You just believe that because...

Falsifiable Friday #7

Happy Friday! 😁

🎭This week’s post is about a topic that has interested me for a while now. How does causal information about how we got our opinions influence their justificatory status?Having formed a view on any topic on the basis of reasons of the usual sort, (when) could information concerning the cause of your belief might constitute a reason to change your opinion on the matter?

☪For example, if I had been born in Saudi Arabia, I probably would have had different ideas about the ethical status of abortion, how the earth came to be, and what happens after death. And those theories would have seemed just as valid to me, 'from the inside', as I now find their antitheses. Is such causal contingency problematic?

🤏It’s popular to hold that such realizations indeed call for modesty.  But while honesty about where our opinion comes from gets you some virtue points, too much modesty makes us all relativists. Talk about bubbles enough, and you can disqualify any argument or person by pointing out the cultural space they come from. 

😶 This, in fact, amounts to no longer taking each other seriously. Find out why exactly that is so in…

You Just Believe That Because…