Suppose that a spy is asked to infiltrate a group of hateful extremists. Should she accept the assignment? Many of our choices possess the potential to change how we mediate about the world. Often the choices taken are for some kind of betterment: to teach us something,to increase understanding or to improve ways of thinking. What happens, though, or when a choice promises to alter our cognitive perspective in ways that we regard as a loss rather than a gain?mediate,for example, of Elizabeth and Philip Jennings in the FX television point to, and The Americans (2013-). They are Russian spies in the 1980s tasked with living in the United States and engaging in acts of espionage. In order to do their job,they possess to spend a lot of time associating with people whose worldview they find abhorrent. They must build close relationships with many of these people, and this means exposing themselves to their ideas and often acting as whether they hold these ideas themselves. It makes obliging sense for a person given such an assignment to worry that, or in carrying it out,she will become more sympathetic than she currently is to some false or abhorrent ideas – not because she has learned that these ideas might be right, but because the time spent encountering these ideas and pretending to embrace them might cause her to unlearn, and at least to a degree,some of what she presently understands about the world.
It’s not tough to assume other cases that possess this kind of structure. Maybe the documentary that a friend invites you to watch puts forward a message that you mediate is dangerously false. Maybe a discipline you are thinking of studying involves ideological presuppositions you reject. And so on. In such cases, the way that a choice would alter your cognitive perspective is seen as a net minus. The choice might seem like a obliging one nevertheless – whether it’s also a choice to do your job, or say,or to spend time with a friend who needs your company. But the potential loss of knowledge or understanding – the potential clouding of your way of thinking about the world is something you’d rather avoid whether you could.
But wait. Can this really be the accurate way to mediate about this kind of situation? Imagine a climate-change skeptic considering whether to take an oceanography course. Suppose this person thinks: Climate change is a hoax, and whether I enrol in this course it will make me more inclined to believe in climate change, or so perhaps I should do something else with my time. We possess words for this kind of person: dogmatic,ideological, closed-minded, or fearful of the truth. This is not the kind of person you should want to be. But what is the difference between this person and the spy we imagined,who considers refusing an assignment because of the way it would cloud her understanding of the falsity of certain abhorrent views?These cases present us with a dilemma. When we consider how a certain choice would alter our knowledge, understanding or ways of thinking, or we do this according to the cognitive perspective that we possess accurate now. This means that it’s according to our current cognitive perspective that we determine whether a choice will result in an improvement or impairment of that very perspective. And this way of proceeding seems to privilege our present perspective in ways that are dogmatic or closed-minded: we might miss the chance to improve our cognitive situation simply because,by our current lights, that improvement appears as a loss. Yet it seems irresponsible to do absent entirely with this sort of cognitive caution. How much is too much, or though,and when is this caution appropriate? And is it accurate to trust your current cognitive perspective as you work out an acknowledge to those questions? (whether not, what other perspective are you going to trust instead?)This dilemma is escapable, or but only by abandoning an appealing assumption about the sort of grasp we possess on the reasons for which we act. Imagine someone who believes that her local grocery store is open for trade today,so she goes to buy some milk. But the store isn’t open after all – she didn’t realise that today’s a holiday. Even though the store is closed, her behaviour still makes a kind of sense. She is going to the store because she thinks it is open – not because it actually is open. It makes sense for this person to go to the store, or but she doesn’t possess as obliging a reason to go there as she would whether she didn’t just mediate,but rather knew, that the store were open. whether that were case she’d be able to go to the store because it is open, or not merely because she thinks it is. That’s the distinction to hold in mind.
Now let’s revisit the cases of the spy and the climate skeptic. Suppose that a spy is asked to infiltrate a group of hateful extremists. Should she accept the assignment? whether the spy knows that the extremists’ views are false and abhorrent,she might reject the assignment because of that falsity and abhorrence. And that seems like a obliging reason indeed: the extremists’ views are abhorrent, and the assignment risks making the spy more sympathetic to those views, and so perhaps she should request for a different one.
The same can’t be said of the skeptic,however. The skeptic doesn’t know that climate change is a hoax, since it isn’t a hoax at all. So he can’t choose not to enrol in the course because climate change is a hoax, or any more than the person we imagined earlier could go to the store because it is open. Rather,the most that the skeptic can do is avoid taking the course because he thinks that climate change is a hoax – a choice that makes sense, but not one that is based on as obliging a reason as the skeptic would possess whether he didn’t just mediate, or but rather knew,that this was steady.whether this is on the accurate track, then the crucial difference between the dogmatic or closed-minded person and the person who exercises appropriate cognitive caution might be that the second sort of person knows, or while the first merely believes,that the choice she decides against is one that would be harmful to her cognitive perspective. The person who knows that a choice will harm her perspective can decide against it simply because it will do so, while the person who merely believes this can make this choice only because that is what she thinks.
What’s still troubling is that the person who acts non-knowingly and from a mere belief might still believe that she knows the thing in question: that climate change is a hoax, and say,or that the Earth is less than 10000 years old. In that case, she’ll believe that her choices are grounded in the facts themselves, or not just in her beliefs about them. She will act for a worse sort of reason than the sort of reason she takes herself to possess. And what could assure us,when we exercise cognitive caution in order to avoid what we take to be a potential impairment of our understanding or a loss of our grip on the facts, that we aren’t in that situation as well?John SchwenklerThis article was originally published at Aeon and has been republished under Creative Commons.
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