Expert Bullshitting: Understanding Epistemic Trespassing through the Lens of Bullshit
individuals favor information that aligns with their hypothesis over information that does not. They give three accounts for how this bias could occur. The one I’ll be centering on suggests that focus on the hypothesis causes “undue weight” to be given to supporting information while contradicting information is neglected. 15 Since trespassers also express T2, they’re unaware of the nuances and complexities of the field they’re trespassing in and are more likely to consider supportive evidence. This unawareness provokes a degree of unconscientiousness in their research, which Moberger claims is required for a statement to be bullshit. So, trespassers can certainly claim to be concerned with the truth or even produce a true statement, but because of their confirmation biases, a certain degree of neglect/unconscientiousness is inevitable. Furthermore, confirmation bias can be defined as an “overconfidence…of one’s own view,” which tracks the overconfidence that Ballantyne attributes to epistemic trespassers. 16 This further supports the claim that trespassers are more susceptible to confirmation bias, which causes their actions to be bullshit. There may seem to be a distinct difference in how bullshitters and trespassers express T3, in that a bullshitter doesn’t care about the truth, and a trespasser may intend to arrive at the truth. The problem with trying to make this distinction though is that if a trespasser really cared about the truth, they wouldn’t be partaking in their actions. So, perhaps a trespasser starts as a non-bullshitter, but once they venture outside their field, they
15 Margit Oswald, and Stefan Grosjean, “Confirmation Bias,” in Cognitive Illusions: A Handbook on Fallacies and Biases in Thinking, Judgement and Memory, e d. Rudiger F. Pohl. (Psychology Press, 2012), 93. 16 Uwe Peters, “What is the Function of Confirmation Bias?,” Erkenntnis , 87 no. 3 (2020): 1351-1376.
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