Episode 88: Kent Bach discusses jumping to conclusions and knowing when to think twice
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What does “ignoring something as evidence” mean in everyday reasoning?
Hey, Matt Teichman here from Elucidations. Before we get going today, I just thought I'd ask if you're a fan of the show to maybe go to our iTunes page and leave a rating and a review, and that way more people can discover it. All right, thanks.
Hello, and welcome to Elucidations, a philosophy podcast ordinarily recorded at the University of Chicago, but which today is being brought to you from San Francisco. With us today is Kent Bach, Emeritus Professor of Philosophy at San Francisco State University, and he's here to talk to us about jumping to conclusions and knowing when to think twice. Kent Bach, welcome.
Hi, Matt. That's one thing we'll talk about. What else? I don't know.
All right. Excellent. And possibly other things, too. So this idea that ignoring something can count as evidence in favor of, I guess, either that or something else is maybe a bit counterintuitive because normally you think that if something's evidence, you're looking at the evidence, you're considering it, and you're weighing it in your mind whether it really is evidence for something happening. So maybe we could try to motivate this idea with an example. What would be an example of like in not thinking about something, some other claim gets justified or you're not thinking about something serves as evidence for something else?
Well, what I have in mind with that notion of ignoring as evidence is that when you come to believe something, you base your belief on something or other, and you could conceivably consider all sorts of possible sources of evidence against whatever it is that you believe, but most of the time you don't. And so there are two questions. One is, what is the significance of the fact that you don't consider certain possibilities? And what does it require for you to consider them when they need to be considered? So take a very simple example. Suppose you're given the question, which of the following four former presidents is on Mount Rushmore? And you're given, it's a multiple choice question. And you're given the choice between Richard Nixon, Abraham Lincoln, George W. Bush, and Dwight D. Eisenhower.
Chances are you'll immediately think of Lincoln as being the correct answer.
That was my general idea, yeah.
Was it? Good for you. You know a lot about American history and South Dakota. The alternatives really don't get taken seriously. As soon as you hear the name Lincoln, that's it. And if you think about multiple choice exams in general, when you...
How do multiple‑choice tests reveal the limits of our snap‑judgment process?
go through them, what typically happens? Well, if it's something you have some knowledge about and you're lucky, exactly one of the, let's say, four choices will strike you as the correct one. And you'll immediately mark that off as your answer and go on to the next question. Nothing holds you back, but sometimes you are held back because maybe one of the other choices seems equally as appealing as the one that first appealed to you. Or perhaps you think of an answer that's not even included among the four, and maybe you even have that as an option under the heading, none of the above. Okay, so what's going on there? Well, you're partly relying on your ability to invoke knowledge that you have when you need to.
And in most cases of relatively easy multiple choice questions, You don't even bother. You take one answer to be the correct one, and that's it. When there's some kind of doubt, then you start bringing in alternative possibilities. But there could be a lot of possibilities other than the ones that you're considering, and that list could conceivably go on and on and on. So somehow you have the ability to think of relevant possibilities or plausible possibilities when they're there, and you don't bother yourself thinking about impossible possibilities or irrelevant ones when they're not there. So, one question arises, well, how does all this work? Well, that's not a philosophical question, that's really a psychological one, and it has something to do with how it is you access information that you possess when you need to access it.
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Chapters
8 chapters
1
What does “ignoring something as evidence” mean in everyday reasoning?
0:00–2:58
2
How do multiple‑choice tests reveal the limits of our snap‑judgment process?
2:58–7:31
3
Why is the ability to tune out irrelevant possibilities crucial for forming beliefs?
7:31–10:46
4
How does the distinction between thinking and believing help solve the problem of self‑deception?
10:46–14:33
5
What role do System 1 (fast) and System 2 (slow) thinking play in everyday inference?
14:33–18:16
6
How do our subconscious snap‑judgments affect ordinary communication?
18:16–21:29
7
When should philosophers study ordinary reasoning and its hidden processes?
21:29–25:07
8
What practical habits can improve our ability to think twice and avoid bad snap judgments?
25:07–30:08
Speakers
1 identifiedMore from Elucidations
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