Knowing You Are On To Something Real: Part I

Last week, I expressed the intense epistemological doubt caused by discovering that South Hills Evangelical Church is actually nowhere near the South Hills.  But I’m over it now.  In fact, I’ve actually decided to join the dark side of the naming force and have, as a result, been copyrighting my own geography-incongruent names.  See what you think of what I’ve got so far:

The Minnetonka, Minnesota Bank of Saudia Arabia

The Majestic Highlands Vista Point Church of Kansas

The Stone Cold Sober Restaurant of Missoula

So, by way of obtuse parable, one way to resolve epistemological doubt is to simply join the skeptics who say we can’t know anything and glory in the chaos.  This allows one the fun of just making stuff up, because when you think about it, what I make up has just as much a chance of being right than what other people call facts.

But, all kidding aside, I don’t think that’s the right way.  I think it’s better by far to admit that we can know stuff; to believe that some things are truer than others; to deal with the obvious fact that it’s not a complete coincidence that when I schedule a meeting at 8:00 at the Buttercup Café, that people all show up at 8:00 at the Buttercup Café, and thus my concepts of time and space might not be totally random; I say, I think it’s better to acknowledge these plain facts and then struggle with the real question that immediately follows in an honest way, than it is to throw up one’s hands and dive into the poisoned well of total skepticism.

That immediately-following honest question is something like this: Sure, I can know times and places, but some things are harder to know than others, and how can I know if I’m actually on to something real? How can I distinguish real knowledge that actually means something from mere shifting opinion that doesn’t mean anything?

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Principle #1: Distrust Obviously Biased Sources

People are biased.  If there is one lesson from my own field of Social Psychology, that is the lesson.  We are not perfect processors of information; we often skew reality in ways that fit what we want reality to be like. 

People are biased; but they aren’t pathological liars. Sometimes they get closer to the truth than at other times.  Some biases are larger than others.  And our first rule of separating the proverbial wheat from the proverbial chaff is: You shouldn’t trust people who have a clear self-serving motive for telling you something. 

I think this factor is so obvious that I’m not going to spend a lot of time on it.  You almost certainly do this already, consciously or not.  When you read a Fox News Poll that says Obama is going to lose the next election, my guess is you don’t think to yourself, “well, that seals it…I guess he’s a one-term President.” You don’t do that because you know that Fox News has a conservative bias, and that the people who watch Fox News (and who would thus respond to the poll) have the same bias, and that this poll as a result is probably is not a representative sample of the nation as a whole.  The same would be true (or ought to be true) if you saw an MSNBC poll saying Obama would overwhelmingly win.  (Of course, you probably have never seen an MSNBC poll, since TV ratings suggest you’ve probably not watched much MSNBC; and even if you had, the people who fill out their polls, as far as I can tell, are entirely comprised of Jim and Edna Miller from Santa Barbara, California.)

So, it’s a useful starting point to note what I hope is obvious to you: People are biased.  Don’t trust them when they obviously have something to gain by you believing their information.  Don’t trust a televangelist when she tells you that you will be healed of your mild headaches if only you will send her $100 dollars; because she might have an ulterior motive.  Don’t trust a politician when he tells you that he really believes in reducing government spending; because he’s probably just repeating the sound bites that tested well in focus groups, and he wants to win an election.  Don’t trust Barney when he says he loves his neighbor, because…he’s a big fictitious purple dinosaur that irritates everyone.  I think you get the picture.

Of course, this still leaves us with the question of how we determine who to trust.  After all, not all cases are as obvious as televangelists and politicians.  And our next three principles will deal with that exact issue: Given that everyone is at least partially biased, how should we go about cutting through the bias?