![]() But the problem of unrecognized ignorance is one that visits us all. Instead, the incompetent are often blessed with an inappropriate confidence, buoyed by something that feels to them like knowledge.īecause it’s so easy to judge the idiocy of others, it may be sorely tempting to think this doesn’t apply to you. What’s curious is that, in many cases, incompetence does not leave people disoriented, perplexed, or cautious. In 1999, in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, my then graduate student Justin Kruger and I published a paper that documented how, in many areas of life, incompetent people do not recognize-scratch that, cannot recognize-just how incompetent they are, a phenomenon that has come to be known as the Dunning-Kruger effect. The American author and aphorist William Feather once wrote that being educated means “being able to differentiate between what you know and what you don’t.” To a great degree, we fail to recognize the frequency and scope of our ignorance. This is a fascinating article, some excerpts:įor more than 20 years, I have researched people’s understanding of their own expertise-formally known as the study of metacognition, the processes by which human beings evaluate and regulate their knowledge, reasoning, and learning-and the results have been consistently sobering, occasionally comical, and never dull. Subtitle: The trouble with ignorance is that it feels so much like expertise. The linkages between philosophy of science and psychology in context of epistemology is articulated in this statement by Quine: epistemology itself “falls into place as a chapter of psychology and hence of natural science”: the point is not that epistemology should simply be abandoned in favor of psychology, but instead that there is ultimately no way to draw a meaningful distinction between the two.īelow are some articles I’ve recently come across that provide some insights.ĭavid Dunning has penned an article for the Pacific Standard entitled We are all confident idiots. In pondering how we rationalize the ‘hiatus’ in context of theories and predictions of anthropogenic global warming, I have been looking to the fields of philosophy of science and psychology for insights. Stumbling through all our cognitive clutter just to recognize a true “I don’t know” may not constitute failure as much as it does an enviable success, a crucial signpost that shows us we are traveling in the right direction toward the truth.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |