Epistemological Casuistry: What's Not Wrong With Motivated Reasoning

ABSTRACT We often accuse others, and sometimes ourselves, of engaging in, as psychologists are apt to term it, “motivated reasoning.” This is the charge that the collection, use, and interpretation of information have been warped by one'sdesires, andis often regarded as amounting to a charge of epistemic irrationality. In a 2015 paper in this journal, we appealed to this familiar charge of motivated reasoning to analyze the phenomenon of irrelevant influences on belief. There, we argued that motivated reasoning is indeed epistemically pernicious. Since then, a number of important objections have been made in different literatures. It has been argued that insofar as one's interests include defending one's prior beliefs, remaining internally coherent, defending one's social identity against threats from oppressive forces, or pursuing one's (otherwise reasonable) practical goals, such interests may permissibly influence reasoning, with no irrationality or “bad” reasoning implicated. In this paper, we address these recent objections and argue that, though the above points may illuminate important limitations of our original thesis, motivated reasoning is indeed a form of epistemic irrationality.