Cognitive Illusions and the Study of Philosophy

I recently read Predictably Irrational and the Upside of Irrationality, two books by Dan Ariely, a behavioral economist. They're both worth reading, and I enjoyed the bits of autobiography—Ariely was disfigured in a fireworks accident as a young man and he writes compellingly and insightfully about his rehabilitation and about how his injuries have affected his life and his work.

Ariely's academic work is similar to that of Daniel Kahneman, a psychologist who won the Nobel Prize for his pioneering work in behavioral economics. Kahneman's recently published Thinking, Fast and Slow, which was excellent. Both of their experiments typically illustrate how human thinking and behavior deviate from the "homo economicus" of Econ 101. And more disturbingly, some of their experiments show that we sometimes deviate from any standard of reasonableness.

You prefer your ideas to other people's ideas, right? That makes sense. But one of Ariely's experiments suggests that you don't like your ideas because they fit your worldview; you like your ideas simply because they're your ideas. Specifically, in a recent study he asked participants to read questions like, "What innovative change could be made to an alarm clock to make it more effective?", and the participants rated potential answers. The control group rated answers from Ariely and his team, while the experimental group were given a list of fifty words and asked to construct their own answers and then rate them.

The trick was that the experimental group constructed the same answers as Ariely, because of the limitations of their lists. And the experimental group liked "their own" answers more than the control group―even though the answers were identical. The participants even rated Ariely's answers higher when they were presented with the words in random order, so that they had to unscramble the answers. In other words, even when it's obvious that the answers are forced upon them, people prefer an idea that they have worked to create.

It's your idea, dude.

"friends it blog this tell your Read and about" is an excellent idea, isn't it? But how do you feel after unscrambling something like this:

"Understanding is, to speak generally, the faculty Of cognitions. These consist in the determined relation of given representation to an object. But an object is that, in the conception of which the manifold in a given intuition is united. Now all union of representations requires unity of consciousness in the synthesis of them. Consequently, it is the unity of consciousness alone that constitutes the possibility of representations relating to an object, and therefore of their objective validity, and of their becoming cognitions, and consequently, the possibility of the existence of the understanding itself."

That's from the transcendental deduction, the thorniest chapter of The Critique of Pure Reason by Immanuel Kant. The Critique is easily the most difficult book I have ever read. But on a "big-picture" level, I found it to be convincing. However, I'm not sure that Kant's system makes any sense: what the hell does it even mean that the empirical world is shaped by the necessary forms of experience?

It's not only that I'm suspicious of my own opinion of Kant: I doubt that anyone can judge Kant fairly. It just isn't possible to figure out what Kant is saying without "unscrambling" it.  Even if you were to read the―admirably clear―Routledge guidebook you'd still have to  sort out the material conceptually. And every expert on Kant has gone through the same experience; their judgments are equally suspect.

It's quite a bind for someone new to philosophy: do you want to put in the time and effort required to understand a difficult book, when everyone who understands it is biased in its favor—and you too will be biased after reading it?

I have a few heuristics independent of expert opinion for breaking out of that bind: I look for obvious contempt for readers (e.g.: Lacan's claim that the structure of consciousness is literally a rhombus along with his refusal to elaborate) or I look for gratuitous misrepresentations of a subject that I'm familiar with. But heuristics are just inaccurate shortcuts, and it troubles me to think that I'll only see a difficult work of philosophy through rose-colored glasses.