4 Comments

Uncovering motives seems to be seen as a social attack. This applies internally as well since uncovering your own motives makes you worse at the kind of plausible deniability that stabilizes some cooperative equilibria.

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There seems to be conflation of two independent questions here: is the belief true? And: Are the believer’s motives for holding the belief sound?

Establishing that someone has an irrational motive for believing something does not establish that the thing is not nevertheless true.

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OK, the "moral critique" angle is pretty sketchy, I agree. It's also unnecessary, because the worst aspects of psychological debunking are best handled with a proper epistemic critique - namely that a fallback on psychological motives is difficult to test, with those motives being hidden from public inspection.

I have a feeling that the only reason to even attempt such a "moral critique" is that the typical person who puts a lot of weight on psychological debunking is not impressed by the epistemic norms of science. The people who say "Your belief that X must be caused by a secret hatred of black and brown people" don't tend to back down when reminded that they may not have done their due diligence in investigating the actual content of my motives, ranking and testing alternate hypotheses, etc. So maybe the "moral critique" is meant as a strategy to get such people to back down. One way to read this is as the outline of the new rules for how we are to conduct debates. "Your belief that the Earth is round aims to undermine epistemically marginalized peoples!" "Your accusation that this is my aim negates my subjectivity and denies my lived experience!" etc.

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It sounds like he's talking about Bulverism. And there is a reason to make people focus on the object-level of whether an argument is right rather than assuming it's wrong and coming up with an explanation for why the person who made it did so.

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