It’s striking to me that a certain sort of person will blissfully reject disconfirming scholarship or expertise on the grounds that it appears to be contradicted by a single experience of theirs. That same sort of person will, if you make an explicit generalization (“most people in Europe are multilingual”), consider your point refuted if they give you a single example (“my cousin Terry only speaks English”). I say disconfirming because these same people don’t do this if the scholarship or generalization confirms what they believe. These people tend to make decisions entirely on the basis of their personal experience, and the experiences of their friends. And, it seems to me, they’re singularly prone to getting scammed, following harmful health fads (such as ephedra), misunderstanding the argument about vaccines, denying climate change. I’ve watched people (and sometimes myself) try to persuade them with studies, citations, and expert opinion, and it doesn’t work. And we aren’t trying (as they often think) to persuade them that they didn’t have the experience they did, or that what they’re claiming happened never happened, but just that their experience isn’t the end of the argument. Yet we get nowhere.
I’m not opposed to arguing from personal experience, or bringing in personal experience when assessing other kinds of data—this whole piece is based in personal experience. I don’t think experts are always right, nor that common sense is necessarily wrong. I think we shouldn’t be thinking in terms of which is right and which is wrong, as though it’s a binary. I think one of the reasons that we have problems with arguments about vaccinations and climate change is that this isn’t argument about claims (is this claim good or bad) but about epistemology. I think that people who value a certain model of identity (that an authentic individual is a person of certainty and clarity) tend to value a highly individualized version naïve realism (the notion that the truth about any situation is always easily obvious to a person of good sense and few prejudices).
If that’s right, then we need to stop arguing about what studies say, and we need to argue about epistemology, and the way a lot of scientists argue (a binary of naïve realism or rampant subjectivism) is just making it all worse.