No Cognition without Volition: Agency and Unbiased Thinking

Lee Pierson, Thinking Skills Institute

The ideal of objectivity as the methodological gold standard in the social sciences has long been undermined by social-science-backed assertions that beliefs—including the beliefs derived from social-scientific research—are the products of environmental and/or genetic factors unrelated to the truth of the beliefs. This paper will explore the issue of whether the social sciences can retain some form of objective scientific methodology while respecting the findings that causal factors other than the evidence for beliefs can lead to bias in those beliefs. To be unbiased in one’s thinking is to be influenced in arriving at conclusions by the relevant evidence and only the relevant evidence. To whatever extent people fail to exercise their agency in this matter—fail to volitionally sustain the attention to available evidence needed to reach a rational belief—to that extent their beliefs and the actions that follow from them will be determined by non-rational factors that result in biases such as racism and sexism. Accordingly, research findings about bias should be formulated in a hypothetical form such as: if people do not choose to exert the necessary properly-directed mental effort of attention, they will believe and act according to biases such as those identified by social science research. By contrast, those who choose to think, i.e., to override any biases by focusing their attention on the relevant available evidence and its implications, can arrive at unbiased conclusions. Is volitionally sustaining thinking itself determined by sociocultural forces? No, not if an oft-made argument against determinism of human belief (presented in its most up-to-date, cutting-edge form in Robert Lockie’s book, _Free Will and Epistemology_, Bloomsbury, 2018), is correct. Nor is bias (explicit or implicit) unavoidable for thinkers who know how to “read their own minds,” i.e., to introspect their thinking (a skill that can and should be taught in school).

No extended abstract or paper available

 Presented in Session 254. Questioning Gifts, Challenging Talent