to correct me if I’m wrong on that count—I’m no statistician. But it’s still
conjecture and I’d rather have empirical evidence. Alas, no one seems to have
tried to resolve this problem, at least not that I could find.
Now, I can imagine a few
different ways Hofer’s model and Kuhn’s model might fit together. Maybe each
belief has only two settings—naïve and sophisticated—and Kuhn’s stages are
different combinations of beliefs. So, realists would have only naïve beliefs;
evaluativists would have only sophisticated beliefs; absolutists and
multiplists would have some combination of naïve and sophisticated beliefs.
This might mean that the beliefs would work together in certain ways to produce
new results, and a combination of naïve and sophisticated beliefs don’t work
well together. And there might be some important beliefs that Hofer is missing
that influence how these work, too. Or, maybe epistemic beliefs have more than
two settings. Maybe there are two kinds of naïve belief and two kinds of
sophisticated belief. Either of these possibilities would explain the conflict
between Kuhn’s results and Braten, Strømsø, and Samuelstuen’s results.
3.
Even if Braten, Strømsø, and
Samuelstuen’s results aren’t a nail in the coffin for those of us who want to
be prescriptive about personal epistemology, any explanation for those results
still means something interesting—or upsetting—about personal epistemology.
Being an evaluativist is probably the best thing to be, in all knowledge
domains: it’s both true** and useful. However, being a multiplist might not be better than being an
absolutist, at least not for everything. Maybe, overall, multiplism is better
than absolutism; certainly it’s truer. But people pay a price for maturity when
they shift from absolutism to multiplism: they lose respect for expertise.
And it’s even worse than it
might seem at first, because most people who make it to multiplism don’t make it to evaluativism. So we can
take a bunch of absolutists and try to get them to evaluativism, but we’ll lose
a lot of them in multiplism, and they might well be worse off in multiplism
than they were in absolutism. (I’m not convinced that they’re actually worse
off—multiplists are far more tolerant than absolutists—but let’s assume they
are.) If I ask people to develop more sophisticated epistemic beliefs, I’m
asking them to take a real risk. The pay-off is high (and, might I add, true), but the risk isn’t insignificant.
I’m reminded of all the worry about
universities turning students into relativists, unable to make commitments, only able to show how nothing is undeniably true, lost at sea among competing frameworks. I’ve been really
skeptical of such arguments in the past, but maybe I’ve underestimated how
big of a problem this is. (The Blume and Roth articles are still riddled with
problems, though.) Maybe relativists are real, and maybe they’re in trouble! I
was wrong! But the existence of relativists might still be a good thing, even if relativism itself is
a less good thing: it means that
education is actually moving people along the stages of epistemological
development. The trick is to get them all the way up to evaluativism; or, to
phrase it more pointedly, the trick is to get them into evaluativism so they
don’t slide back down into absolutism. I don’t know what the results look like
for people who regress: I suspect it’s
harder to get them into multiplism again so that they can get to evaluativism.
This is what Perry’s research suggested, but Perry’s research was… well, that’s
another story.
There’s still a lot to hash
out here: Perry’s work suggests that schools with absolutist professors tend to
produce multiplists anyway, since students still need to reconcile conflicting
authorities and that process is what drives personal epistemology’s
development. In fact, he suggests that yesterday’s reactionary tended to get a
pretty developed epistemology, since they were wrestling with absolutist
professors; today’s reactionary, however, rebels against multiplist or
evaluativist professors, and so doubles-down on absolutism. This is a problem.
And I also suspect—this time
with nothing but anecdote, so mark it with an appropriate amount of
salt-grains—that people in early stages can’t recognize or comprehend later
stages very well. To an absolutist, evaluativism and multiplism probably look
much the same, or else they think they’ve already achieved evaluativism.
Meanwhile, to a multiplist, evaluativism probably looks like some kind of
compromise with absolutism. Moving forward just looks wrong, until there’s nothing else you can do.
It’s hard to say what all of
this means for higher education (or elementary and secondary education, for
that matter). Do you focus on getting relativists through into evaluativism? Or
do you focus on getting people out of absolutism and keeping them out of
absolutism, trusting that they’ll find their way to evaluativism on their own
(though Kuhn suggests this is very unlikely).
Maybe universities aren’t the ones that can get them to evaluativism anyway? Or
do you throw them a bunch of professors with strong but conflicting opinions,
hoping that this will challenge them through to evaluativism? (Personally, I
learned a lot from clearly evaluativist professors who stated and argued for
their own beliefs in the classroom, but did the opposing views justice, too.
That seems like a good compromise: when the student is ready for evaluativism,
they’ll have a model for that way of thinking, but students who tend to be
reactionary aren’t so likely to slip into truculent absolutism for the rest of
their lives, which they’d probably do if they had explicitly relativist
professors.)
It’s hard to say, but I think
personal epistemology is a good place to start thinking about the issue. My goodness there are a lot of studies I
wish I could do!
4.
I wrote this post because I
wanted to get all of this off my chest, but also because I intend to talk a bit
in a upcoming post about higher education in response to one those worried articles I mentioned before. (Thanks, Leah, for bringing it to
my attention.) Personal epistemology won’t play a large part in that
discussion, I don’t think—I haven’t written it yet, so I can’t be sure—but I
wanted you to have these concepts down as background information. A lot of
these “there’s trouble in higher education” articles tend to worry a lot about
all these hippy relativists that universities put out, and if we want to
address that issue, I think we should learn how that relativism fits into
cognitive development, right? It’s looking like people need to be relativists
before they can be right, and then they need to move forward from relativism rather than retreat back into absolutism.
Actually, that’s an almost perfect summary. I’ll add that to the end.
OK. I know I’m well beyond
acceptable blog post length, but there are two more things.
a. Way back when Eve
Tushnet wrote an article for the
American Conservative called “Beyond Critical Thinking,” and then I wrote a
thing called “Beyond Simple Acceptance,” because sometimes I’m a snide jerk.
All that and the resulting back-and-forth is in the links peppering this post.
Anyway, Eve was talking about how people come out of university unable to make
intellectual stands because they’ve over-learned critical thinking; I was talking about how quite a lot of
people (probably most people, probably you, probably me) don’t seem to be
sufficiently capable of critical thinking, so I really didn’t think that there
was a problem with folks learning too
much of the stuff.
Maybe I should have named
this post “Beyond Critical Thinking and Simple
Acceptance.” In retrospect, I think Eve is clearly arguing for something like
evaluativism but I thought she was backsliding to absolutism. So I was wrong in
that. But Eve was wrong to say that critical thinking is the problem. Instead,
the problem seems to be that universities aren’t shepherding people through
multiplism into evaluativism. (Maybe it isn’t the job of a university to do that, but I don’t know where else people
will learn it.)
Now, I absolutely do not want a university to teach people which beliefs to take a stand for. The
thought of that makes my skin crawl; the whole Catholic college or Baptist
bible institute seems … disingenuous at best. Private schools at the elementary
and secondary levels are even worse. (Though Perry might remind me that the
rebels would fare better in that system than if they were taught by
relativists.) But universities would certainly do well to help any students who
make it to multiplism move on through to evaluativism.
b. Because I read Unequally Yoked and Slate Star
Codex, I have some passing knowledge
of Less
Wrong, the Center for
Applied Rationality (CFAR), and the
rationalist community generally (though I wish they’d change the name from rationalist because I’m fairly sure they
aren’t disciples of Descartes, Spinoza, and Kant.) A major focus of these groups is to figure out how
to reason better. CFAR is particularly looking at rationality outreach and
research—testing whether the sorts of tricks Less Wrong develops are empirically
supportable, and teaching these tricks to people outside the movement.***
I wonder about this, though.
How much rational thinking can non-evaluativists learn? Would the resources be
better spent moving people from absolutism into multiplism and from multiplism
into evaluativism? Or does that come automatically when you teach rational
thinking? Perry was clear: he thought that critical reasoning skills came from the development of personal
epistemology. But Perry’s method was… not the best. It might be worth spending
some resources to check this: is it better—in terms of outcome/cost—to move
people into evaluativism, or to teach them the rationality tricks? I don’t have
the resources to check any of that, but maybe the CFAR does.
TL;DR: It’s looking like people need
to be relativists before they can be right; relativism isn’t great, though;
people need to move forward from
relativism rather than retreat back into absolutism.
* On the note of class
assignments, I finish my program in April. Yay! Then I will need to start job
hunting. Boo! But after that, I hope, I will have a job. Yay!
** I am asserting that it is
true. This assertion is based on—well, on everything, really—but I want to make
clear that psychology can’t really tell us much about epistemology in the
philosophical sense; the job here is to determine what beliefs people do have about knowledge, not which
beliefs are true. However, it seems
pretty clear, philosophically, that knowledge is uncertain and constructed,
that reality cannot be directly accessed, and so on.
*** The other focus for Less Wrong (and Slate Star Codex?) is the creation
of a robot-god which will usher in a utilitarian paradise (and prevent the
otherwise-inevitable rise of a robot-demiurge), so I’m still not sure what to
make about their claim to reasonableness.
_____
Select Sources
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