Inquiry and action

Taking a stab at Paul's questions:

I wouldn't say that principles of inquiry depend on actions.  I would say that actions often depend on beliefs -- in the sense that what we do depends on how we understand the circumstances in which we are acting, the values at stake, etc., etc.  Which is to say that beliefs typically have consequences for behavior.  (Does it even make sense to think that there could be a belief that made no difference whatsoever to how a person would act?  Maybe not.  But I don't think we need to answer that question.  It's enough to notice that beliefs generally do make a difference.)  Since our beliefs typically guide our actions, we can ask (as Clifford did) whether we are believing responsibly.  As the title of his essay implies, there can be an ethics of belief as well as an ethics of action.  When people jump to conclusions (base their beliefs on flimsy evidence or fallacious reasoning) or indulge in wishful thinking we can (and do) say that they have no right to believe as they do.  It sometimes follows that they have no right to do what their beliefs lead them to do -- but that's a separate question.
 
It seems to me that the main lesson we should learn from the material we have studied about cognitive biases is that it is a lot harder to be a responsible believer (to earn one's right to believe through honest inquiry) than you might think it is.  It is not enough, for example, to look for evidence for your beliefs.  You also need to take seriously the possibility that you are under the influence of confirmation bias and are noticing the the evidence that supports your belief while ignoring (or failing to seek out) the evidence that contradicts it.  And similarly you need to become aware of the other cognitive biases and take steps to avoid them. 

If we were some kind of ideally rational machines instead of human beings, then these efforts would be unnecessary.  But we are human beings, and we need principles of inquiry that work for us, not for robots or Vulcans. 

Cognitive biases afflict human inquiry in all areas, I think -- in science and in business as well as in politics  and the paranormal.  Scientists are no more immune to these tendencies than the rest of us.  This is part of what Kuhn is telling us.  The anomalous card experiment he discusses in Chapter VI is an early contribution to the study of cognitive bias.    The subjects in that experiment saw what they expected to see, and Kuhn insists that scientists do this too.  But in science there are practices that permit anomalies to be perceived (eventually) and new ways of thinking to emerge and become dominant.  Even if individual scientists stubbornly cling to their paradigms and even if whole scientific communities can suffer from a kind of 'group think', the effort to make scientific ideas precise and testable, the presence of rival groups with different ideas, and the replacement of older scientists by younger ones permits progress to be made.  But if Kuhn's account is anywhere near right, then even our best practices of inquiry are far from algorithmic -- they are not the sort of practices that permit questions to be answered by mechanical computations.  They involve interpretation and therefore the possibilty of multiple interpretations.  Good principles of inquiry have to be good for coping with these difficulties.  I think this means that they have to include a social dimension.  I am unlikely to figure things out all by myself. (Descartes' solitary meditations are not a good model for rigorous inquiry.) My ideas need to be tested against others' experiences and interpretations.  I need not only principles to guide my solitary reflections but also principles to guide me in my interactions with other inquirers.  (One of the things I like about Brian Fay's book is that he works out an approach of this kind.)  But this is tricky.  We need to acknowledge the existence of multiple interpretations without losing our ability to distinguish between better and worse interpretations.  Or perhaps I should say: I hope we can find a way to distinguish between better and worse interpretations.   Fallibilism, yes; relativism, no.