UC Berkeley

Can science ever fully explain what it is like to fall in love, to undergo a religious transformation, or to have a child? For some types of experiences, people seem to give special status to their own introspective knowledge over other types of information, especially scientific information, an inherently third-personal source.

Across these three sets of studies, I demonstrate that people privilege their own first-person knowledge over science when it comes to highly personal aspects of the human mind and experience. In Chapter 2, I show that people judge science as being unable to ever explain aspects of the mind to which they feel that they have privileged introspective access – the types of mental phenomena that only the experiencer herself can truly know. In Chapter 3, I extend this finding to show that these commitments hold important consequences for people’s moral judgments. Finally, in Chapter 4 I demonstrate that people privilege their own first-person knowledge over scientific information when making decisions about personally transformative decisions.

These findings advance the literature on folk epistemology, but also illustrate that epistemic commitments have important consequences for moral judgments and how people approach decision-making in their everyday lives.