It’s HARD to be Unbiased
To preface, I was writing a review/post on “12 Angry Men”, in particular, an epistemological breakdown and sort of a philosophy of science pigeon-holing of each character, but that made my head spin a bit. I write this amidst my frustration of failing that endeavor, but also grappling with my existential unease in fulfilling the virtue of the capital T Truth.
I believe that our brain-body truly makes it hard to be unbiased, phenomenologically. That is the way in which we experience rationality and emotions, both seeking to instantiate some sort of truth about the world that is “seemingly” how it is. Similar to Leder’s Absent Body and his argument on why cartesian dualism is so popular precisely because the body is self-effaced, I want to say something of the same for our faculties towards truth.
Rationality
Starting Descartes’s “I think, therefore I am” statement reveals something troubling to me for the rationalist mode. Actually, even skipping all the way to modern neo-Kantians and their regime of categorizing everything in the world, both old and new rationalist programs face a problem that isn’t necessarily solved. That of justifying the premise or category without facing the problem of induction or any form of “justification” for a certain claim.
What makes a given premise true? Correspondence and context, but again, whose perspective? My concern is that there aren’t any “logical” steps into establishing a premise, only perception, interpretation, emotion, memory, or an infinite regress of justifications. I acknowledge that the concern is grappled with by “real realists/rationalists” and is written on by many of the core thinkers. My real concern is people who live by this banner in a way that compromises any sort of epistemic virtue or humility.
Just because a person has taken a premise to be true and logically derived some more truths, doesn’t mean the premise is really true. The problem is that in the rationalist mode, it becomes very easy to believe the premise to be true as you have already built this intricate castle of logic on top of it. Now, since you are so “sure” of the conclusion, the world has flipped, and now the sky is holding up the premise.
I’ll end this section off with the duck-rabbit as an example. Looking at the image can give two possible premises: Duck or not(Duck). Very much like the controversy of the blue or gold dress, the decision of whether or not the image is a Duck or not(Duck) is solely reliant on the interpretive faculties of the person. Sure, you could go deeper and maybe try to decompose Duck further or not(Duck), but the premise hinges on the “fallibility” of perception, not any “rational” faculties. Again, this highlights my concern that someone under this banner will simply call you crazy.
Intuition, Emotion, Relativism
The other side of this does not escape from my critique either. Pure anything-goes sort of emotional relativism, to me, falls to the same vice of rationalism, that of egoism. Intuition as it is does not provide any justification for certain claims. To me, this isn’t really a problem when we are talking about preference claims, i.e., ice cream flavor, but it becomes one when it encroaches on an empirical domain.
If everyone’s emotions or personal feelings become their own justification for what is true, we get a situation where facts and evidence become secondary or irrelevant. This is deeply problematic, especially in areas like science, medicine, or politics, where empirical data is critical to making informed decisions that affect people’s lives.
However, I would like to point out that this is what every scientist is doing when interpreting “empirical data”. This isn’t to say that their emotions or biases should take precedence over the data, but rather that interpretation itself is always mediated through a subjective lens, influenced by personal beliefs, theoretical framework, or ideological positions. This highlights the inherent difficulty of achieving pure objectivity, even in empirical fields1.
Anyways, back to emotional relativism, it becomes hard to refute someone if this person is going off of “just vibes”. Shared truths can not be built that way, and it seems pretty hard to convince people under this banner otherwise. It’s funny, though, that in my mind, the people I called “under the banner of rationalism” are truly relativists “under the hood”.
Solution?
Constructivist or Pragmatist approach? In all honesty, I don’t know. The best I really got is to say to aspire towards epistemic virtues2.