Certainty and Explanation

Commentary on Redstone's "Democracy and the Problem of Certainty."

The sociology journal Theory and Society recently published an article by Ilana Redstone on “Democracy and the Problem of Certainty.” From the abstract:

This paper introduces The Certainty Trap, a pervasive cognitive distortion that leads individuals to treat their knowledge and beliefs as definitive and final rather than provisional, particularly regarding contentious social and political issues. It explores three key fallacies underlying this trap, discusses its consequences, and proposes strategies for moving from certainty to confidence in thinking and discourse. By revealing the mechanisms of The Certainty Trap and its overall impact on various domains of society, this essay aims to contribute to the clearer thinking that can lead to more nuanced and productive approaches to addressing complex societal challenges.

I was one of several authors asked to provide commentary on the piece. You can view the version of record here, if you have a subscription. Here is a lightly edited version of my commentary:

According to Redstone, the Certainty Trap is “a cognitive distortion” that involves “seeing our knowledge as definitive,” treating our “values, goals, and beliefs as though they don’t need to be clear or explicit,” “assuming that differences in information are the cause of differences in opinion,” and “assuming we that we can know another person’s intent.”

This cognitive distortion fuels political polarization, social distrust, and poor communication. Those who disagree with our obviously correct positions are assumed to be either woefully ignorant or to have bad motives.

Our author’s advice on avoiding the Certainty Trap is to recognize that our knowledge is always provisional — something that recalls Karl Popper’s ([1934] 2002; 1994) arguments against logical positivism and theoretical dogmatism. Knowledge induced from observation is fundamentally uncertain, absolute proof or disproof is impossible, and it’s testability all the way down. One might also think of rationalist author Julia Galef’s (2021) argument in favor of a “scout mindset,” more concerned with getting an accurate the lay of the land than with the soldier’s mindset of defending a position.

Cautioning people against close-mindedness is good, and may have some impact at the margins. But one wonders at the limits of simply educating people out of the Certainty Trap. It is all too easy to imagine that most will continue to operate as before, only now certain that falling into the Certainty Trap is another of their adversaries’ many intellectual and moral failings.

Sociology suggests that to reduce the impact of the Certainty Trap, one must alter the social conditions that give rise to it. Given that the Trap decomposes into three elements — The Settled Question Fallacy, The Fallacy of Equal Knowledge, and The Fallacy of Known Intent — we might be able to propose a correlation between each element of the Trap and one or more features of social structure.

For instance, The Settled Question Fallacy occurs when we erroneously assume all reasonable or informed people agree on something. It involves a tendency to treat our knowledge as definitive and to let our value assumptions go unstated and thus unrecognized. Both components of the fallacy are plausibly a direct function of cultural homogeneity. The more that people — including the highly educated — live ensconced in social bubbles where all have similar beliefs and values, the more these beliefs and values become settled questions and unstated assumptions, and the more harshly deviations from consensus are judged (for relevant theory, see Black, 2011: 101–119).

Note that in any setting some dimension of culture might be diverse, while others are homogeneous — for example, people in an office might eat varying cuisine at home, but all support the same political causes (Campbell and Manning 2018: 64). We should expect their certainties and unstated assumptions to vary accordingly.

The Fallacy of Known Intent erroneously assumes the motives of others. To explain it, we might look for structural correlates of assigning intent to other individuals — especially ill intent. Motives are not directly observable, and there is wide latitude in which goals and intentions we attribute to others (Black, 1995; Manning, 2020). The attribution of bad intentions is shaped by the contours of conflict and moralism and is most likely toward those in the social locations that attract harsh judgments and severe sanctions (Manning, 2020). This includes distant inferiors in most settings, but also perhaps those deemed guilty of being privileged or oppressors (idem).

Concern with the motives, intentions, and subjectivity more generally also varies with social structure — for instance, we are more likely to produce phenomenological explanations of social superiors than of social inferiors, and of socially close people than of socially distant people (Black, 2000: 357, n.36). Deterministic explanations, explaining behavior with outside forces, are more likely toward those at lower social elevations and toward those who are more socially distant (Black, 2000:356–357).

The Fallacy of Equal Knowledge erroneously concludes that people with equal access to the facts will necessarily agree — thus, disagreement implies ignorance on the part of our opponents. Insofar as this involves explaining people’s beliefs as the result of some socialization process or lack thereof, it is deterministic — and so to some degree structurally incompatible with explaining their behavior as the result of pure ill intent. This suggests that the purest examples of the Fallacy of Equal Knowledge and of the Fallacy of Known Intent should tend to involve different classes of people as their subject matter: For instance, the idea that someone knows better but disagrees due to bad motives should be more common when the subject is a social elite, while the idea that someone may mean well but is ignorant or deluded should be more common when the subject is someone in the lower or working class. When one sees both types of idea overlapping, we would expect it to happen most often with targets of intermediate elevation and distance.

These are only speculations, but an enterprising researcher could perhaps find ways to test them.

To the extent that the Certainty Trap is a useful concept, exploring its social structure is a worthwhile sociological exercise, and possibly one with practical applications as well. For social distances can be manipulated though any intervention that successfully stimulates peaceful interaction, and various kinds of diversity might be promoted in this social network or that. Social structure is fateful, but changeable.

You can read Redstone’s response to the various commentaries here. I’ve not yet read it, but she also has a book on her argument.