Monday, January 8, 2018

Belief In Invisible Biases

Sometimes, in order to silence a person who threatens or refutes their worldview, people might resort to asserting that everyone has some sort of worldview bias, even if he or she isn't aware of it, and these biases undermine the legitimacy of the other person's claim.  Well, believing that everyone suffers from conformation bias or that confirmation bias cannot be identified and rejected is utterly irrational to begin with [1], but the claim that people have biases they do not know about only exposes the fallacies of the the ones making the claim.

Let's say that a hypothetical person named Samantha has one of these "invisible" biases.  Despite not actually describing the exact nature of the bias, those around her continue to strongly insist that she really does have it.  Samantha even comes to believe this.  In this scenario where she (and anyone claiming the unknown bias exists) actually has yet to identify the bias, she can have no reason whatsoever to actually claim or believe that she has any bias at all, since it is "invisible" to her and thus she doesn't know about it.  Do you see how asinine it is to say that people have biases that they and other people don't actually recognize?

If I said that I know there is a dog in my room that I have not seen or heard or otherwise observed with my senses, and that does not exist by logical necessity, I would be making a claim that no person could accept while being rational!  To say that everyone has a dog in their rooms that they know nothing about would be even stupider!  All I am pointing out in this case is the stupidity of a person claiming that something exists which he or she doesn't know of.

In logic there is no bias, and in logic there is pure objectivity; thus, people who want objectivity simply need to align their worldviews with logic.  Only then can they have the utmost clarity.  This is a short post because, ultimately, it doesn't take long to demonstrate the stupidity of those who claim that biases prevent any knowledge or that biases are universal, or unknown, or inevitable.

No comments:

Post a Comment