Paul Meehl, a famous clinical-psychology researcher, once said that when he was a student he was taught “the general scientific commitment not to be fooled and not to fool anyone else.” Yes, the. I’ve heard a dozen variations of this: “In graduate school I learned to think critically,” for example. How weirdly unbalanced. Isn’t it just as important — or more important — to figure out what can be learned from evidence? Not just what can’t?
The bias shows up in language. Skeptical is good, credulous is bad. There is no word that means too skeptical, no word that means under-credulous, no word that means the right amount of credulous.
When I hear comments like Meehl’s — when someone says “correlation does not equal causation,” for example, and does not stop to wonder what can be learned from the particular correlation being discussed — I think: You’re only using half your brain.
I think the word you’re looking for (in terms of “just credulous enough”) is “charitable”: e.g. I’m willing to give the results of self-experimentation a charitable interpretation. Meehl’s statement (out of context) isn’t precisely skeptical = good, credulous = bad; self-experimentation isn’t “fooling other people” as long as you make it clear that your N = 1 and includes the experimenter. Self-experimentation is just a more rigorous way of talking about your intuitions, and since most experiments proceed from intuitions, it shouldn’t be abandoned.
Also, skeptics are roundly believed not to be very much fun at parties.
George Polya discusses the “heuristic syllogism” and the nature of plausible reasoning in How to Solve It (1957), sections 6 and 7 of the article “Signs of Progress”, p. 186-190. These sections are online here:
https://reposeinthee.blogspot.com/2007/02/heuristic-syllogism-and-nature-of.html
In section 2 of the same article (“Signs of Progress”, page 181) he notes:
“If you take a heuristic conclusion as certain, you may be fooled and disappointed; but if you neglect heuristic conclusions altogether you will make no progress at all.”
Thanks, beta, that’s a good quote. I suppose it supports my point that it comes from a mathematician rather than a scientist.
yes, “charitable” may be the closest word. It isn’t quite right though — charitable is not the opposite of skeptical or credulous.
Let’s coin a word: “creditive”, meaning ‘tending to give credit’, ‘tending to believe’. While we’re at it, let’s start using “under-credulous”, “over-credulous”, and “appropriately credulous”, to help spread the idea that skepticism is not an unconditional virtue.
That sounds about right. I would add “over-skeptical”.