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Philosophy

<OpenstaxParagraph>
	A final concept that is a critical component for becoming a better critical thinker is adopting a stance of <OpenstaxTerm>epistemic humility</OpenstaxTerm>. As we have already seen, our thinking can be clouded by cognitive biases. Additionally, our perspective on the world is always colored by our own experience and rooted in the particular place and time in which we live. Finally, even our best scientific knowledge of the universe explains only a fraction of it, and perhaps even less of our own experience. As a result, we should recognize these limitations of human knowledge and rein in our epistemic confidence. We should recognize that the knowledge we do possess is fragile, historical, and conditioned by a number of social and biological processes.
</OpenstaxParagraph>
<OpenstaxFigure id="fig-00001" src="https://openstax.org/apps/archive/20240226.174525/resources/76a5afd4e03ca2cbf405d03d219a7154afc7188d" alt="Sky full of thin, broken clouds. The sun shines dimly through." mediaType="image/jpeg" width="800" height="536" />
<OpenstaxFigureText width="800">
	<strong>Figure 2.5</strong> The principle of epistemic humility calls upon us to recognize that the knowledge we possess is fragile, fallible, and colored by our own experiences. (credit: “Life is a long lesson in humility.” by e.r.w.i.n./Flickr, CC BY 2.0)
</OpenstaxFigureText>
<OpenstaxH3>Question Yourself: Do I Really Know What I Think I Know?</OpenstaxH3>
<OpenstaxParagraph>
	We retain all sorts of beliefs from many different sources: memory, testimony, sense perception, and imagination. Some of these sources may be reliable, while others may not. Often, however, we forget the source of our beliefs and claim to “know” something simply because we have believed it for a long time. We may become very confident in believing something that never happened or did not happen in the way we remember it. In other cases, we may have been told something repeatedly, but the ultimate source of that information was unreliable. For instance, most people recommend wearing warm clothes outside when the temperature drops so that they do not “catch a cold.” This is the sort of wisdom that may have been passed down through generations, but it makes little sense from a medical standpoint. There are not many ways that getting a chill or even lowering the body temperature will lead to a respiratory infection. Colds are caused by viruses, not by a drop in temperature. Without thinking through the source of the belief that “if you get cold, you may catch a cold,” you end up believing something that is not true.
</OpenstaxParagraph>
<OpenstaxH3>Be Aware of the Dunning-Kruger Effect</OpenstaxH3>
<OpenstaxParagraph>
	An even more pernicious form of epistemic overconfidence is revealed in the psychological phenomenon known as the <OpenstaxTerm>Dunning-Kruger effect</OpenstaxTerm>. David Dunning and Justin Kruger demonstrated a widespread illusion in which incompetent people or novices rate their own knowledge of a subject more highly than they ought to, while highly competent people or experts rate their knowledge slightly lower than they ought to. These findings do not mean that the experts considered themselves to be less competent than novices. In fact, experts are fairly accurate in rating their own knowledge. However, they tend to assume that everyone else has a similar level of expertise. By contrast, novices consider themselves to be far more competent in comparison to others and misrepresent their own incompetence, which can be a dangerous in many situations.
</OpenstaxParagraph>
<OpenstaxParagraph>
	The lesson from the Dunning-Kruger effect is that you should be extremely wary when assessing your expertise about anything, but especially about something that is a new area of learning for you. The reality is that your intuitive sense of your own knowledge is likely to be inaccurate. It takes time to build expertise in a subject area, and the expert is more capable of assessing their own knowledge accurately.
</OpenstaxParagraph>

2.3.2 Adopt Epistemic Humility

1 Introduction to Philosophy

1.1 What Is Philosophy?

1.1.1 Historical Origins of Philosophy

1.1.2 How It All Hangs Together

1.2 How Do Philosophers Arrive at Truth?

1.2.1 Sources of Evidence

1.2.2 Logic

1.2.3 Conceptual Analysis

1.2.4 Trade-offs

1.3 Socrates as a Paradigmatic Historical Philosopher

1.3.1 “The Life Which Is Unexamined Is Not Worth Living”

1.3.2 Human Wisdom Is Worth Little or Nothing

1.3.3 The Importance of Doing No Harm

1.4 An Overview of Contemporary Philosophy

1.4.1 What Can You Do with a Philosophy Major?

1.4.2 An Overview of Your Philosophy Textbook

2 Critical Thinking, Research, Reading, and Writing

2.1 The Brain Is an Inference Machine

2.1.1 The Brain’s Adaptive Ability to Plan Ahead

2.1.2 The Evolutionary Advantage of Shortcuts

2.2 Overcoming Cognitive Biases and Engaging in Critical Reflection

2.2.1 Critical Reflection and Metacognition

2.2.2 Cognitive Biases

2.3 Developing Good Habits of Mind

2.3.1 Strive for Objectivity

2.4 Gathering Information, Evaluating Sources, and Understanding Evidence

2.4.1 Start with a Strong Foundation

2.4.2 The SIFT Method (Four Moves for Student Fact Checkers)

2.5 Reading Philosophy

2.5.1 Prepare to Read

2.5.2 Engaging with Philosophical Texts

2.5.3 Pre-reading

2.5.4 First Read

2.5.5 Close Read

2.6 Writing Philosophy Papers

2.6.1 Identify Claims

2.6.2 Collect Evidence and Build Your Case

2.6.3 Organize Your Paper

3 The Early History of Philosophy around the World

3.1 Indigenous Philosophy

3.1.1 Challenges in Researching Indigenous Philosophy

3.1.2 Indigenous African Philosophy

3.1.3 Indigenous North American Philosophical Thought

3.1.4 Mesoamerican Philosophy

3.2 Classical Indian Philosophy

3.2.1 The Vedic Tradition

3.2.2 Classical Indian Darshanas

3.3 Classical Chinese Philosophy

3.3.1 Early Chinese Philosophical Thought prior to Confucius

3.3.2 Confucianism

3.3.3 Daoism

3.3.4 Mohism

4 The Emergence of Classical Philosophy

4.1 Historiography and the History of Philosophy

4.1.1 Presentist Approach

4.1.2 Contextualist Approach

4.1.3 Hermeneutic Approach

4.2 Classical Philosophy

4.2.1 Egyptian Origins of Classical Philosophy

4.2.2 Ancient Greek Philosophy

4.2.3 The Presocratics

4.2.4 Socrates and Plato

4.2.5 Aristotle

4.2.6 Epicureans

4.2.7 Roman Philosophy

4.3 Jewish, Christian, and Islamic Philosophy

4.3.1 Defining Jewish, Christian, and Islamic Philosophy

4.3.2 Early Jewish Philosophy

4.3.3 Early Christian Philosophy

4.3.4 Islamic Philosophy

4.3.5 Late Medieval Philosophy in Christian Europe

4.3.6 Jewish Philosophers in the Christian and Islamic Worlds

4.3.7 The Rise of Reason in the Early Modern Era

5 Logic and Reasoning

5.1 Philosophical Methods for Discovering Truth

5.1.1 Dialectics and Philosophical Argumentation

5.1.2 The Use of Reason to Discover Truth

5.1.3 Testing Hypotheses

5.1.4 Laws of Logic

5.1.5 Normativity in Logic

5.2 Logical Statements

5.2.1 Conditionals

5.2.2 Universal Statements

5.3 Arguments

5.3.1 Getting to the Premises

5.3.2 The Difference between Truth and Logic

5.4 Types of Inferences

5.4.1 Deductive Reasoning

5.4.2 Inductive Inferences

5.4.3 Abductive Reasoning

5.5 Informal Fallacies

5.5.1 Fallacies of Relevance

5.5.2 Fallacies of Weak Induction

5.5.3 Fallacies of Unwarranted Assumption

5.5.4 Fallacies of Diversion

6 Metaphysics

6.1 Substance

6.1.1 Fundamentality: The One and the Many

6.1.2 Ontological Perspectives on Substance

Question	Answer
the cognitive bias in which people with little expertise in a specific task rate their knowledge too highly relative to others with more knowledge.	Dunning-Kruger effect
a stance in philosophical and scientific investigation that recognizes the limits of one’s own ability to know truth and reality in a direct or complete way.	Epistemic humility