It is widely held that the rise of social media has led to a degradation in public debate.
We substitute invective for argument online, trolls hijack our few attempts at reasoned argument, and fake news proliferates.We talk and listen only to those who are like us in our beliefs, inhabiting echo chambers in which prior attitudes are reinforced and genuine problems pass undetected.
Social media leaves us epistemically vulnerable. It leaves us vulnerable to the acquisition of false, or at least unjustified, beliefs. It leaves us vulnerable to accepting wild conspiracy theories. It leaves us vulnerable to manipulation by nefarious actors, who want to sell us stuff or undermine our democracies.It is tempting to think that epistemic humility offers us the solution to these problems.We are not epistemically humble online. Sometimes we are not epistemically humble because we are arrogant: we shut ourselves off from other voices, or denigrate them if they happen to slip through. Sometimes we are not epistemically humble not because we are arrogant but because we are servile.We take the word of Fox News, or The Intercept, or our Facebook friends without checking and without skepticism.We often seem to adopt an attitude of default trust toward information on the internet (Lynch 2016; but see Rini 2017 for important qualifications).This excessive trust is not humble, because humility is the mean between servility and arrogance.1 If we were more humble — if we trusted to the extent we ought to and were skeptical to the extent we ought to — then we would engage respectfully with other points of view (to the extent that doing so was warranted) and treat unreliable stories with the skepticism they deserve. If social media is the problem, epistemic virtue (along with other virtues) is the solution.
In this chapter, I will argue that epistemic humility is not the solution to the problems of social media. In fact, neither the apparent arrogance nor the servility we see online are well understood as epistemic vices.
Rather, they are the manifestations of dispositions that are typically knowledge-conducive. Being more humble will not bring it about that our beliefs are more accurate or better justified. My argument is not specific to social media: it applies to the exchange of information much more broadly than that.In passing, I hope to shed some illumination, too, on what has come to be called the situ- ationist challenge to epistemic virtue. According to the situationist challenge, agents lack stable character traits. But if they lack stable character traits, they cannot in fact develop the corresponding virtues.2 Our traits may be too sensitive to irrelevant contextual features to count as virtues. I wiH argue that what seemed a bug is actually a feature, at least with regard to the putative epistemic virtue of humility. Our sensitivity to features of the context does (indeed) entail that we are not epistemically humble, in the way that proponents of the virtue would want. In some contexts, the epistemic dispositions we do and should manifest are more arrogant than humble; in others, they are more servile than humble. We should aim to approximate the mean between servility and arrogance only occasionally. I will argue that these dispositions, and the context-sensitivity that causes us to oscillate between them, are epistemically adaptive: they allow us to track significant truths.
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