Psychological Accounts

Abstract

Abstract This chapter reviews leading psychological accounts of our attraction to skepticism. It discusses approaches put forward by John Hawthorne, Timothy Williamson, Alexander Dinges, Jennifer Nagel, Mikkel Gerken, Alexander Jackson, John Turri, and others. These psychological theories appeal to well-known biases including those that arise from uses of the availability and the subadditivity heuristics as well as from stereotype and ego-centric thinking. They provide causal accounts of how our judgments or inclinations to judge in skeptical cases arise. They contrast with semantic or epistemic theories which were reviewed in the previous chapter (although we “psychologized” those approaches). The take-home message of this chapter is that the various accounts in the literature are either mistaken or incomplete. I recommend the approach I defend in this book.