In a series of very influential papers, Dan Kahan argues for “the identity protective cognition thesis”: the claim that politically motivated reasoning is a major factor explaining current levels of polarization over matters of fact, especially in the US. An important part of his case consists of experimental data supporting the claim that ideological polarization is more extreme amongst more numerate individuals. In this paper, we take a close look at how precisely this “numeracy effect” is supposed to come about. Working with Kahan’s own notion of motivated reasoning, we reconstruct the mechanism that according to him produces the effect. Surprisingly, it turns out to involve plenty of motivation to reason, but no motivated reasoning. This undermines the support he takes the numeracy effect to provide for the identity protective cognition hypothesis.

While increasing scholarly attention has been devoted to news avoidance, there are only few studies taking the distinction between intentional and unintentional news avoidance into consideration, and none that has investigated the linkage between the two types of news avoidance and knowledge about politics and society. To fill this void, this study explores this relationship while distinguishing between knowledge related to uncontested issues and knowledge related to issues that have been subject to public controversies (climate change, vaccination, genetically modified organisms, crime, and immigration). Relying on a large-scale survey among Swedish citizens conducted in 2020 (N = 2,160), we find that the relationship with patterns of news use is substantially different across these types of beliefs. Among other things, the results suggest that knowledge of uncontested issue domains is positively related to news use, but knowledge of contested issue domains is not. The intentional avoidance of news is only negatively related to knowledge of contested issues. Taken together, the results suggest that the mechanisms driving beliefs related to uncontested versus contested issues are substantially different.

This chapter introduces the themes of the book and provides an overview of key arguments and of the chapters in the book. Among other things, the chapter discusses the problem of knowledge resistance, outlines the purpose of the book, and provides a broad framework toward understanding knowledge resistance and its antecedents. This framework includes the transition from low- to high-choice media environments, an increase in the prevalence of mis- and disinformation, biased information processing, and factual belief polarization, and the linkage between misperceptions and knowledge resistance. Finally, it briefly introduces and discusses each of the chapters in the book.

This book offers a truly interdisciplinary exploration of our patterns of engagement with politics, news, and information in current high-choice information environments. Putting forth the notion that high-choice information environments may contribute to increasing misperceptions and knowledge resistance rather than greater public knowledge, the book offers insights into the processes that influence the supply of misinformation and factors influencing how and why people expose themselves to and process information that may support or contradict their beliefs and attitudes.

A team of authors from across a range of disciplines address the phenomena of knowledge resistance and its causes and consequences at the macro- as well as the micro-level. The chapters take a philosophical look at the notion of knowledge resistance, before moving on to discuss issues such as misinformation and fake news, psychological mechanisms such as motivated reasoning in processes of selective exposure and attention, how people respond to evidence and fact-checking, the role of political partisanship, political polarization over factual beliefs, and how knowledge resistance might be counteracted.

This book will have a broad appeal to scholars and students interested in knowledge resistance, primarily within philosophy, psychology, media and communication, and political science, as well as journalists and policymakers.

We provide a characterization of knowledge resistance in terms of resistance to available evidence and a philosophical guide to the concepts central to empirically investigating it: knowledge, evidence, and rationality. Knowledge requires true, justified belief, so we emphasize the importance of focusing on factual judgements the truth of which can be investigated by empirical methods. We understand evidence in terms of probabilification, and discuss its content and its testimonial nature in the central cases. We propose that knowledge resistance always involves epistemic irrationality. An important psychological mechanism resulting in such irrationality is motivated reasoning, and politically motivated reasoning has been proposed as the main explanation of fact polarization. We discuss challenges to the detection of motivated reasoning, stressing the rationalizing role of prior belief. When priors line up with motivations, these two factors are difficult to disentangle. But even where polarization results from differences in prior belief, there might be irrationality, for instance in the form of unjustified beliefs about which sources of evidence are trustworthy. Therefore, we propose to not only investigate knowledge resistance in a narrow sense, involving a direct, epistemically irrational response to evidence subjects have, but also in a wider sense, resulting for instance from selective exposure.

One debate the Pyrrhonian skeptics had with the Epicureans concerned the relation between sense perceptions and beliefs. The debate centers on the Epicurean claim that all perceptions are true, a claim rejected by the Skeptics, who proceed on the assumption that there is no judgment component in perception, and it echoes widely through today’s philosophy of perception. In the past the author has defended a non-standard version of intentionalism, according to which (visual) experiences indeed are beliefs, but have contents—so-called looks-contents—that, if ever, very rarely are false. This chapter works out how this view can nevertheless account for non-veridical experience. It harnesses the rational role of experience to work out a precise way of characterizing non-veridical experience in terms of misleadingness.

In previous work, I have suggested a doxastic account of perceptual experience according to which experiences form a (peculiar) kind of belief: Beliefs with what I have called “phenomenal” or “looks-content”. I have argued that this account can not only accommodate the intuitive reason providing role of experience, but also its justificatory role. I have also argued that, in general, construing experience and perceptual beliefs, i.e. the beliefs most directly based on experience, as having different contents best accounts for the defeasibility of experiential reasons. In this paper, I shall have a closer look at the evidential or inferential relation between looks-propositions and the contents of perceptual beliefs and argue for a form of what I shall call “Pollockianism” about experiential reasons: such reasons are good unless defeated. Questions to be investigated include: Does the resulting picture of perceptual justification contain an externalist element? Is it compatible with Bayesianism? And how does it do with respect to problems that have been raised for other forms of Pollockianism such as dogmatism or phenomenal conservatism?

According to Donald Davidson, “what a fully informed interpreter could learn about what a speaker means is all there is to learn; the same goes for what the speaker believes” (Davidson 1983, 148). This is a foundational claim about the nature of semantic properties: these are evidence-constituted properties. They are determined by the principle of charity on the basis of data about the behaviour of the speaker(s). But what exactly is the role of the interpreter in the Davidsonian account of meaning determination? Is she merely a dramatic device or an essential element of the metaphysical picture? In this paper, I investigate whether we can get help in answering these questions from David Lewis’s (1983) distinction between natural and unnatural properties.

In this chapter, we critically examine the most important extant ways of understanding and motivating the idea that reasons for belief are normative. First, we examine the proposal that the distinction between explanatory and so-called normative reasons that is commonly drawn in moral philosophy can be rather straightforwardly applied to reasons for belief, and that reasons for belief are essentially normative precisely when they are normative reasons. In the course of this investigation, we explore the very nature of the reasons-for-belief relation, as well as the ontology of such reasons. Second, we examine the idea that the normativity derives from the internal connection between reasons for belief and epistemic justification, distinguishing between two distinct normativist accounts of justification, a weaker and a stronger one. We argue that neither line of argument is compelling. Pending further arguments, we conclude that normativism about reasons for belief is not supported.