Steven Nadler and Lawrence Shapiro, When Bad Thinking Happens to Good People

This is a book with an admirable aim. It addresses an important issue that is fundamentally worrying: why people—to an increasing degree—seem to hold ideas that are not supported by good reasons, borderline ‘crazy’ ideas, such as the notion that 5G networks are the cause of the spread of COVID-19 or that all evidence for the climate crises is in fact a hoax. What the authors set out to do, is to ‘explain why bad thinking happens to good people’, a goal motivated by the idea that, as they put it, the best response to bad thinking ‘will involve a deeper engagement with philosophy: both its history and its methods’ (p. 9).

The authors, Steven Nadler and Lawrence Shapiro, are both high-profile academic philosophers. Nadler specializes in seventeenth-century philosophy while Shapiro focuses on contemporary issues in the philosophy of mind and the philosophy of psychology. In this book, however, they put their philosophical competencies in the service of public dissemination, and even if they present a number of central philosophical insights from classical Greek thinking to this day, their book is written in lucid, non-jargonistic prose which ought to be accessible to any interested reader.

More specifically, Nadler and Shapiro aim, first, to explain why so many people today have beliefs that seem to have little or no support and, second, to provide tools to improve people’s thinking and, more ambitiously, their quality of life. The main assumption informing their book is that bad thinking reflects two different forms of failure. It indicates an epistemological failure, termed epistemological stubbornness, which is the refusal to change one’s belief even in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary. However, bad thinking also reflects a moral failure, termed normative stubbornness, which amounts to insisting on following a rule even in circumstances where the rule is ill-suited, instead of acknowledging and trying to realize the normative aim motivating the rule. The authors are interested in both these forms of stubbornness because they consider them subject to will and thus lying within the control of the subject, which means that bad thinking is avoidable, and that people engaging in bad thinking are blameworthy, both epistemologically and morally.

The book falls in two parts, the former focused primarily on epistemology and the sources of bad thinking, and the latter on its alternative, the road leading to better thinking, wisdom, and, ultimately, the authors ideal of the philosophical life.

The authors open the first chapter by presenting examples of bad thinking, emphasizing how it is different from failed thinking which is the result of, for example, a lack of available information or insufficient education. What is of interest in this book are cases where a person insists on holding a belief, even when she has the necessary abilities and evidence to see that she ought to know better and therefore adjust or change her belief. This is why it makes sense to say that bad thinking is driven by forms of stubbornness. Nadler and Shapiro then present a contemporary understanding of knowledge with a focus on justification and evidentialism, arguing for ‘soft’ evidentialism, the idea that you are prudentially obliged to hold a belief in cases where you have available any or all evidence necessary to assure yourself of that belief’s correctness and where holding a contrary belief would cause harm—in the way that refusing to believe in climate change is causing harm by obstructing attempts to counteract this change. The authors are careful to point out how justification comes in different degrees and that reasons for holding a belief also come with different weights, but only to emphasize that the nature and scale of the evidence supporting a belief matter. A few supporting reasons are not enough to hold on to a belief where evidence to the contrary is overwhelming, just as the weight of our evidence will have to be evaluated in light of relevant background knowledge.

In the next two chapters, we are presented with forms of reasoning that can be used to support a belief. The authors explain the key elements of deductive reasoning, highlighting its cogency and central attraction—that a logically valid argument based on true premises ensures a true conclusion—while also pointing out some of the most common forms of defective deductive reasoning. This is difficult territory, and the authors do a fine job—this part of the text could in fact be very useful as the opening text in a course on valid reasoning or informal logic.

Moving on to non-deductive forms of reasoning, Nadler and Shapiro note that these are far more pervasive in ordinary life and, consequently, more relevant to the investigation of bad thinking. Central in their presentation of inductive reasoning are the problems that arise from relying on small samples of evidence, and in their treatment of ‘abduction’ or inference to the best explanation, they pay particular attention to our tendency to note and consider only the evidence that supports the beliefs and biases we already hold. The authors bring out the importance of a principle, prevalent in scientific work, but still somewhat counterintuitive, that epistemically we are often best served if we look for evidence countering our beliefs.

Chapter four marks the transition from the first to the second part of the book focusing on the moral failures involved in bad thinking and an alternative ideal of practical wisdom. What is important to Nadler and Shapiro is to show how morally responsible thinking never consists in blind adherence to rules, principles, or laws, but always has to be complemented by judgement in the form of rational discrimination or appreciation of particular situations and circumstances. Rules are important to make things easier to approach and handle, but as rules of thumb, they do not always fit specific cases, and when they do not, they may enforce bad thinking. By discussing Aristotle’s notion of phronesis, practical wisdom, the authors bring out the various features of good judgement, before moving on to the even more difficult question of how we might be motivated to act on such judgement. Maybe the most interesting part of this section of the book is their claim that we sometimes fail to do the right thing because we fail to correctly assess the moral character of a situation, which to them underlines a connection between bad thinking and moral failing.

In the final two chapters of the book, the authors draw out broader ideals that we should strive for in order to avoid the dangers of bad thinking. Looking first at wisdom, they argue that it is more than a condition of holding sound beliefs. For wisdom is also necessary to know how to live a rational life and flourish as a human being. It comprises all aspects of excellence in practical judgement including the ability to perceive what is right and to be motivated (at least to some degree) to do what is right. By discussing various examples of wisdom found in classical Greek thinking, they explain the Socratic ideal of wisdom as the ability to understand the logos of human life in general and one’s own life in particular. In this way, they argue for a connection between wisdom and the philosophical aspiration to understand logos, or, in a quote from Wilfried Sellars, the aspiration to understand ‘how things in the broadest sense of the word hang together in the broadest sense of the word’ (p. 159). This leads to the final chapter which makes the case for a philosophical life. It demonstrates that the pitfalls of bad thinking are more pervasive than simply coming to hold unjustified beliefs because you also come to rely on such flawed beliefs in your choice of actions and in the way you live your life in general. The alternative is, in the words of Socrates, to live an examined life, and Nadler and Shapiro carefully articulate how this is not just the activity of examining certain beliefs or parts of your life, but the continuous living of a life of critically reflective examination.

The book offers valuable and practical help for anyone who is trying to understand and counter bad thinking. Even if the second half of the book does not engage directly with forms of bad thinking, it does fulfil a central role in the book’s overall argument. It serves to show how the effects of bad thinking are more wide-ranging than is often acknowledged. It also points out in vivid terms how the philosophical tradition can provide us not just with a wide repository of insights relevant to understanding bad thinking, but also with alternative and compelling ways of engaging with others and conducting our own lives. Another notable quality of the book is its engaging tone and accessible style. It is difficult to present philosophy in a straightforward manner, and even when philosophers promise to do so, they rarely succeed. However, Nadler and Shapiro manage to live up to their promise.

However, I do have a few minor and not so minor complaints. The first concerns the book’s title. When Bad thinking Happens to Good People is catchy and in line with the winning spirit and tone of the book, but the problem is that while it serves the purpose of reaching out to readers, it does in fact not reflect the main assumptions about bad thinking contained in the book. If something ‘happens to’ a person, we would normally expect that this was something that the person did not initiate and for which she was not responsible. That is, what ‘happens to’ us is normally considered to be something that comes from the outside, beyond our control or influence. However, the form of bad thinking investigated in the book does not take this form. As already noted, the authors actually go to some lengths to stress that you are epistemically and morally blameworthy for bad thinking because it is something that is within your own control. Bad thinking is, according to the authors’ own line of thinking, not something that happens to you.

Another minor shortcoming is the absence of a list of contents. This is annoying for the reviewer, but I suspect also for readers in general. If the book is to be helpful among other things by being a primer on factors leading to bad thinking, it would be good to be able to find particular sections again without having to leaf through all the pages. A list of contents would also, in a surveyable manner, show the twofold layout of the book and prepare the reader for the shift in aim and focus between parts one and two.

My more fundamental criticism, however, centres on two questions that are left unanswered about the intended reader and the intended object of the book. To begin with the matter of the intended reader, it certainly would be nice if those guilty of bad thinking in the sense presented by the authors could be expected to pick up the book and change their way of thinking. Yet this is unlikely, especially because these potential readers are singled out as epistemically and morally blameworthy from the very beginning. You can hardly expect a person to read a book in which she is already identified as the villain, or at least a failure. I think the most realistic suggestion for a reader of the book that may also, if only implicitly, be the intended reader (I am only surmising here) is someone who generally agrees with the authors about the problematic nature of the current prevalence of bad thinking, but who has not—at least not yet—the tools to understand why bad thinking may be so attractive, and who, even more importantly, does not currently have the resources to engage in a dialogue with people who raise unsupported beliefs. The book may help such a reader by providing argumentation strategies to counter flawed belief as well as an overall argument for why bad thinking is detrimental not only to public debate and society at large, but also to the very individuals who hold these beliefs.

This leads me to the related question of the intended object of the book. Who is it that our imaginary reader will be addressing with her new-won philosophical tools? Who are the folks guilty of bad thinking in the sense described here? Nadler and Shapiro go to some lengths to make clear that they use the term ‘bad thinking’ only in cases where people have the necessary education and information to think otherwise. However, it is a genuine question who these people really are. As is well known, the landscape of contemporary media is diverse and is not shaped solely by worthy epistemological and moral aims, but also, for example, by purely political and economic considerations and vested interests. Furthermore, many of the people involved in producing media content present arguments and evidence that do not in any way live up to the criteria of practical wisdom presented by Nadler and Shapiro. This creates spaces of public engagement where the weightiest, most well-supported and extensive evidence, for example, for the reality of climate change, is almost completely absent, and where it may in fact be quite difficult for many ‘ordinary citizens’ to detect the best supported and most justified beliefs. In my view, it is a difficult question whether such ordinary citizens can be said to be blameworthy for their beliefs, because they actually rely on what has for a long time been our main source of information and served as our marketplace of ideas, the media and the public sphere in general.

The people most obviously blameworthy are those involved in this distortion of media and public debate, that is, journalists, official and unofficial opinion makers, corporate interests, politicians and so forth. These are the ones that we can justifiably hold accountable, and many of the tools presented by Nadler and Shapiro may help us understand what is driving bad thinking among these people. However, it is quite likely that many of those who shape the current landscape of (dis)information are arguably not persisting in bad thinking because of stubbornness, but because they have other interests supporting their bad thinking; interests related to personal success, to personal or political power. If this is so, disclosing their failed arguments, their confirmation bias, or their tendency to rely on poor or insufficient evidence may only bring us part of the way to better thinking. And yet this part undeniably matters, and therefore, Nadler and Shapiro’s intervention in the treacherous waters of bad thinking remains both instructive and welcome.

Reviewer:

Anne-Marie Søndergaard Christensen is professor of practical philosophy at the University of Southern Denmark and the author of Moral Philosophy and Moral Life (Oxford, 2020).