"A Little Learning is a Dangerous Thing"
Abstract: It is natural to think, the more you know, the better! That is, the more you learn about something, the better you are at understanding it and reasoning about it. However, across a wide variety of domains, a little learning in fact makes us worse off than knowing nothing at all. It makes us prone to all sorts of cognitive errors, such as overgeneralization, psychological essentialism, and the illusion of explanatory depth. This widespread phenomenon in human psychology is captured in U-shaped curves in learning, in which mastery of cognitive and physical skills dips before climbing again, en route to expertise. I argue that in such cases, agents become epistemically worse off in virtue of having learned something. This surprising conclusion impacts how learning should be defined, as well learning’s relation other core epistemic concepts such as justification, knowledge, and epistemic goals.
Zoe Jenkins is an Assistant Professor at Rutgers University.