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What and How We Know and Reason & Logic
Chris Mooney's "The Science of Why We Don't Believe Science: How our brains fool us on climate, creationism, and the vaccine-autism link" at Mother Jones (April 18, 2011).
Chris Mooney summarizes a host of studies underlining our human capacity for rationalization, for what is called, "motivated-reasoning". When confronted with new information that threatens to undermine our deeply held beliefs, we readily turn to an arsenal of defensive psychological tools to rebuff disconfirmation. Mooney covers several terms of art in psychology and neuroscience, such as "confirmation bias", and the "backfire effect". Remember Fox Mulder's wall-hanging: "I want to believe." Mooney writes: "The theory of motivated reasoning builds on a key insight of modern neuroscience: Reasoning is actually suffused with emotion (or what researchers often call "affect"). Not only are the two inseparable, but our positive or negative feelings about people, things, and ideas arise much more rapidly than our conscious thoughts, in a matter of milliseconds..." Though epistemologists and rhetoricians have long been preoccupied with the role of presuppositions, desires, and pathos in persuasion and belief formation, these studies serve to bring many of our age-old epistemic worries into sharp focus. It is worth noting that the tradition of epistemic virtues is largely shaped by the evident need to ward off rationalization and self-deception. Consider circumspection, intellectual humility, teachability, and objectivity. The informal logical fallacies also have in mind our capacity for poor reasoning when we are so inclined. Though not mentioned in the piece, our ability to be stubborn or recalcitrant toward undesired evidence has relevance to yet another longstanding philosophical subject: direct and indirect doxastic voluntarism.
Reasoning Practically (Oxford University Press: 2000), p. 76.
Given my focus on practical rather than theoretical reasoning, I may at this point consider weakening the principle of total evidence and examining a presumption instead. The presumption to be examined establishes, for purposes of rational action, a generic bias in favor of more knowledge rather than on less. To defend the adoption of the presumption in favor of being maximally informed amounts to defending the belief that following it will lead, in the long run, to better overall results, in terms of goal fulfillment, than the results of following its antithesis (i.e., a presumption establishing a generic bias in favor of acting on the basis of less knowledge rather than on more), or indeed better than the results of a case-by-case balancing (i.e., of following no rule or presumption at all).
Proposed Roads to Freedom (H. Holt & Co.), p. 147.
What a man believes upon grossly insufficient evidence is an index to his desires — desires of which he himself is often unconscious. If a man is offered a fact which goes against his instincts, he will scrutinize it closely, and unless the evidence is overwhelming, he will refuse to believe it. If, on the other hand, he is offered something which affords a reason for acting in accordance with his instincts, he will accept it even on the slenderest evidence.