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Authors: Peter Boghossian
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belief. Such protests may actually indicate a successful treatment. (Of course, it’s possible that the believer has an argument that she has not yet raised in the conversation, but there’s no way to address an unvoiced argument.)
1. Delusion and Doxastic Closure
Some delusions are not beliefs (Bortolotti, 2010). For example, some people who have experienced a traumatic head injury suffer from Capgras delusion—they believe that familiar people, like their husband, and sisters and brothers, are really imposters. Other individuals are afflicted by Cotard delusion—they believe they are dead (literally). It is not possible to talk people out of these delusions.
Street Epistemologists should set the realistic goal of helping the faithful become more doxastically open. Sow the seeds of doubt. Help people to become less confident in what they claim to know, and help them to stop pretending to know things they don’t know. In time, with more interventions behind you, you’ll hone your skills and increase your ambitions. Ultimately, in your wake you’ll have created not only people freed from the prison of faith, but also more Street Epistemologists .
In instances of damage to the brain, no dialectical inter-vention will be effective in eliciting cognitive and atti-tudinal change. These and other conditions like some strokes, intracranial tumors, or Alzheimer’s disease affect the brain and are beyond the reach of nonmedical inter-ventions. In short, if someone is suffering from a brain-based faith delusion your work will be futile.
2. Primum non nocere (“First, do no harm”)
“[Faith] causes us to distort or even ignore objective data [as such] we often ignore all evidence that contradicts what we want to believe.”
—John W. Loftus, The Outsider Test for Faith (2013)
When people are presented with evidence that contradicts their beliefs, or are shown that they don’t have sufficient evidence to warrant beliefs, or learn that there’s a contradiction in their beliefs (the trees could not both come before Adam, Genesis 1:11–12 and 1:26–27, and after Adam, Genesis 2:4–9), or come to understand that their reasoning is in error, they seem to cling to their beliefs more tenaciously.
Doxastic pathology is especially evident in faith-based beliefs. That is, faith-based beliefs occupy a special category of beliefs that are particularly difficult to revise. Helping people revise a faith-based belief, or to abandon faith entirely, presents a host of challenges not usually encountered in other belief domains; even with politics, which trades in competing ideologies, a belief change can be facilitated more readily. This is because many factors are working to cement doxastic closure with regard to faith-based belief systems: society treats faith as a virtue, religious organizations actively spread faith, faith has evolved mechanisms to shield it from analysis, there are cultural taboos with regard to challenging people’s faith, and faith communities actively support members’ beliefs. (Tax-exempt status has allowed faith to become big business, but unlike faith, big business is always in the spotlight and under constant criticism.)
Does this mean your intervention has backfired? Have you unintentionally made their epistemic situ-ation worse? Have you cemented doxastic closure? No.
Interesting lines of research by Sampson, Weiss, and colleagues illustrate this phenomenon in the context of psychotherapy (Curtis, Silberschatz, Samp-son, Weiss, & Rosenberg, 1988; Gassner, Sampson, Weiss, & Brumer, 1982; Horowitz, Sampson, Siegel-man, Weiss, & Goodfriend, 1978; Norville, Sampson, & Weiss, 1996; Sampson, 1994; Silberschatz, Curtis, Sampson, & Weiss, 1991; Weiss & Sampson, 1986.) Researchers posited that short-term psychotherapy helps individuals escape from pathogenic beliefs. A pathogenic belief is a belief that directly or indirectly leads to emotional, psychological, or physical pathology; in other words, holding
1. Delusion and Doxastic Closure
Some delusions are not beliefs (Bortolotti, 2010). For example, some people who have experienced a traumatic head injury suffer from Capgras delusion—they believe that familiar people, like their husband, and sisters and brothers, are really imposters. Other individuals are afflicted by Cotard delusion—they believe they are dead (literally). It is not possible to talk people out of these delusions.
Street Epistemologists should set the realistic goal of helping the faithful become more doxastically open. Sow the seeds of doubt. Help people to become less confident in what they claim to know, and help them to stop pretending to know things they don’t know. In time, with more interventions behind you, you’ll hone your skills and increase your ambitions. Ultimately, in your wake you’ll have created not only people freed from the prison of faith, but also more Street Epistemologists .
In instances of damage to the brain, no dialectical inter-vention will be effective in eliciting cognitive and atti-tudinal change. These and other conditions like some strokes, intracranial tumors, or Alzheimer’s disease affect the brain and are beyond the reach of nonmedical inter-ventions. In short, if someone is suffering from a brain-based faith delusion your work will be futile.
2. Primum non nocere (“First, do no harm”)
“[Faith] causes us to distort or even ignore objective data [as such] we often ignore all evidence that contradicts what we want to believe.”
—John W. Loftus, The Outsider Test for Faith (2013)
When people are presented with evidence that contradicts their beliefs, or are shown that they don’t have sufficient evidence to warrant beliefs, or learn that there’s a contradiction in their beliefs (the trees could not both come before Adam, Genesis 1:11–12 and 1:26–27, and after Adam, Genesis 2:4–9), or come to understand that their reasoning is in error, they seem to cling to their beliefs more tenaciously.
Doxastic pathology is especially evident in faith-based beliefs. That is, faith-based beliefs occupy a special category of beliefs that are particularly difficult to revise. Helping people revise a faith-based belief, or to abandon faith entirely, presents a host of challenges not usually encountered in other belief domains; even with politics, which trades in competing ideologies, a belief change can be facilitated more readily. This is because many factors are working to cement doxastic closure with regard to faith-based belief systems: society treats faith as a virtue, religious organizations actively spread faith, faith has evolved mechanisms to shield it from analysis, there are cultural taboos with regard to challenging people’s faith, and faith communities actively support members’ beliefs. (Tax-exempt status has allowed faith to become big business, but unlike faith, big business is always in the spotlight and under constant criticism.)
Does this mean your intervention has backfired? Have you unintentionally made their epistemic situ-ation worse? Have you cemented doxastic closure? No.
Interesting lines of research by Sampson, Weiss, and colleagues illustrate this phenomenon in the context of psychotherapy (Curtis, Silberschatz, Samp-son, Weiss, & Rosenberg, 1988; Gassner, Sampson, Weiss, & Brumer, 1982; Horowitz, Sampson, Siegel-man, Weiss, & Goodfriend, 1978; Norville, Sampson, & Weiss, 1996; Sampson, 1994; Silberschatz, Curtis, Sampson, & Weiss, 1991; Weiss & Sampson, 1986.) Researchers posited that short-term psychotherapy helps individuals escape from pathogenic beliefs. A pathogenic belief is a belief that directly or indirectly leads to emotional, psychological, or physical pathology; in other words, holding
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