1 This paper was published in S. Luper, ed., The Skeptics (Aldershot, England: Ashgate Publishing)
2003, pp. 227-247


                         Metaskepticism: Meditations in Ethno-Epistemology

                                           Shaun Nichols

                                        University of Utah

                                           Stephen Stich

                                        Rutgers University

                                       Jonathan M. Weinberg

                                        Indiana University


Epistemology as Ethnography


One of us has long been intrigued by the possibility that different groups of people might have
very different epistemic intuitions (Stich, 1988, 1990), and a few years ago we learned of two
research projects in cross-cultural psychology which suggested that systematic diversity in
epistemic intuitions was more than a mere possibility. In one of these projects, Richard Nisbett
and his collaborators (Nisbett, 2001) have found large and systematic differences between East
Asians and Westerners6 on a long list of quite basic cognitive processes including perception,
attention and memory. These groups also differ in the way they go about describing, predicting and
explaining events, in the way they categorize objects and in the way they revise beliefs in the
face of new arguments and evidence. Nisbett and his colleagues maintain that these differences “can
be loosely grouped together under the heading of holistic vs. analytic thought.” Holistic thought,
which predominates among East Asians, is characterized as “involving an orientation to the context
or field as a whole, including attention to relationships between a focal object and the field, and
a preference for explaining and predicting events on the basis of such relationships.” Analytic
thought, the prevailing pattern among Westerners, is characterized as “involving detachment of the
object from its context, a tendency to focus on attributes of the object in order to assign it to
categories, and a preference for using rules about the categories to explain and predict the
object’s behavior.” (Nisbett et al. 2001, p. 293) Westerners also have a stronger sense of agency
and independence, while East Asians have a much stronger commitment to social harmony. In East
Asian society, the individual feels “very much a part of a large and complex social organism …
where behavioral prescriptions must be followed and role obligations adhered to scrupulously.”
(Nisbett et al. 2001, pp. 292-293) As a result of these differences, Nisbett and his colleagues
maintain, there is considerable cultural variation in the epistemic practices in these two cultural
traditions – people in the two cultures form beliefs and categories, construct arguments, and draw
inferences in significantly different ways. Of course, this does not show that there are also
cross-cultural differences in epistemic intuitions. But it does suggest that it is a serious
empirical possibility, and that it might be worth finding out whether these differences in
epistemic practices are associated with parallel differences in epistemic intuitions.

The second research project that attracted our attention looked explicitly at intuitions, though
they were moral rather than epistemic intuitions. In an intriguing series of studies, Jonathan
Haidt and his collaborators explored the extent to which moral intuitions about events in which no
one is harmed track judgments about disgust in people from different cultural and socioeconomic
groups (Haidt et al. 1993). For their study they constructed a set of brief stories about
victimless activities that were intended to trigger the emotion of disgust. They presented these
stories to subjects using a structured interview technique designed to determine whether the
subjects found the activities described to be disgusting and also to elicit the subjects’ moral
intuitions about the activities. For instance, in one story, a family’s dog is run over and killed
by a car, and the family decides to eat the dog. The interviews were administered to both high and
low socio-economic status (SES) subjects in Philadelphia and in two cities in Brazil. Though the
cultural differences were relatively small, Haidt and colleagues found large differences in moral
intuitions between social classes. Low-SES subjects tend to think that eating your dog is seriously
morally wrong; high SES subjects don’t. Much the same pattern was found with the other scenarios
used in the study.

Though neither of these studies directly addresses the issue of group differences in epistemic
intuition, the results they reported led us to think that the following pair of hypotheses might
well be true:


Hypothesis 1: Epistemic intuitions vary from culture to culture.

Hypothesis 2: Epistemic intuitions vary from one socioeconomic group to another.


For the last two years, we have been conducting a series of experiments designed to test these
hypotheses. In designing our experiments, we wanted our intuition probes – the cases that we would
ask subjects to judge – to be similar to cases that have actually been used in the recent
literature in epistemology. Would different groups show significantly different responses to
standard epistemic thought experiments? The answer, it seems, is yes. While the results we have so
far are preliminary, they are sufficient, we think, to suggest that there are substantial and
systematic differences in the epistemic intuitions of people in different cultures and
socioeconomic groups. In Weinberg, Nichols & Stich (forthcoming), we present a detailed account of
our studies and results. For present purposes, it will suffice to sketch a few of the highlights.

The internalism/externalism debate has been central to analytic epistemology for decades.
Internalism with respect to some epistemically evaluative property (e.g., knowledge) is the view
that only factors within an agent’s introspective grasp can be relevant to whether the agent’s
beliefs have that property. Other factors beyond the scope of introspection, such as the
reliability of the psychological mechanisms that actually produced the belief, are epistemically
external to the agent. In our experiments, we included a number of “Truetemp” cases inspired by
Lehrer (1990), designed to explore whether externalist/internalist dimensions of our subjects’
intuitions differed in subjects with different cultural backgrounds. Here is one of the questions
we presented to our subjects:


One day Charles is suddenly knocked out by a falling rock, and his brain becomes re–wired so that
he is always absolutely right whenever he estimates the temperature where he is. Charles is
completely unaware that his brain has been altered in this way. A few weeks later, this brain
re–wiring leads him to believe that it is 71 degrees in his room. Apart from his estimation, he has
no other reasons to think that it is 71 degrees. In fact, it is at that time 71 degrees in his
room. Does Charles really know that it was 71 degrees in the room, or does he only believe it?

REALLY KNOWS                  ONLY BELIEVES


In this intuition probe, Charles’ belief is produced by a reliable mechanism, but it is stipulated
that he is completely unaware of this reliability. This makes his reliability epistemically
external. Therefore, to the extent that a subject population is unwilling to attribute knowledge in
this case, we have evidence that suggests that the group’s ‘folk epistemology’ is internalist.
Since the mechanism that leads to Charles’ belief is not shared by other members of his community,
Nisbett’s work suggests that East Asians (EAs), with their strong commitment to social harmony,
might be less inclined than individualistic Westerners (Ws) to count Charles’ belief as knowledge.
And, indeed, we found that while both EAs and W tended to deny knowledge, EA subjects were much
more likely to deny knowledge than were Ws.

Another category of examples that has had a tremendous impact on analytic epistemology are “Gettier
cases,” in which a person has a true belief for which she has good evidence, though, as it happens,
the evidence is false, or only accidentally true, or in some other way warrant-deprived. By their
very construction, these cases are in many ways quite similar to unproblematic cases in which a
person has good and true evidence for a true belief. Nisbett and his colleagues have shown that EAs
are more inclined than Ws to make categorical judgments on the basis of similarity; Ws, on the
other hand, are more disposed to focus on causation in describing the world and classifying things.
(Norenzayan, Nisbett, Smith, & Kim 1999; Watanabe 1998 & 1999). In many Gettier cases, there is a
break in the causal link from the fact that makes the agent’s belief true to her evidence for that
belief. This suggests that EAs might be much less inclined than Ws to withhold the attribution of
knowledge in Gettier cases. And, indeed, they are.

The intuition probe we used to explore cultural differences on Gettier cases was the following:


Bob has a friend, Jill, who has driven a Buick for many years. Bob therefore thinks that Jill
drives an American car. He is not aware, however, that her Buick has recently been stolen, and he
is also not aware that Jill has replaced it with a Pontiac, which is a different kind of American
car. Does Bob really know that Jill drives an American car, or does he only believe it?


REALLY KNOWS   ONLY BELIEVES


This probe produced a striking difference between the groups. While a large majority of Ws give the
standard answer in the philosophical literature, viz. “Only Believes,” a majority of EAs have the
opposite intuition – they said that Bob really knows.

The data we’ve presented so far suggests that Westerners and East Asians have significantly
different epistemic intuitions. What about people in other cultures? We know of no experimental
studies of cross cultural differences in epistemic practices that are as rich and detailed as those
of Nisbett and his colleagues. However, for some years Richard Shweder and his colleagues have been
assembling evidence indicating that the thought processes of some groups of people on the Indian
sub-continent are quite different from those of Westerners. (Shweder, 1991) In some respects, the
account of Indian thought that Shweder offers is rather similar to the account that Nisbett offers
of East Asian thought – holism looms large in both accounts – though in other respects they are
quite different. So one might suspect that the epistemic intuitions of people from the Indian
sub-continent (SCs) would be in some ways similar to those of EAs. And indeed they are. Like the EA
subjects, SC subjects were much more likely than W subjects to attribute knowledge in a Gettier
case.

When we first analyzed these data, we found them quite unsettling, since it seemed perfectly
obvious to us that the people in Gettier cases don’t have knowledge. But the results from our
studies suggest that an important part of the explanation of our own clear intuitions about these
cases is the fact that we were raised in a Western culture. Nisbett was likewise surprised by his
findings of cross-cultural differences in epistemic practices. In a recent review article, Nisbett
and colleagues write:


Almost two decades ago, Richard E. Nisbett wrote a book with Lee Ross entitled, modestly, Human
Inference (Nisbett & Ross, 1980). Roy D’Andrade, a distinguished cognitive anthropologist, read the
book and told … Nisbett he thought it was a “good ethnography.” The author was shocked and
dismayed. But we now wholeheartedly agree with D’Andrade’s contention about the limits of research
conducted in a single culture. Psychologists who choose not to do cross-cultural psychology may
have chosen to be ethnographers instead (Nisbett et al. 2001, p. 307).


Our results suggest that philosophers who rely on their own intuitions about matters epistemic, and
those of their colleagues, may have inadvertently made a similar choice. They too have chosen to be
ethnographers; what they are doing is ethno-epistemology.


The Core Epistemology Hypothesis


If epistemic intuitions are indeed culturally local, it poses a threat to the claim that skepticism
is “primitive and inevitable.” For to the extent that Western skepticism relies on culturally local
intuitions, its appeal will also be culturally local. But the evidence reported in Section 2 poses
only an indirect threat to arguments for skepticism, for while that evidence indicates that some
epistemic intuitions may be culturally local, we have not yet offered any evidence about the sort
of skeptical intuitions that play a crucial role in arguments for skepticism. Philosophers who
think that skepticism’s appeal is universal might suggest that while Gettier intuitions and
Truetemp intuitions are culturally local, skeptical intuitions are less variable. Indeed, for all
we have said, skeptical intuitions might be part of a universal core of epistemic intuitions, a
core shared by just about everyone.

The hypothesis that there may be a core set of universal epistemic intuitions is one that we think
deserves careful empirical scrutiny. In our own studies, we found that on one crucial probe, there
were no statistically significant differences among any of the groups we looked at. For all of our
subject groups we included a question designed to determine whether subjects treat mere subjective
certainty as knowledge. The question we used was the following:


Dave likes to play a game with flipping a coin. He sometimes gets a “special feeling” that the next
flip will come out heads. When he gets this “special feeling”, he is right about half the time, and
wrong about half the time. Just before the next flip, Dave gets that “special feeling”, and the
feeling leads him to believe that the coin will land heads. He flips the coin, and it does land
heads. Did Dave really know that the coin was going to land heads, or did he only believe it?

REALLY KNOWS                  ONLY BELIEVES


There was no significant difference between the Western and East Asian subjects on this question;
similarly, in our studies of socio-economic groups, we found no difference on this question between
high and low SES groups In all groups almost none of our subjects judged that this was a case of
knowledge.

Though obviously much more research is needed, these results are compatible with the hypothesis
that some epistemic intuitions are universal.


The Ethnography of Skeptical Intuitions

If there is a universal core of epistemic intuitions, are skeptical intuitions among them? In this
section we’ll offer evidence suggesting that, for some skeptical intuitions at least, the answer is
no”. In one of previous sections, we set out three hypotheses about potential sources of diversity
in epistemic intuitions. We proposed that epistemic intuitions might vary as a function of culture
and SES. Data we have recently collected indicates that skeptical intuitions vary as a function of
all of these factors.

These data indicate that there are significant differences between SES groups in their tendencies
toward skeptical intuitions, and both findings are compatible with the hypothesis that high SES
groups cleave to higher minimum standards of knowledge than low SES groups.

In our cross-cultural studies, we presented students with this variant:


Mike is a young man visiting the zoo with his son, and when they come to the zebra cage, Mike
points to the animal and says, “that’s a zebra.” Mike is right –– it is a zebra. However, as the
older people in his community know, there are lots of ways that people can be tricked into
believing things that aren’t true. Indeed, the older people in the community know that it’s
possible that zoo authorities could cleverly disguise mules to look just like zebras, and people
viewing the animals would not be able to tell the difference. If the animal that Mike called a
zebra had really been such a cleverly painted mule, Mike still would have thought that it was a
zebra. Does Mike really know that the animal is a zebra, or does he only believe that it is?

REALLY KNOWS      ONLY BELIEVES


Using this probe, we found a significant difference between Western and Subcontinental subjects.
One possible explanation of these data is that SCs, like low SES Westerners, regard knowledge as
less demanding than do High SES Westerners.

SC and Low SES subjects thus appear to be significantly less susceptible to skeptical intuitions,
at least in these cases. These findings contrast sharply with our evidence on EAs. We did not find
significant differences between EAs and High SES Ws on the Zebra case.


Some Meta-Skeptical Conclusions

What conclusions can be drawn from these studies? The first and most obvious conclusion is that,
though the empirical exploration of epistemic intuitions, and of philosophical intuitions more
generally, is still in its infancy, the evidence currently available suggests that all of our
initial hypotheses may well be true. Epistemic intuitions, including skeptical intuitions, appear
to vary systematically as a function of the cultural background and the socio-economic status. We
want to emphasize that all the results we have reported should be regarded as quite preliminary. To
make a suitably rich and compelling case for our hypotheses, it will be important to replicate and
extend the findings we have reported. But our data thus far certainly lend support to the claim
that there is a great deal of diversity in epistemic intuitions, and that a substantial part of
that diversity is due to differences in cultural background and SES.

If that’s right, and if, as we contended in section 1, the defense of many of the premises used in
arguments for skepticism comes to rest on an explicit or implicit appeal to intuition, then we can
also conclude that the appeal of these skeptical arguments will be much more local than many
philosophers suppose. For if people in different cultural and SES groups do not share “our”
intuitions (i.e. the intuitions of the typical analytic philosopher who is white, Western, high SES
and has had lots of philosophical training) then they are unlikely to be as convinced or distressed
as “we” are by arguments whose premises seem plausible only if one has the intuitions common in our
very small cultural and intellectual tribe. Pace Stroud there is no reason to think that skepticism
“appeals to something deep in our nature.” Rather, it seems, its appeal is very much a product of
our culture, our social status and our education!

We do not, of course, deny that some people (ourselves included!) find it very hard to loosen the
grip of skeptical intuitions. Along with most high SES Western philosophers, we find many skeptical
intuitions to be obvious and compelling. However, we are inclined to think that the lesson to be
drawn from our cross-cultural studies is that, however obvious they may seem, these intuitions are
simply not to be trusted. If the epistemic intuitions of people in different groups disagree, they
can’t all be true. The fact that epistemic intuitions vary systematically with culture and SES
indicates that these intuitions are caused (in part) by culturally local phenomena. And there is no
reason to think that the culturally local phenomena that cause our intuitions track the truth any
better than the culturally local phenomena that cause intuitions that differ from ours. Our
predicament is in some ways analogous to the predicament of a person who is raised in a homogeneous
and deeply religious culture and finds the truth of certain religious claims to be obvious or
compelling. When such a person discovers that other people do not share his intuitions, he may well
come to wonder why his intuitions are any more likely to be true than theirs. On second thought,
our situation is a bit worse. The religious person might rest content with the thought that, for
some reason or other God has chosen to cause his group to have religious intuitions that track the
truth. Few philosophers will rest content with the parallel thought about their epistemic
intuitions.

We are not, we should stress, defending a generalized skepticism that challenges the use of all
intuitions in philosophy. Rather, our skepticism is focused on those intuitions that differ
systematically from one social group to another. There is, of course, a sense in which the
philosophical literature on skepticism also supports the conclusion that some of our epistemic
intuitions are not to be trusted, since, as the quote from Cohen in Section 1 illustrates, much of
that literature is devoted to showing that our epistemic intuitions appear to support a logically
inconsistent set of propositions, and to arguing about which of these intuitions should be ignored.
But our findings raise a quite different problem. For even if some individual or group had a
completely consistent set of intuitions, the fact that these intuitions are determined, to a
significant degree, by one’s cultural, SES and educational background, and the fact that people in
other groups have systematically different intuitions, raises the question of why the folks who
have these consistent intuitions should trust any of them.

One way in which a philosopher might resist our contention that the systematic cultural variation
in epistemic intuitions indicates that these intuitions are not to be trusted would be to argue
that intuitive differences of the sort that we’ve reported are an indication that the people
offering the intuitions have different epistemic concepts. In his recent book, From Metaphysics to
Ethics, Frank Jackson clearly endorses the view that people whose epistemic intuitions differ on
philosophically important cases should be counted as having different epistemic concepts.


I have occasionally run across people who resolutely resist the Gettier cases. Sometimes it has
seemed right to accuse them of confusion… but sometimes it is clear that they are not confused;
what we then learn from the stand-off is simply that they use the word ‘knowledge’ to cover
different cases from most of us. In these cases it is, it seems to me, misguided to accuse them of
error (unless they go on to say that their concept of knowledge is ours). (Jackson, 1998, 32)


So for Jackson, (unconfused) East Asians or Indians who insist that the people described in Gettier
cases do have knowledge are not disagreeing with those of us who think they don’t. Rather, they are
simply using the term ‘knowledge’ to express a different concept. And, in all likelihood, an East
Asian or Indian is right to insist that (as he uses the term) people in Gettier cases do have
knowledge, just as, in all likelihood, we are right to insist that (as we use the term), they
don’t. Though Jackson focuses on the example of Gettier cases, we think it is clear that he would
say much the same about people who react differently to the sorts of skeptical intuition probes.
Those people, too, if they are not simply confused, should be viewed as having different epistemic
concepts. Thus there is no real disagreement between people who react differently to skeptical
intuition probes, and in all likelihood their intuitions are all true.

One important consequence of this assumption is that it undermines our attempt to argue from the
results of our cross cultural studies of epistemic intuition to the conclusion that those
intuitions are not to be trusted. Crucial to our argument was the claim that, since epistemic
intuitions of people in different groups disagree, they can’t all be true. But if Jackson is right
about concepts, then our subjects are not really disagreeing at all; they are simply using the word
‘knowledge’ (or ‘know’) to express different concepts. So their intuitively supported claims about
knowledge (or, to be more precise, about what they call ‘knowledge’), including those claims used
in arguments for skepticism, can all be true, and as Jackson would have it, in all likelihood they
are.

But while Jackson’s account of concept individuation makes it easier to maintain that the premises
of skeptical arguments are true, it makes it harder to see why the conclusions of those arguments
are interesting or worrisome. To see the point, we need only note that, if Jackson is right about
concepts and if we are right about the influence of culture and SES on epistemic intuitions, then
it follows that the term ‘knowledge’ is used to express lots of concepts. East Asians, Indians and
High SES Westerners all have different concepts; High and Low SES Westerners have different
concepts.

In the philosophical tradition, skepticism is taken to be worrisome because it denies that
knowledge is possible, and that’s bad because knowledge, it is assumed, is something very
important. On Plato’s view, “wisdom and knowledge are the highest of human things,” (Plato
(1892/1937, 352) and many people, both philosophers and ordinary folk, would agree. But obviously,
if there are many concepts of knowledge, and if these concepts have different extensions, it can’t
be the case that all of them are the highest of human things. If Jackson is right about concepts,
then the arguments for skepticism in the philosophical tradition pose a serious challenge to the
possibility of having what High SES, white Westerners with lots of philosophical training call
‘knowledge’. But those arguments give us no reason to think that we can’t have what other people –
East Asians, Indians, Low SES people, or scientists who have never studied philosophy – would call
‘knowledge’. And, of course, those skeptical arguments give us no reason at all to think that what
High SES white Western philosophers call ‘knowledge’ is any better, or more important, or more
desirable, or more useful than what these other folks call ‘knowledge’, or that it is any closer to
“the highest of human things.” Without some reason to think that what white, Western, High SES
philosophers call ‘knowledge’ is any more valuable, desirable, or useful than any of the other
commodities that other groups call ‘knowledge’ it is hard to see why we should care if we can’t
have it.

Let us close with a brief review of the main themes of the paper. Arguments for skepticism have
occupied a central place in Western philosophy. And it’s easy to see why.

Skeptical arguments threaten dramatic conclusions from premises that are intuitively compelling to
many philosophers, including the three of us. A number of Western philosophers maintain that the
intuitions invoked in skeptical arguments have nothing to do with being Western or a philosopher.
Rather, these intuitions are regarded as intrinsic to human nature and cross-culturally universal.
We’ve argued that our evidence poses a serious challenge to this universalist stance. Our data
suggest that some of the most familiar skeptical intuitions are far from universal – they vary as a
function of culture, SES, and educational background. We find that this evidence generates a
nagging sense that our own skeptical intuitions are parochial vestiges of our culture and
education. Had we been raised in a different culture or SES group or had a different educational
background, we would have been much less likely to find these intuitions compelling. This
historical arbitrariness of our skeptical intuitions leads us to be skeptical that we can trust
these intuitions to be true; for we see no reason to think that our cultural and intellectual tribe
should be so privileged. One might, as we’ve noted, maintain that different cultural, SES and
educational groups simply have different concepts of knowledge, and that on our concept of
knowledge, the skeptical intuitions are true. Although this response is available, it saps the
drama from the skeptical conclusion. It’s not clear that skepticism would have held such a grip
over the minds of epistemologists if the skeptic is reduced to the claim that the external world
can’t be “known”, according to the concept of knowledge used by the relatively small cultural group
to which we happen to belong. As one of us wrote some years ago, “The best first response to the
skeptic who maintains that we cannot achieve certainty, …knowledge or what have you, is not to
argue that we can. Rather, it is to ask, so what?” (Stich, 1990, 26)