Keywords In and Out of Context

I cited both of Dan Sperber and Deirdre Wilson‘s books on relevance (their 1986 Relevance: Communication and Cognition and their 2012 Meaning and Relevance in Chapter 4, so I was quite interested to see Sperber briefly mentioned in the New Yorker’s story on the phenomenology of misinformation, in connection with his distinction between “factual” and “symbolic” beliefs, which continues to be a hot research topic in cognitive psychology (though the New Yorker story, with its focus on the late “Flat-Earther” Mike Hughes’ attempt to prove that the earth is flat by going up in a homemade rocket to see for himself— which resulted in his death when the rocket failed shortly after launch, provides a striking but not really representative example of the varieties of non-epistemic beliefs that people may hold.)

I’d been aware of Sperber’s background in social anthropology since I’d also read his 1975 Rethinking Symbolism about the Dorze people in Ethiopia (which clearly informed his later work in cognition) but I haven’t followed much of his more recent work. As an aside, my own doctoral education included minimal mention of the Sperber/Wilson publications on relevance, as their emphasis on pragmatics wasn’t considered particularly germane to the more technological focus on “relevance” in information retrieval favored by LIS 20 years ago.

Indeed, Michael Buckland has again recently argued in the Journal of Documentation that the Sperber/Wilson view of relevance is not particularly useful in the document-oriented approach, which comprises much of LIS research today. Even John Buschman’s survey of current research on misinformation focuses solely on the epistemic issues. As I have remarked elsewhere, the insistence on maintaining disciplinary boundaries does not encourage new insights, even as we enter further into the infosphere.

Matthew Sullivan’s 2024 dissertation “Habits and Heuristics: How Librarians Evaluate News Online” points out that “With few exceptions, psychological facts about human reasoning and information processing are treated as problematic in LIS. This applies not just to bias but also to emotion.. . . Even when there are calls to understand better the role that emotion plays in evaluation or reasoning more generally, the goal is to control or “disrupt” its influence ” (Sullivan, 2024, p. 310). His dissertation, I believe, is one of the few studies in LIS to acknowledge that librarians too have biases and emotions that may impact their work activities and which should, in my view, also encourage more empathy with their clientele (or at least encourage more studies of intellectual humility, as pioneered by Tim Gorichanaz).

In any case, Evan Westra of Purdue has recently published “Symbolic Belief in Social Cognition” in which he distinguishes between epistemic beliefs (Sperber’s “factual” beliefs) as being essential to individual cognition, as these tend to be supported by empirical evidence of some kind (important to one’s survival in many situations), and symbolic beliefs as more essential to social cognition, as these tend to show group adherence (also important to one’s survival in many situations). Westra explains that symbolic beliefs are regulated by social group membership, while epistemic beliefs generally are not.

“Violations of epistemic norms like updating in response to evidence do not have to be enforced by other agents (even if they sometimes are), because epistemic norms are enforced by the world itself. Failing to update in response to evidence is, generally speaking, bad for you. An agent living in total isolation like Robinson Crusoe would still need to adhere to epistemic norms, because failure to do so would swiftly lead to their demise. In contrast, symbolic beliefs seem to be an intrinsically social and regulative phenomenon. … [in] that the meanings of symbolic belief will be most readily grasped by other members of the relevant community. When an individual avows their symbolic beliefs to an audience of ingroup members, it is not understood as an expression of a factual claim about how they take the world to be. Instead, it is understood as an expression of their bona fide commitment to the community and its collective goals. It signals that they are accountable to the norms of the ingroup, and that they stand ready to enforce them. To borrow a phrase that grew popular during the 2016 US election cycle, symbolic beliefs are taken seriously but not literally.

The meaning of symbolic beliefs expressions should be much harder to understand when one is not a member of the relevant community. .. Insofar as a symbolic belief functions as a signal, the signaling system that it belongs to extends only to the boundaries of the relevant community. …
As a result, it’s likely that we often mistakenly attribute epistemic beliefs to outsiders instead of symbolic beliefs. This then leads us to infer that these individuals must be either ignorant, irrational, or dishonest…: how else could we explain why those people come to have such outlandish beliefs? But this is often a misunderstanding, since symbolic belief discourse does not aim at truth.Conversely, understanding the real function of symbolic beliefs might foster better intergroup understanding. Even if some beliefs appear extreme or alien from the outside, from inside of a community they are experienced as an ordinary part of how one relates to one’s peers. Grasping the non-epistemic role of these beliefs – and the fact that they probably have analogues in one’s own ingroup – could help to reduce false impressions of epistemic and political polarization.. . Even if the attitudes underlying symbolic beliefs are not a psychological natural kind distinct from the broader category of belief, it is highly likely that symbolic belief constitutes a robust social kind with “looping effects” on human psychology.”

This may seem somewhat irrelevant to LIS’s current concerns but in an America in which political appointees can demand and enforce that the Ten Commandments be taught in all public schools within the state as part of all students’ formal education, a better understanding of “symbolic beliefs” and their impact appear increasingly necessary.