Stages of Mental Growth – Link between Credulism and Reductionism
by Wei Jing HO – Sunday, 3 November 2024, 1:07 AM
Number of replies: 7
As baby, as a blank slate, we depend and trust our caretakers.
For most of us brought up in a safe environment, we trust those around us. Listening and learning from them.
This seems similar to the philosophy of Credulism.
Over time, we gathered the good and bad experiences in life and learn to doubt and be skeptical of others. Some of us more broken than others and the distrust is more.
We doubt and validate what we are told.
If we learn to balance the harsh reality of the world vs. the harmony most of us may wish to have among our valued people – we learn to set certain rules:
- Some testimonial knowledge can be taken at face value e.g., for small talk, for non-critical stuff.
- Some testimonial knowledge that impact critical decisions related to health, money, lives and reputations have to be scruntinised more.
This seems similar to the philosophy of Reductionism.
As humans, we cannot subscribe to 100% Reductionism. We are bond to time, with limited lifespan. Checking every piece of testimonial knowledge is illogical and inefficient. A 100% Reductionism thinking system may be more relevant for machine designs.
However, if we subscribe to 100% Credulism, that’s extremely naive when young and simple when old. Trust is a virtue, but in the real world, bad actors hijack it for malicious or manipulative purposes.
Maturity comes from the balancing act of how much trust to give. Because the maturity of a human was never about how intelligent one is, but how adaptive one has become – to overcome and pre-empt the hard problems in each of our lives.
________
One case of a society’s push towards Reductionism way of validating testimonial knowledge via non-testimonial evidence are a nation’s Cybersecurity Campaigns against more and more frequent digital scam attacks. Example:
- Cyber Security Agency of Singapore (CSA). Cybersecurity Campaigns: https://www.csa.gov.sg/our-programmes/cybersecurity-outreach/cybersecurity-campaigns
- Singapore Government’s Scam Shield Portal: https://www.scamshield.gov.sg/
To build mental resilience against social engineering attacks, society needs to trust less in certain scenarios.
Re: Stages of Mental Growth – Link between Credulism and Reductionism
by James Carmichael – Sunday, 3 November 2024, 2:10 AM
Wei Jing, just to drill down on the niceties in what may be an irrelevant tangent to you. What you’re describing when you talk about our need to scrutinize “testimonial knowledge that impact critical decisions related to health, money, lives and reputations” doesn’t strike me as *reductionism*, per se, nor do most efforts to counteract disinformation online that I am familiar with. I agree with you that they’re about not credulously (as it were) believing single sources of testimonial information, but what you’re describing–which, again, is intuitive with much of my own experience!–seems to be the idea that we benefit from going further down the testimonial regress to more sources of testimonial information in order to verify information about important things. But we’re still going to testimonial sources; we either cannot verify these things for ourselves or find too difficult to do so; so, we diligently check (for example) *other* online sources and trusted news outlets against that claim that we read online. (To pick a current example from the US, I don’t think that anyone is suggesting that the way to combat disinformation about voter fraud is for us to go and *observe voter behavior ourselves*; it is, rather, for us to be judicious and get *more* testimonial evidence in before drawing conclusions about whether or not voter fraud is occurring.)
None of this goes against the grain of what you are ‘really’ getting at, I think; I guess I’m just responding to the fact that your post does seem–to me; maybe I’ve got it wrong!–not to mention the final and distinguishing feature of reductionism, which (as I understand it!) is to turn *away* from testimonial evidence and to some *other* source. What you’re advocating and describing seems to be a judicious credulism, which *does* accept the reliability of *some* testimonial evidence, but encourages us to be circumspect and diligent with respect to *which* testimonial evidence we trust, and how much *corroborating* testimonial evidence we require for any given piece of information.
Re: Stages of Mental Growth – Link between Credulism and Reductionism
by David Laflamme – Sunday, 3 November 2024, 4:39 AM
I am really enjoying your debate Wei Jing and James on what is, in fact, credulism, and likewise, reductionism. If I may add my two cents I believe that the crux of this dilemma lies in the reality that the internal/external debate does not really exist. These two aspects of understanding the importance of testimony in an epistemic sense is that they are married at the hip and cannot be separated. They are opposites that attract and are necessary to each other. That is what makes it so hard to describe the testimonial process of justifying our true beliefs. According to Stephen Wright, “The Epistemology of Testimony” found on YouTube, the internal narrative and the rationality of reliability transmit to the determination of our justifications as the listener to how we respond to the testimony. To Wei Jing’s point of stages of growth, so much is controversial here because the physiology and psychology of the growth of the cognitive process are poorly understood and are hard to define in in a strictly epistemic sense. Having said that, I think both of your comments very interesting and thanks for listening to my take on a fascinating discussion.
In reply to David Laflamme
Re: Stages of Mental Growth – Link between Credulism and Reductionism
by David Margach – Sunday, 3 November 2024, 11:54 PM
As I read the discussions occurring in the forums, I keep being reminded that coming to an understanding if not a consensus of the concept ‘knowledge’ is both hopeless and necessary and always interesting. My background in the physical sciences reminds me of Popper’s ‘conjectures and refutations argument’ (with all of its limitations). Whatever we are seeking to know we must somehow test its validity always being reminded that knowledge is tentative. This is perhaps even more important at this time when we are deluged with so much information (testimony) from so many sources.
Re: Stages of Mental Growth – Link between Credulism and Reductionism
by Kimberly Inge – Monday, 4 November 2024, 4:29 AM
Is the concept of knowledge “hopeless”? Maybe it’s worth continuing to dig into especially now with the rise of A.I.
I think one thing that separates humans from A.I. is that we have deep-seated feelings related to the search, acquisition, and production of knowledge, whereas A.I. simply associates zillions of bits and bytes of information without any notion of what it really is, without any sentiment. I think of how passionately people defend their beliefs, I think of how intense folks can be about what they ‘know’ to be true, I think about the fervent support some people show toward pundits, I think of the persistence of stereotypes, and I think of the pervasiveness of cognitive biases, and in all of these cases there’s profound emotion. A.I., for what I understand about it, doesn’t have this essential layer–not yet, at least.
So, when it comes to defining knowledge, perhaps we should consider adding ’emotion’ to the JTB ‘test’ conversed about earlier in the course.
Kimberly
Re: Stages of Mental Growth – Link between Credulism and Reductionism
by Wei Jing HO – Monday, 4 November 2024, 4:16 PM
Thanks James, both David! and Kimberly.
When I was crafting the initial post, I was deliberating if my perceived Reductionism example could actually be Credulism. In certain situations where only exchanges of testimonial knowledge exists, it leans towards Credulism. In rule-based societies however, certain things are factual or set the scene for certain code of conduct. It is then within the capability of a human with access to internet to do a quick check of testimonial knowledge e.g., a scammer pretends to be police to get personal details from their target. A quick check of the local police website may reveal that an actual police will never out of the blue ask for details, without some verification.
Thanks David for pointing out my struggles. When I unpack something, I have a habit to frame it against my past knowledge to identify commonalities and form analogies. But a clear separation of Credulism vs. Reductionism, Internal vs. External, might not be a clear cut battle.
I agree with Kimberly’s point of view as well. As humans, we have a few “superpowers” most are double-edged. Emotions drives us in our exploration and problem-solving of this world. We build AI systems with data, logic and Math. But what drives AI are the humans.
In future when we finally work out ways for tech to extend human capabilities without the current conflicts and fears, maybe there will be new thoughts building upon existing foundations, of the concept of knowledge. e.g., are advice and answers from AI systems like ChatGPT – testimonial knowledge or non-testimonial knowledge?
Re: Stages of Mental Growth – Link between Credulism and Reductionism
by Wei Jing HO – Monday, 4 November 2024, 4:56 PM
I belatedly reflected and realised knowledge on police websites also comes from humans, which in epistemological sense might be still considered testimonial knowledge… which nullified my attempt at listing a reductionist example.
I was perceiving it from the perspective that if its a fact or rule of society, it should be non-testimonial… I guess that’s where my misunderstanding arises.
From this angle, I guess ChatGPT’s answers and advice will be testimonial knowledge.
Re: Stages of Mental Growth – Link between Credulism and Reductionism
by James Carmichael – Friday, 8 November 2024, 5:07 AM
Thanks for beating me to it, Wei Jing — that’s just what I was going to say about the reports on the police website . For it to be reductionism, I think you’d have to go out and observe the police doing that yourself, which might be very hard in this case since you’d have to prove the negative (you’d have go out and observe them…never doing that; or, be able to logically deduce that the police logically must behave in a given way, which a priori logic seems inapplicable in this example). And I agree with you that current ChatGPT would be testimonial, since it’s aggregating existing testimony.
To your second ‘graph (“I was perceiving…”), is what you’re getting at the fact that *some* “facts” or “rules of society” ARE directly experienced by us? I agree that that is the case, and, I think, it *would* get us out of the testimonial regress (*i.e.*, allow us to ‘reduce’ to some knowledge foundation outside testimony)! E.G., jaywalking; if you live in a city where you directly observe people routinely jaywalking–as many of us do or have–you could use that direct observation to get out of the testimonial regress regarding all sorts of claims (about pedestrian habits, about people’s relationship to rule-of-law, whatever), I think.