Most thought-provoking in our thought-provoking time is that we are still not thinking.

Martin Heidegger, What Is Called Thinking?, 1954

In my research on information experience, I continue to be drawn to the intersection of mind and information. Many philosophers would define thinking as a series of electrical impulses in the brain that could be done as well in an armchair as in a vat, and information scientists tend to simply assume that to inform someone of something is simply a matter of putting the information in front of their nose. Both views miss quite a bit. (Okay, yes, I’m being a little uncharitable here.)

Lately, I’ve been thinking about thinking—about what it means to think well and poorly, and how we use information and documents to help us think (or not), and how we might do so differently. Today, in the coronavirus era, this is as needful as ever. But it’s not a new question.

On the eve of World War II, the philosopher Susan Stebbing wrote:

There is an urgent need to-day for the citizens of a democracy to think well. It is not enough to have freedom of the Press and parliamentary institutions. Our difficulties are due partly to our own stupidity, partly to the exploitation of that stupidity, and partly to our own prejudices and personal desires.

Susan Stebbing, Thinking to Some Purpose, 1939

This appeared on the dust jacket of Thinking to Some Purpose, a how-to manual for spotting logical fallacies on the road to thinking more effectively. It was well received and pioneered a whole genre of writing on similar topics.

Such approaches to improving one’s thinking fall within the rubric of virtue epistemology, which looks at people’s mental traits, attitudes and thinking styles, and how these serve (or don’t) the pursuit of knowledge and truth. Virtue epistemologists discuss and disentangle the virtues and vices of thinking. Lists of both are myriad and diffuse:

• The intellectual virtues may include: attentiveness, autonomy, benevolence, carefulness, cognitive empathy, confidence, conscientiousness, courage, creativity, discernment, fair-mindedness, honesty, humility, imagination, integrity, love, objectivity, open-mindedness, parsimony, perseverance, responsibility, studiousness, thoroughness, understanding, warranty, and wisdom—among others.
• The intellectual vices may include: carelessness, closed-mindedness, conformity, cowardice, curiosity, dishonesty, dogmatism, folly, foolishness, gullibility, idleness, indifference to truth, insensitivity to detail, lack of thoroughness, negligence, obtuseness, prejudice, pride, rigidity, self-deception, superficiality, superstition, twisted thinking, willful naivety, and wishful thinking—among others.

The fact that curiosity appears on both lists may incite us to wonder how the virtues and vices are related. In some cases, virtues and vices may be opposites (e.g., open-mindedness and closed-mindedness). In other cases, a virtue may be a middle-point between two vices; for instance, intellectual humility lies at the sweet spot between intellectual arrogance and diffidence, both of which can be considered vices. What’s more, we might wonder if these all represent distinct virtues/vices or if some should be lumped together or split apart, or if others lie in waiting. All in all, it seems to me that we need more work that brings these visions of intellectual virtues and vices into a more coherent picture.

Moreover, it may be that we need to update our notion of intellectual virtues and vices for the digital age. While the medieval Seven Deadly Sins—lust, gluttony and all the rest—are as relevant today as ever for personal comportment writ large, it seems to me that our information environment has changed so dramatically that intellectual virtues tuned to a medieval scriptorium are no longer sufficient.

To speak of virtues for the digital age, I might suggest tinkering, championed for instance in Nassim Taleb’s book Antifragile. More and more we learn by trying things out and making subtle manipulations and interpretations in a way that does not separate thinking from doing. Additionally, I’ve recently been thinking that silence may be a worthy virtue for our age. I made a short video describing silence as a virtue:

And what about vices? To give one example, Quassim Cassam, in his 2019 book Vices of the Mind, shines a spotlight on what he terms epistemic insouciance, which is a “lack of concern with respect to whether their claims are grounded in reality or the evidence.” It’s an indifference to truth, and sometimes a dismissive coping mechanism for dealing with a hopelessly complex world. This is the vice of the bullshitter.

We can recognize epistemic insouciance at play in our post-truth era. Writes Cassam, “Being subjected to a relentless barrage of misleading pronouncements about a given subject can deprive one of one’s prior knowledge of that subject by muddying the waters and making one mistrust one’s own judgement.” And when we mistrust our own judgment and sense that the prevailing social consensus is this or that, we are prone to commit ourselves to precisely this or that—I’m thinking of the Asch conformity experiments from the 1950s, which showed the power of conformity in social reasoning.

And while Cassam does not explicitly bring up disinformation in his discussion, this is a particularly chilling concern today. In her book Deepfakes: The Coming Infocalypse, journalist Nina Schick describes the rise of disinformation and the coming “infocalypse,” discussing particularly deepfakes—synthetic media (such as videos) intended to deceive—which are now trivial to create with free software and a little time and expertise. The “photograph” you see to the right, for instance, is a computer-generated image of a person who does not exist. Predictably, it gets worse—like the deepfake porn bot that automatically removes the clothing from images of women. And that’s just the start. What happens when nation-state actors and other interest groups begin to create and circulate synthetic evidence—disinformation—depicting brutal or incriminating events that never happened? It doesn’t take much imagination to see some dark possibilities. Hence the term infocalypse—but unlike in the Biblical apocalypse, the infocalypse does not foretell the second coming of any savior or prophet.

The proliferation of disinformation—already upon us, and only slated to get worse—brings us back to Stebbing’s diagnosis, quoted above, that our difficulties thinking are due partly to the exploitation of our stupidity. Here we may be tempted to throw up our hands that the situation is hopeless. Of course this would be a demonstration of the utmost epistemic insouciance, on Cassam’s account—and yet what other choice is there? Could we make ourselves less exploitable?

I am hoping that we can find a satisfactory answer to that question in the coming years. It may have something to do with delineating the intellectual virtues and vices—ones up to the task of the digital age and the infocalypse—and for coming up with ways to instill the virtues and root out the vices in the public and our students.

To be sure, our personal traits and behaviors are only part of a very complex picture; our mental and political outcomes are due to a mix of network-level social effects and sub-personal cognitive biases. But there are things we can do as individuals, and in any case we ought to tend to the things we can.