Yet another reason we need social epistemology

Consider forty rational people each individually keeping track of the ethnicities and virtue/vice of the people they interact with and hear about (admittedly, one wonders why a rational person would do that!). Even if there is no statistical connection—positive or negative—between being Polish and being morally vicious, random variation in samples means that we would expect two of the forty people to gain evidence that there is a statistically significant connection—positive or negative—between being Polish and being morally vicious at the p = 0.05 level. We would, further, intuitively expect that one in the forty would come to conclude on the basis of their individual data that there is a statistically significant negative connection between Polishness and vice and one that there is a statistically significant positive connection.

It seems to follow that for any particular ethnic or racial or other group, at the fairly standard p = 0.05 significance level, we would expect about one in forty rational people to have a rational racist-type view about any particular group’s virtue or vice (or any other qualities).

If this line of reasoning is correct, it seems that it is uncharitable to assume that a particular racist’s views are irrational. For there is a not insignificant chance that they are just one of the unlucky rational people who got spurious p = 0.05 level confirmation.

Of course, the prevalence of racism in the US appears to be far above the 1/40 number above. However, there is a multiplicity of groups one can be a racist about, and the 1/40 number is for any one particular group. With five groups, we would expect that approximately 5/40=1/8 (more precisely 1 − (39/40)⁵) of rational people to get p = 0.05 confirmation of a racist-type hypothesis about one of the groups. That’s still presumably significantly below the actual prevalence of racism.

But in any case this line of reasoning is not correct. For we are not individual data gatherers. We have access to other people’s data. The widespread agreement about the falsity of racist-type claims is also evidence, evidence that would not be undercut by a mere p = 0.05 level result of one’s individual study.

So, we need social epistemology to combat racism.