A good analogy as to why Induction is bad epistemology is to the ideas of a typical racist.
What a racist will do is observe maybe a dozen or so bad black people throughout their life and then make a universal claim such as 'all black people are bad'. The racist thinks he has 'proof' and feels justified in his racism.
However this approach doesn't work. One could meet a million bad black people and as soon as one meets a good black guy, 'all black people are bad' is no longer true. Given that we can never know whether he have ever met all black people in existence, we are never rightly able to make the claim that 'all black people are bad'.
This is not the whole story though. What's most important here is that the racist is lacking an *explanation* as to why black people are bad.
An enlightened non-racist would be willing to accept that the racist had met lots of bad black people. He may even be willing to accept that there are many bad black people out there. They may even constitute a majority of the population. However he would point out that there are also many good black people in the world, and thus the claim 'all black people are bad' can't be true.
More importantly however, the enlightened non-racist is able to *explain* why there are bad black people in the world, even if they happened to constitute the vast majority of the black population, in non-racist terms. Black people, as human beings, are autonomous moral agents that have the capacity to chose between right and wrong and also like other human beings they are fallible, which means that the amount of mistakes they make will vary, thus they will fall somewhere within the scale of good and bad. The enlightened non-racist does not consider this view as infallible like the racist does. He accepts that if a better explanatory model consisting of reasons why black genetics lead to moral degeneracy existed then the racist may have truth on their side.
Whilst the racist believes his view to be proven, the non-racist is open to criticism.
I used to jest that I had a list of 'reserved' prejudices. And I made it clear when citing my 'reserved' prejudices, that they were names on the list mainly because I'd never met a person of 'x' group that didn't fit my stereotypical image of that group. They were very narrow but existed as almost a satirical parody of other prejudices because of it.
ReplyDeleteSome examples:
(borrowed from George Carlin) Little grey haired old ladies with small overbred dogs that just shake and piss all the time.
Skate boarders or snowboarders who wear angst-sloganed t-shirts and hang around in public parks all day doing nothing but complaining.
Young Chaldean males who wear their shirts half open exposing at least 3-4 gold chains and weave some comment about their genitalia into every sentence.
I guess a modern one I could add to the list would be:
Birkenstock wearing liberals driving Priuses covered in animal "rights", environmentalist and Obama/Biden bumper stickers who's self-righteous pontifications could make a vulture gag on a gutpile
What is the relation of this comment to my post?
ReplyDeleteI think it's more common that a racist has never met a black person in his life, rather than observed a few and then formed conclusions.
ReplyDeleteIf you did meet a substantial number of a certain group of people who acted in a certain way, that would be something to explain. "They all have a shared property that makes them act that way" isn't a bad initial guess. Exceptions need yet more explanation.
There are racists that think only most black people are bad (rather than all), but still qualify as racists. Also there are fallibilist racists.
I don't think the mistake racists are making is to do with induction. Induction doesn't exist, anyway.
I'm not sure about that. I think the ignorant kind of racism of 'I don't like those niggers that I've met' is far more prevalent than the ideological racism of 'black people are inherently evil/possibly subhuman', although the latter is considerably more evil and dangerous.
ReplyDeleteIt's not a bad initial guess no, but it's a very primitive attitude to uphold in the 21st century in the West, which is why I think the labelling of racists as ignorant is accurate.
How would somebody that only thinks most black people are bad qualify as a racist?
I don't consider people who base their 'racism' on rationality (i.e. Thomas Jefferson before he was convinced that racism was wrong) as racists. There has to be an irrational element to it.
Sure induction doesn't exist, but they think it does.