#1238 Chris Ranalli: What Is Indoctrination?

00:00 Ricardo Lopes: Hello everyone. Welcome to a new episode of The Dissenter. I'm your host, as always, Ricardo Lops, and today I'm joined by Doctor Cri Renali. He's an assistant professor of philosophy at VU Amsterdam, and today we're talking about his book, The Philosophy of Indoctrination, Epistemology, Ethics and Politics. So, Doctor Rinaldi, welcome to the show. It's a pleasure to everyone.

00:24 Chris Ranalli: Yeah, it's a, yeah, pleasure to be here as well. Thank you so much. Really appreciate it.

00:29 Ricardo Lopes: OK, great. So, why do you think it's important to study indoctrination? Why does it matter?

00:39 Chris Ranalli: Yeah, it's a great question. Um, IT'S something I still ask myself if I, if I admit, but um, I guess that's just, yeah, what philosophers sort of do, always trying to justify uh what it is that we do. Um, BUT there's roughly, um, 3 reasons, so, uh, one is that we care about education. Knowledge and our own and other people's, you know, development as thinkers, you know, critical thinkers, open-minded people, considerate, humble, and so on and so forth. So we, we care about Our own and others' intellectual development, basically. And indoctrination is widely thought to undermine all of this, right? That, effectively indoctrination is undermining The principles of education, um, it's somehow inhibiting knowledge and under or understanding, rationality, um, and the development of the intellectual self, you know, the, the person as a critical thinker, as a humble thinker, as a person who is sensitive to reasons, arguments, and evidence, and so on and so forth. So, indoctrination is thought to undermine all that, um, but how Uh, and, you know, and why exactly it does this is unclear, right? So just to give you a gist of the problem, um, people can be indoctrinated to believe what's true and indoctrinated to deny what's false. And what's so bad about that, right? So, um, insofar as you think that we can be indoctrinated to believe not only what's true, um, but also what's false and thus to sort of Inhibit ourselves from considering seriously um what's false, that just raises the question of what Uh, would make indoctrination, at least from sort of like an educational and, and epistemological point of view, uh, a bad thing. So it kind of cries out for explanation, and that's where an epistemologist, um, can jump, you know, jump in and, and, and try to give a story. Um, SO that's, that's one reason why we should study indoctrination, um, at least philosophically. Um, THE second reason is that. Many people also seem to think that indoctrination, you know, just happens when you're sort of socialized, uh, into a community with a, with a belief system, right? Whether it's political, religious, non-religious, or any kind of worldview, right? So it's just sort of like part of the natural um habituation into, you know, society. Um, BUT then, if growing, just growing up in a culture or society just comes with it, like certain beliefs and values that you just can't sort of avoid, um, if, you know, following Wittgenstein, you just sort of swallow down these beliefs without considering reasons or evidence for them. Then indoctrination seems inevitable, right? It's something that is completely unavoidable. Um, BUT then if it's unavoidable, why think it's a serious harm or something to be concerned or worried about, right? Um, WOULDN'T it be like the, the kind of doxastic or, you know, cognitive version of somebody worrying about puberty or midlife crisis or old age as a sort of like, as, you know, things to be avoided. I mean, that, that wouldn't really make much sense, right? Those are just kind of normal facts of life, so to speak. And, you know, this story about how indoctrination is just part of ordinary. Inculturation and habituation into a society that has beliefs and values that makes it look like just a part of, you know, ordinary life and not a problem as such. And here's the thing, um, many people still, of course, point to indoctrination as something to be avoided, that it's wrong to indoctrinate and that educators should, you know, try to avoid indoctrination as best as they can. But if it's not avoidable at all, then, you know, clearly there's a conflict, right? So, um, part of the philosophical study then is, you know, to tell a story there as well. And, um, third, um, indoctrination is a politically salient issue. And then, you know, different points of recent history, it's, it's been politically salient for different reasons. I mean, at least recently, lawmakers, politicians in the US, um, and Western Europe, uh, mostly, Um, on the right wing, um, so more on the conservative spectrum of things, have, you know, called for the end of indoctrination in schools and especially universities. And so, there are charges of indoctrination sort of clearly presupposed that there's something wrong with indoctrination, right? That it's wrong and that it should be avoided. And that, you know, to the extent that our educational systems are employing indoctrinatory methods or forms of instruction, then they're sort of corrupted by indoctrinators, right? Um, Well, here's the thing, we can't really assess whether their claims are true or justified if we don't have a good grip on what indoctrination is exactly. You know, we have to actually know what we're talking about. Um, AND also, we have to have a good grip on why it's a bad thing, if it is at all, right? And whether it really is even avoidable. Um, SO Uh, that also makes, I think, the study of indoctrination important because. It, you know, ultimately will help us assess political claims a lot more effectively. And, um, yeah, and although I think that most of the concerns about indoctrination, at least, you know, from a political point of view, are coming mostly from the, the right wing and conservatives. That's not to say that the left wing and more progressive and liberal people are not also concerned about it. So, you know. There's definitely charges from the left that, you know, private religious schools are centers of indoctrination, that uninformed parents are effectively indoctrinating their kids to deny climate change or to deny the efficacy of vaccines, or there's also charges from kind of more mainstream media that people are indoctrinated to believe. False, uh, conspiracy theories, um. So, it's, it's not just, you know, on the right, although it, it, a lot of the, I guess, sort of. A lot of the airtime is given to the right when it comes to indoctrination, um, but it's still the case that the left and, you know, the center and the mainstream are also concerned about indoctrination just, um, you know, for different kinds of groups, for, for different kinds of beliefs and, and so on. So, yeah, I'd say these are the three main reasons why indoctrination is important. Um, YEAH, for educational. Epistemological and maybe even broadly democratic reasons. So, you know, many have thought that. The point of education in a democratic society is to facilitate not just the, you know, ingestion of knowledge and, and understanding, but to develop students, uh, as, as like thinkers, right? And to, to do, to develop the, the intellect and indoctrination, it seems incompatible with that. So we need to spell out why all of this is.

08:25 Ricardo Lopes: Right, but what is indoctrination? I mean, what does it mean to indoctrinate someone and how should the definition of indoctrination be approached?

08:37 Chris Ranalli: Yeah, this is um. Sort of a really big question because Yeah, part of my motivation um for the book was just On the one hand, if you go to. Contemporary philosophy, you don't have any real settled definitions of indoctrination. You sort of have A dispute, which happened mostly in the 70s. Um, FROM philosophers of, of education about what, you know, indoctrination is. And this is all kind of against the backdrop of, you know, the, the cold, the Cold War, right? Um, SO, a lot of the data points you, you could say that we have on indoctrination philosophically sort of comes from this discourse from the 70s and, and, and a bit into the 80s as well. Um, THE other data points are from Things like religious studies, um, social psychology, and terrorism and security studies where They don't always mention indoctrination by name, but they have something like indoctrination in mind when they're thinking about certain kinds of cognitive manipulation. And sometimes they do mention indoctrination, but they just sort of fail to kind of give an adequate definition of what it is, right? Um, SO, yeah, it sort of starts from those two points that the kind of definitional, um, project was, you know, kind of left open by the philosophy, and the definitional project was never really properly taken, taken up outside of philosophy, so you just find You know, different, um, mutually exclusive, inadequate definitions outside of philosophy, right? Um, AND then if you go to the dictionary, the dictionary sort of actually does a, a fairly good job compared to other philosophically interesting terms, you know, so if you like looked it up, looked up knowledge or justice in the dictionary, you You know, don't really get philosophically compelling definitions, but if you look up indoctrination in the dictionary, it's, it's a lot better. It's something like, um, being instructed to accept something uncritically, and that's actually like an excellent starting point. But then all of the interest comes in. When we start thinking about what is it to accept something uncritically, right? So what, what counts as uncritical, um. And so the philosophy would still be necessary then, even if you're starting with, say, a, a dictionary, like a, you know, widespread dictionary definition. Um, YEAH, so either way, we need to embark on this kind of definitional, uh, project, and Doing this takes us. Yeah, into different territory. On the one hand, it takes us into this territory about just thinking about, OK, so what should a definition of this phenomenon look like exactly, right? So this is more of a kind of like a meta question, right? A question about not what is the definition, but what do we want from a definition of this phenomenon. Um, And the other territory is, is kind of going over all, you know, this kind of different literature, which often doesn't. You know, correspond with each other, right? And trying to see what nuggets of insight, you know, we can extract from that. Um, OK, so with that said, what I tried to say in the book is the given trying to give a definition of indoctrination is actually more difficult than trying to give a definition of other philosophically interesting, uh, phenomena. And the reason why is because Indoctrination doesn't, the, the term isn't just used to describe, um, you know, certain instructional methods or processes or ways of acquiring and holding beliefs, but they also contain an evaluation. Of that, of the method, process, or way of um uptaking and holding a belief. And because there's this evaluational aspect of what the term means. Uh, IT means that it's then kind of latent with normativity. So, we can't then just take ascriptions of indoctrination at face value in the same way that we could say ascriptions of when someone knows something, or maybe even less controversial when something is a mammal, or, or, you know, when, when someone, um, I don't know when something is a fish, and so on and so forth. Of course, all these things admit of like borderline cases and there will be ambiguity, but Uh, what's lacking in these cases, I mean, at least at first blush, is something like a normative evaluation of the phenomenon, uh, in the same breath, right? So if I call something indoctrination, I'm not just describing it as a kind of instructional method or process. For getting beliefs, but I'm also evaluating it in a negative way. It's like saying of the thing that it's, you know, just like when you say of something that's irrational, or that's so dogmatic, you're not just describing the thing, the state, you're evaluating it. Um, AND so that means when we go to look at how people use the concept of indoctrination, we're, we're also getting kind of like data points on On what they consider to be negative, right, from an epistemological or moral point of view, right? So you might get people who If you just swapped out the relevant views, right, would call a certain way of getting a belief indoctrination, while the other would say, oh, no, no, it's not, right? So for some, it might be that your paradigm case of indoctrination will involve, you know, fundamentalist religious beliefs, um, and for others, it will involve maybe, maybe, you know, more like atheistic, humanistic beliefs, right? On a political On the political side, it could be, and this is why I mentioned a moment ago about how the the original definitional project took place, you know, while the Cold War was going on. You know, a lot of the, the worries had to do with The American educational system. Being too similar to something like the Soviet educational system, right? So the idea is like, well, look here in the West, we need to educate our people and our students, not indoctrinate them. And so the The paradigm, you know, so like the base case of what indoctrination would be, would be, however they're being educated, however they're being instructed rather, in the Soviet Union and further back in, into um more like fascist regi regimes of Nazi Germany and, and, and Italy, for example, during the, uh, the Second World War. So, all this is just to say that Descriptions, descriptions, attributions of indoctrination, um, they carry normative evaluations within them, and that makes ordinary, taking ordinary descriptions of indoctrination at face value difficult so that we don't really have a good grip on which cases are the base cases of indoctrination and which aren't. They're always going to be open to dispute. Um, AND so that's something I wrestle with a lot, uh, in the book and especially, uh, chapter two where I try to resolve this basically a practical version of what's called the problem of the criterion, you know, so you want to give a, a criterion of the thing in question, in this case, indoctrination. Um, AND so it seems like you should start from obvious cases of it, right? Um, BUT in this case, our obvious cases are questionable, right? People will dispute them for, you know, political, ideological reasons. Um, SO that makes it difficult to start from kind of like paradigm cases or base cases of. In of what indoctrination is supposed to be. So then that points towards going towards just principles that if we get them right, will just tell us which cases are indoctrination and which ones, and which ones aren't. Um, SO that's, that's one way to go. But then, One of the primary ways of testing these principles is against cases. Right, so let me give you an example. Um, IF you have a principle of knowledge, which. Says something like, whenever anyone has an opinion, it counts as knowledge, well then, that's not gonna correspond so well to our ordinary attributions of knowledge, right? We'll say people who believe that 2 + 2 equals 24, well, then that counts as knowledge cause there's someone out there who believes that, I'm sure. But that, that won't um jive, right? It won't correspond to our ordinary attributions where we withhold knowledge. In that case, we'll say, no, that person doesn't know that. 2 + 2 equals 24 because that claim is not true, right? Um, SO we test principles. Against cases, and, and so if what I just said is correct that the cases of indoctrination are themselves problematic. Um, WE, it makes it difficult to even test the principles against the cases, right? Because we have to have kind of agreement on This is a case of indoctrination and not merely some kind of ideological distortion, right? Kind of normative confusion. So that's why the definitional project, I think, in the case of indoctrination is especially difficult, and this will probably be true as well for. Similar kinds of terms like propaganda, brain brainwashing, you know, things in the nexus of indoctrination.

19:21 Ricardo Lopes: Right. Um, I mean, I would like to ask you now about the theory of indoctrination you present in the book. You also go through some particular views like the ideological view, the rationality bypassing view, and the close-mindedness view of indoctrination. I mean, would you like to tell us about your own theory, the one you present in the book, and how it differs from these other views of indoctrination?

19:48 Chris Ranalli: Yeah, sure. So, um, Yeah, I sort of move in the book kind of progressively towards my own, you know, working first working through, um, why why the dictionary definition is is inadequate, and then more to Full-blooded philosophical theory. So I start with the ideological view, and then I get to the, what I call the rationality bypassing view, and then to the closed-mindedness or dogmatism sort of view. And in my view it's kind of a variation of, of that. It's in that family. It's a kind of closed-mindedness sort of view. Um, SO yeah, let me just work through this sort of step by step a bit. Um. OK. So, maybe where we should start in trying to define indoctrination is just to think about Well let's try to start with some, some cases, right? So, Um, I guess in real life, you know, there is Nazi Germany teaching students in, you know, elementary school, um, biology, right? And the way that they taught biology sort of aligned with. Because of the Nazi perspective on racial hierarchy, right? That, that white people, and specifically Germans are superior to, to the rest, um. I think many would want to say that this was uh an instance of indoctrination. So, you know, if something has, you know, is, is a contender for being a paradigm case, this is as close as we're, we're gonna get, I guess, um, in the real world, um. OK, so like what the ideology view says basically is that. To be indoctrinated is to be taught. To believe a particular ideology, right? So that's like the initial simple presentation of the view. And I think If you think about that in relation to this Nazi biology case, you can say like, OK, so it would account initially for why that's a case of indoctrination because students are indeed being taught to believe that a particular ideology is correct, right? Namely, that the Nazi ideology or, or way of thinking about biologies, you know, is correct. Namely, the one that aligns with racial. Like the supremacy of white over non-white people. OK. The problem with this is that it overgeneralizes, right? Because If you just look at, I guess, the definitions of what ideology are, at least in sort of like political psychology, um, And, um, you know, anthropology and behavioral sciences. Ideology is just kind of understood as something like a body of mutually reinforcing and supportive beliefs and values, and so, Um, everyone will have an ideology of in this sense, right? So if you just take your ordinary religious believer or even your ordinary non-religious believer, I mean, they'll have some religious or non-religious worldview or ideology, right? Um, If you take someone who grows up in, you know, like Western Europe and social democratic countries, they'll have a broadly Democratic worldview might skew um agnostic or atheist, a bit suspicious about religion, but is tolerant of it. This also uh encapsulates a certain worldview, you know, we might call it like enlightenment worldview, right? OK, so I guess you can already kind of see what the problem is, is that if this ideology, this basic ideology account of indoctrination is correct, then just too many things will count as indoctrination, you know, basically it would mean that just by getting beliefs at all, you're being indoctrinated, right, at some point. And so it, because it overgeneralizes, it becomes not so scientifically fruitful as a, as a theory. Right, cause it, it will just, it'll just call far too many cases of indoctrination and, and so it's not a helpful way of demarcating what's indoctrination from education, right? Or what's indoctrination from, I don't know, you could say like epistemically good teaching or what's the difference between um Indoctrination and education that facilitates knowledge, right, or an intellectual self-development. So it won't really help us to make any of these, to answer those kinds of questions. So it overgeneralizes. Um, OK. But there's another way of parsing the ideological view, um, which is much stronger. So, you could say like, OK, it's not really about coming to believe in ideology or worldview as such, but it's more about the way the person acquires the worldview or ideological belief. So, there's a difference here then between being instructed to believe in ideology and being ideologically instructed. To believe a certain ideology or worldview. And it's this latter thing, this ideological instruction, which is what makes the process indoctrinatory. OK, so, that's better. Um, BUT it raises the question, what is it to be ideologically instructed? Well, something like instruction that is informed by a background ideology. Um, SO that means going back to the Nazi biology case, it means that they were taught biology under the guise. Of Nazi ideology, right? Or sort of maybe not in the guise of, but. Um, THROUGH the influence of Nazi ideology. So that Nazi ideology is, as it were, distorting. The the relevant. Um, BIOLOGICAL education, right? So that what the students come to think of as the science surrounding. Uh, RACE is not really the science in a, in a certain sense surrounding race, but is more like a distortion of, of the facts and the evidence, like a certain way of interpreting it so that it kind of fits with. Uh, THE prevailing, uh, Nazi worldview, right? So it involves this kind of this distortion of the evidence for what counts as true by the ideology. So we have to spell out what that notion is, and. One way of doing it is just like, well, the, the ideology perhaps is prone to represent what's false as what's true. Um, THAT would be one way of doing it, but. But because indoctrination is compatible with getting true beliefs. Um, THIS would mean that then only. Coming to acquire false beliefs would count as indoctrination. And so if you took You know, two people who are taught. Different views. So one is taught, let's say, any view P and the other one is taught the opposite, not, not P, but they're instructed in exactly the same sort of way. This view would count only one of them as being indoctrinated, namely the one who got the, you know, got the false belief. And I, and it struck me that this was inadequate because it seems to put all of the work into just how the world turns out to be, you know, does the world turn out to be such that that person's belief corresponds to it or not? And so it's kind of, it kind of sucks out all of the explanatory work of the methodology, uh, that. Ideological that ideological distortion is supposed to do in accounting for why the methodology or process is indoctrinory, right? So it kind of is self-undermining as a theory. It's supposed to be a theory about how, why a certain method or way of getting a belief is indoctrinatory, and it turns out that, oh, it doesn't really have much to do with the method, it just really has more to do with what the world ends up being like. So a better way then would be to say, well, ideological distortion is a matter of Distorting the reasons for the position, sort of making it seem as though um there are reasons for a position when there really aren't any, or making it seem as though the stated reasons uh really do support the view when they really don't. So in this case, you know, Nazi biology teachers, it isn't as though they just Gave somehow gave students beliefs. They also presented reasons for those beliefs um under the heading of being the science, right, right, so it wasn't taught as though it wasn't taught as if it were independent of science. It was taught taught as being part of the science so that if you're kind of respectful of the science and appreciate what the science says, then you should believe what they do. So that would be the distortion then, right? Representing something that is not science as science and thus as having scientific evidence of a belief when you really don't. Um, SO that does a lot better, I think. Um, BUT it then it seems really close to a rival position, namely this rationality bypassing view, right? Because then it's not ideology as such, which is kind of explaining why the case is indoctrination, but it's more the epistemic features of the ideology that are explaining why it's indoctrination. Namely, because it's Misrepresenting the evidence or because it's. Making the way um. That the learner uses the evidence, uh, somehow improper. Um, SO, all of these features are strictly speaking detachable from ideology, right? I could just teach someone an individual claim that um seems remote from ideology, you know, say like, that's a table, and I could kind of misrepresent the evidence. I could say like, well, here's scientific evidence for why this is a table, but it's not really scientific evidence. Well, then my Ideological distortion account would have to call that. Um, I, indoctrination. Which, um, which seems wrong, um, or at least. It sort of makes the, the view superfluous, right, because then it's not quite ideology which is doing anything, it's just these epistemological features that happen also to be features of this, you know, of the ideology in question like. So, yeah, it becomes superfluous and it, it, it's not something about ideology as such, which is doing any explanatory work anymore. OK, so I know this is long, but now we're only at the rationality bypassing view. So it kind of takes us here, um, as maybe the better position and I think of this view is sort of the main rival to the view that I favor, which is more of a closed-mindedness theory. Um, SO I spent a lot of time on this theory in the book compared. To the others. So the rationality bypassing view effectively says that to be indoctrinated is to Come to acquire a belief that something is true or false, but in a way that bypasses your rationality. It bypasses your rational evaluation, it bypasses your critical faculties. It just kind of goes around these things, right? And I think that this view does, um, account for some people's intuitions about what indoctrination is supposed to be. So if you think about You know, Alex from A Clockwork Orange and he gets, you know, they use this, of course, it's made up, but this Ludovico technique on him to get him to, um, be repulsed by murder, right? Um, ALTHOUGH it doesn't involve a conviction, you can just tweak the case so that not only does it cause him to be revolt revolted by murder, but to believe that murder is wrong. So imagine, you know, they employ this technique which sort of, sort of like gives him these. You know, terrible images of murder that makes him feel like just sick and and and and everything else. Makes makes him repulsed and we'll suppose it makes them convinced that murder is is awful, that it's wrong. OK, so it seems like he's indoctrinated. Why? Well, rationality bypassing you has a great answer. Well, the way he acquired this conviction completely went, went around his rational evaluation, right? It just engaged his, his sort of like, you know, emotions and, and even, uh, deeper than that, it just, you know, engaged his, his like kind of disgust, right? So. That doesn't seem to involve any rational evaluation, consideration of arguments, reasons, and so on and so forth. OK, so gets that kind of example right. Um. OK, so all, all is good. What's wrong then? Um, I guess it's because this is, of course, is a fictional example, and once we start, you know, pulling the threads, we end up completely unraveling it, so. What it says is that makes this example indoctrinatori is that. The way of getting the conviction went around. Alex, the agent's rational faculties, basically. OK. Well then. That makes it seem like indoctrination then is something like compelled or forced belief, right? Because being compelled to believe something or being forced to believe it also seems to go around. This activity, this activity of considering an argument for a belief, this activity of thinking about whether there's reasons for the belief and whether these reasons actually support it or not. Right, OK. Um, NOW, let's go back to Yeah, epistemology, um, just consider Descartes' evil demon thought experiment for a moment, right? In this thought experiment, we're supposed to be like, we imagine ourselves as Descartes or like Descartes sitting by the fire, holding a piece of paper in our hand. And Descartes says, well, look, isn't it possible that. As you hold this, you know, piece of paper, book in your hand that an evil demon, completely unbeknownst to you, just, you know, put this, um, thought into your mind, which causes you to assent to it. Um, Well, Suppose that is possible, then Descartes's case would actually be a case of indoctrination, namely the evil demon indoctrinated us to believe, here's a book, right? Or here's, or I have hands, or I have a body. Here's a desk, here's a computer, uh, and so on and so forth. It's just kind of giving you, um, the belief, right? Um, SO, What would basically be going on here is that when something causes you to believe something, then you just count as indoctrination. Uh, IT just counts as having been indoctrinated. And so I worried here that this also will overgeneralize because just think about your relationship to your own sensory experiences, your own sensory impressions. I mean, often enough they don't just They don't prompt you to consider arguments or reasons in favor of. That what you're seeing is vertical, but they just cause you to believe, right? If you open your eyes in the morning and look at the clock and it says 7 a.m., you immediately come to believe it's 7 a.m. You don't consider arguments or reasons, and in fact, that seems to be what the belief has going for it, even, right? It's just an immediate. Um, RELATION between the impression, this experience of seeing what the clock says to believing. It just immediately causes the belief without any inferential steps, no argumentative steps, no activation of your reason. But then, just simple perception. WOULD also count as indoctrination, in effect, by, by, by this definition. So, it ends up being, uh, it ends up overgeneralizing. And the reason I brought up this, this Descartes case was Just to highlight how. Being caused to believe something would, would count as indoctrination, and the thing is that, well, lots of things can cause us to believe what we do, you know, so if you get bumped on the head and then you end up believing, uh. Maybe you believe something connected to it, like I was bumped on the head, or maybe you don't. Maybe you believe something completely as a, as a, as an accident, a kind of fluke. You believe that it's gonna rain tomorrow. Well, that would be a belief that bypassed irrationality. Was, is it really indoctrination though? You know, it doesn't seem like it. Um, SO it seems to overgeneralize, and I could get into some more things like thinking about like determinism and freedom, you know, if determinism is true, then in a certain sense, all of our beliefs are caused by the remote past and the laws of nature, but then every belief would count as indoctrination and of course determinism might well be true at, at the level of, at this level, so. Um, YEAH, that, that, that would be bad, right? Um, OK. Maybe a fix here is to say something like, all right, it doesn't have, it's not just being compelled to believe. But it's something like you need to believe in such a way that you're sort of reason responsive. Right, so, going back to the Clockwork Orange example, Alex wasn't just compelled to believe, but he's also maybe we could tweak the example so that he's reason, he's not reason responsive, so that if someone maybe in his old gang were to give him reasons for believing as he used to believe that murder is great and we should all, you know, that it's, he should engage in it. He wouldn't be able to con he wouldn't be able to consider these reasons seriously, be able to factor in, factor those into his thinking. He would kind of be preempted from doing it, right? He would be repulsed. Yeah, um, all right, so I think this view, um, Has a good shot of being. Correct, but. It runs into a difficult question, which is that. There's sort of this ambiguity between being reason. Unresponsive in the way you acquire the belief. So in terms of your belief formation. Um, VERSUS the way you maintain the belief. So, it could be that you're a reason unresponsive in how you got the belief, um, but you're still reason responsive in the way you maintain it. So let me give you an example of that. Um, Maybe I acquire a certain belief from perception. Say I acquired the belief that um it's raining, it's raining right now because that's what I seem to see. When I see some water falling down um uh from, from above. OK, so that was in a certain sense, reason unresponsive because I didn't like consider reasons or anything. I just. Got the belief Immediately through my experience. I didn't really think about it. But I maintain it maybe in a reasoned responsive way, so that if my wife comes in and says, hey, I was just watering the flowers above us, it made, I just used way too much. Uh, I left the hose on, and yeah, it really looked like rain. And then if I go, oh, OK, I thought it was raining before, but, uh, I guess it was just you, um, you know, using, using too much water. So there I revised my belief, um, so it was reason responsive, so it wasn't indoctrination, right? Um, YEAH. OK. So, that's, uh, that would be helpful. So then we have to build in them that for it really to count as indoctrination, it can't just be that the way I acquired the belief was reason unresponsive, but the way I maintained it. Um, OK, so this is where the difficulty now comes in for proponents of this way of understanding rationality bypassing, is that The rationality bypassing view is supposed to be a view, what's called a method view of indoctrination. So method views of indoctrination, they're a family of views which say, look, what makes something indoctrination or not is facts about the method. Of teaching or acquiring the relevant beliefs. All right. And so here's the thing, to secure that the belief is maintained in a reasoned unresponsive way, you have to pack in a lot into the method to make it, to guarantee or make it likely that the belief is maintained in a reason, reasoned unresponsive way. So how are you gonna do that? Short of just magically causing the person. To maintain it in a, you know, reasoned, unresponsive way. Um, YOU know, if you have something like Descartes's Evil demon who's constantly Keeping the belief fixed in you and preventing you from considering reasons and alternatives, then, you know, that could do it. But what in the real world could do it, right? So, that was just one kind of like open question for the proponent of this account. And what I tried to say is this, well, look, here's what could actually do it. When people are indoctrinated, It's true that they don't just come to believe a view and then they forget it the next day or immediately change their view upon being presented with counter-evidence, but there's something about the way that they acquired it that preempts them from doing that. For example, they are taught that the critics are not trustworthy. They're taught that the alternatives to their views are completely misleading, right? They're not based on Um, they're not based on, um, evidence, um, from reliable sources, um, that they are maybe even sourced, uh, in bad actors who have, um, nefarious intentions, uh, and so on. So that when the pupil goes out into the world, so to speak, and encounters criticism, they'll be apt to dismiss those. Dismiss the critics, dismiss the counter-evidence, dismiss the counterarguments as, as misleading. So then, what's doing the explanatory work here is something like. There's a feature of the instruction which gets the agent to be closed-minded. It gets the agent to dismiss the, the alternatives to their views. It gets them to not consider those views seriously. If they do consider them, they're not doing it in a serious way. They're doing it just to Uh, just to disparage or just to say, look, I'm Look, you're wrong. I'm not, not interacting with you further, right? So then, once we fill out the rationality bypassing view, it ends up becoming a, uh, a kind of closed-mindedness view. It becomes part of the other family, right? Where a necessary element of indoctrination is that the, the pupil. Comes to have a closed-minded attitude or disposition or posture towards what they were taught as true. Right? So the idea then is that to the extent that you're attracted to this rationality bypassing view, once we kind of fill out the details properly, it ends up becoming a, uh, a member of a, of a, of another family of views, namely the closed-minded, where closed-mindedness as an attitude or posture, disposition, um, is a central, a central element of what makes, uh, something indoctrinatory.

46:06 Ricardo Lopes: Right. And so, I mean, your view is a close-mindedness kind of view as well, or?

46:16 Chris Ranalli: Yeah, it is. So, um, what I tried to do is say, look, there's a, the lesson of this rationality bypassing view is that We have to have something which accounts for the stability of the agent's belief over time, such that they don't consider. Um, COUNTER-EVIDENCE, counterreasons, counterarguments, they don't consider the critics seriously. OK, so having this closed-mindedness, this closed-minded posture is what could do this, uh, realistically. Um, OK, so we do need this closed-mindedness element, but just getting a belief and Having this closed mindedness posture towards the belief. IS not thereby sufficient for indoctrination because you could have got this closed-minded attitude towards the belief in a way that is completely independent of how you got the belief in the first place. So you can imagine like there's one stream, one stream that leads you to believe, say, God exists. And then another stream that leads you to leads, leads you to be close-minded with respect to the belief that God exists, so that you don't consider counterarguments or the critics seriously. So, these two streams can be independent of each other, and I wanted to say that because they can be independent, It won't always be, there won't always be a 1 to 1 match between someone who Um, is taught to believe that something is true and is closed-minded about whether or not it's true, that, that they have to be paired together so that, you know, there's something, say, that the educator, that the teacher does, which not only leads the pupil to believe that, say, God exists, but leads them to be closed-minded with respect to whether God exists or not. So, So in that respect then it, it's not just. It's, it's not just that, um, getting a belief, coming to believe that P and becoming closed-minded about whether P, some belief that P is sufficient for indoctrination, but it is necessary for it. And so, OK, what would make, what do we have to add then? Well, As I was hinting at, it has to be sourced um in something that I guess the instructor does, right? So the instructor has to The reason why the pupil is closed-minded about, say, whether God exists. It's because maybe the teacher has said repeatedly that, look, I mean, the critics, they are really misguided, um, they, they have really, you know, untrustworthy sources, so, um, also, you know, maybe he says, look, these people are also, um, They're agents of the enemy, right? They can't be trusted also because they are out to get you, right? They want to recruit you into their own, um, nefarious, like to towards their own nefarious ends, you, you know, so imagining kind of like a fundamentalist teacher here who says that the critics are all, you know, agents of, of the devil or something like that, right? So, This kind of gives the students like pretty strong practical reasons given their situation not to engage seriously with the critics because they think if they were to do so. You know, they would be in company with. You know, the evil enemy, right? Um, AND Yeah, they have that practical reason. There's also certain social reasons, you know, like being ostracized or being told off by your teacher, being punished. Um, SO different kinds of practical considerations can come into play here to preempt a student from considering. The critics and the counter-evidence seriously, right? It's not just, it's not just epistemological considerations, it's also practical considerations. That's important. So I call all this rationally preemptive features of the instruction. It's things that if you're a rational person, person would give you a reason not to engage seriously. And both epistemic and practical, practical considerations can do this, right? Like if I get told by someone who, um, you know, I have good reason to think we'll follow up on what they're saying that I'll be severely punished if I talk to the critics, well, now I have a good reason not to. You know, um, so. Uh, SO yeah, so this is this rationally preemptive content or instruction. I, I, I talked about in the book. So that's one way to link the closed-minded attitude back to the relevant belief forming process, the way the teacher taught them, what the teacher taught them. Um, BUT I found in the book that actually this isn't enough because sometimes the. It need not come down to what the teacher does, but how the The relevant social environment kind of scaffolds this um. These sort of like rational preemptters of the critics of the counter-evidence and so on. So, it might be that the teacher has all of the best intentions and maybe even wants the students to You know, maybe this is like kind of like a It might be um the let's imagine the teacher is sort of like a liberal progressive, um. Uh, Christian, um, believer, um, they have very firm convictions, um, and they're working at a fundamentalist, a more fundamentalist kind of school, right? So, what they try to do is not just Openly say things like, look, you know, maybe the fundamentalist doctrines themselves aren't true, but they do things like, well, let's, um, you know, let's order some books that are scholarly and are kind of critical from a theological perspective of these doctrines, so that if the fundamentalist perspective is the right one, we can kind of get more, you know, solid reasons for thinking this. Um, SO imagine the, the, the teacher tries to order such books, but the, you know, the principal of the school board say, nope, you can't do that, right? Um, IMAGINE he then, you know, tries to take them to the local, I mean, this is getting fictional now, but imagine he takes them to the local, you know, like community college library or something like that, but they just, in fact, are funded by fundamentalists and so it's kind of stacked with mostly fundamentalists supporting literature, not really literature that's critical of it, right? So, so even that is a failure in this case. Maybe he tries to get some guest speakers, but all the guest speakers that get approved are ones who are more on, you know, more sympathetic towards fundamentalism. So, basically, all of the teacher's efforts to kind of inspire a more open-minded disposition towards fundamentalist views. So he's definitely teaching them that these fundamentalist doctrines are, you know, the ones that they ought to believe, but he's trying to inspire them to be open-minded about it and Yet all of his efforts of trying to secure this open-mindedness fail because of the overarching educational system and social epistemic community surrounding, uh, these views, right? So basically, You can also get indoctrination, um, Of of the kind I'm thinking about. Um, WHERE the social environment sort of picks up the slack, where the teachers, you know, themselves, um, is not, is not, he, he going, is not sort of doing things that go towards making his students, um, closed-minded, right? The, the sort of system can facilitate that process of making the students, uh, closed-minded, so that, you know, the students might come out thinking like, well, you know, We got some guest speakers. We got some scholarly books, and, you know, they all kind of gave us the reasons why the non-fundamentalist interpretations of this theology is, or why all of that is bunk. So they come out, you know, kind of like with better reasons than when they started, and you could say like reasons not to be open-minded about their positions, right? They'll have kind of considered reasons for dismissing the opposition. Um, SO this is an example that I adapted from. Uh, Yeah, um, a philosopher of education named, uh, Rebecca M. Taylor, who kind of works through this view. As Highlighting the way in which the systems can also play a role in making students closed-minded, not just the educator, um, his or herself. And I went a little, I went a step further and, and argued that like, well, the educator can almost entirely drop out of the picture in, in certain instances where As long as you have a source of the belief, maybe it even comes, you know, online through YouTube or, or, you know, message boards or things like that, they get kind of positive presentations of a, of a view or perspective, and then their surrounding social environment, including the digital environment, preempts them from considering the relevant alternatives to that view seriously. So that there needn't even be a kind of Teacher-student relationship in this kind of traditional, uh, traditional form, right? You're imagining like a bunch of students in a classroom or something. Um, Yeah, so Just to close out my answer to this question then, um, What makes um a way of being a a a, a kind of instruction um indoctrinatory is that You have to, you have to have uh an instruction which is aimed at the, the students or pupils, the recipients. Believing that something is the case, and then having a closed-minded posture uh towards what it is that they believe, where that means they don't consider the alternatives to that belief, um. They don't consider it seriously, right, so they'll ignore it or dismiss it or think it's, uh, wrong and misleading. Um, AND that very disposition, posture, way of thinking has to be rooted in something. Explanatorily significant. So, if not the teachers in directives, then in the way in which the social, uh, the, the pupil's social environment is structured, so as to support. That closed-minded posture, just like in the example from before with the With the, the teacher of the fundamentalist school who wants the students to be open-minded about their fundamentalist doctrines, but the social environment kind of reinforces. Um, BEING closed-minded towards it. So it has to be rooted in, in, in, in something that is, you know, causally explanatorily salient with respect to their Closed-minded attitude.

58:34 Ricardo Lopes: Mhm. OK, so, uh, I mean, I, uh, I have a few more questions I'd like to ask you. I would like to ask you also to please try to be a little bit more succinct because we're already at, at an hour of recording and I would like to go through at least a few more questions. So, is indoctrinated belief epistemically harmful and if it's harmful, uh, what makes it so?

59:02 Chris Ranalli: Yeah, that's great. Um, YEAH, so this is effectively the second main question of the book. So the first one is, what, we just went over, what is indoctrination. Um, NOW, OK, what, if anything, makes it harmful? OK, so, I have a certain kind of harm um in mind here. So if indoctrination is most fundamentally a way of getting people to A way of getting people to believe. Um, THEN we need to look at this from an epistemological point of view. So, like, what's bad about believing or getting beliefs and holding beliefs in this way. So, if what I said is right, then indoctrination is fundamentally a way of coming to believe something and to believing it in a closed-minded way, owing to the, I guess you could say, kind of closed-minded making intentions of the, of the teacher or The, the closed-minded making conditions of the, the pupil's uh social environment. OK. So what's harmful then about that from, from an epistemological point of view? Well, It seems like The, it seems like indoctrination can lead still to true beliefs, even on my own view, right? So, it just involves being taught something and being closed-minded towards it. Um, WHERE that's rooted in the relevant, um, social epistemic structure or, or, or the teacher. Um, OK, but that could still result in true beliefs. So, insofar as it does result in true beliefs, it's also gonna result in, um, dismissing false beliefs, namely the contrary views to one's own doctrine or position. And so, from that perspective, it'll seem epistemically beneficial, right? Because, um, Not only will you learn what's true, you'll also be disposed not to consider the contrary false views seriously, which is, you might think, epistemically beneficial because um it'll preempt you from revising a true belief and replacing it with a false belief. It'll um prevent you from falling for misleading evidence. Uh, FOR example, or merely persuasive counterarguments that are ultimately misleading. So, when the beliefs are true, it seems like indoctrination will be beneficial. Um, And I argue that, yes, that's right. So, actually, it'll turn out that some cases of indoctrination will be epistemically beneficial um because it will lead to true beliefs and to the protection of those true beliefs. And that is From an epistemological point of view, beneficial because part of the, one of the primary goals, epistemic goals is to believe what's true and not believe what's false, right? Um, OK. So, if you then take, if you, if you think that, OK, then this fully explains. Um This kind of fully explains what's going on with respect to indoctrination when it comes to epistemic benefits, goods. Uh, HARMS and wrongs, then. It'll just turn out that indoctrination is only sometimes epistemically wrong, right? If it results in false beliefs, it's wrong. If it doesn't, then it's not. I call that the veritistic view. So it'll say indoctrination is only sometimes epistemically harmful or wrong. Um, Against this view, there'll be proponents of what I call in the book, the virtue view, which say like, well, look, An aim of education isn't just to get true beliefs and knowledge, um, and to, you know, stab off ignorance, but it's also to develop as a virtuous thinker, and open-mindedness is one of the virtues, one of the intellectual virtues. So, since indoctrination fundamentally opposes Open-mindedness, right? It's part of the very nature of indoctrination that it opposes this, then it will facilitate. Vicious, intellectually vicious thinking, right? By just by its nature. Um, OK, so, I was thinking of the virtue of you then is the main rival, but. Um, I also found that once we try to, you know, unravel this position, um, It It either kind of collapses into a version of the veritistic view, or it leads to the position I end up endorsing, which I call the epistemic respect view. And epistemic respect view basically says that Well, what's bad about, what makes indoctrination wrong is that it disrespects the learner in their capacity as an epistemic agent, as someone who has epistemic values that they can um prioritize, that they can choose to prioritize or not to prioritize. Um, THAT has certain, um, values that they, um, care about, uh, from an epistemic point of view. Um, SO, let me just go over this virtue view then real quick. So, mhm. On the one hand, one way of thinking about intellectual or epistemic virtues is that there are ways of thinking, character traits, and dispositions that are conducive towards knowledge and true belief, right? So, the thought is, is that Intellectual humility counts as a virtue insofar as it leads, it's conducive to true belief and knowledge, and otherwise it's not. Similarly, open-mindedness counts as a virtue if it tends to lead you to true beliefs and to ignore false beliefs, right? OK, well, on this understanding of what a virtue is, then it'll closely align with the veritistic view because then. Getting people to be closed-minded, um, when they are believing a true view, so they're indoctrinated, and thus they believe P and they are closed-minded with, with respect to the relevant alternatives to P. Um, That will count as an instance of intellectual vice if in fact, the belief is false or prone to lead them to other false beliefs as well. But if we suppose that that's not true, that it's a true belief, and thus they're gonna ignore the contrary false view, so you can just fill it in with whatever view, you know, views you think are actually true, right? So the theists can put in their favored. You know, they can put in God exists, and then their favored theology, and then the, the atheists can put in God does not exist, and then their favored um worldview, maybe, you know, a more humanistic, um, scientific worldview, for example. OK, so, one of them then will end up being virtuous, while the other is vicious, cause one is sort of Protecting, um, a belief that is true and is conducive to other true beliefs and the other is not doing that. Um, SO it ends up corresponding, this virtue view will end up corresponding to the veritistic view. It's really a, you know, a distinction without a difference. Um, OK, so, in order to get around this, you have to defend the virtue view in a different way. Now, you're like saying like, well, the virtues aren't so tightly connected to what's true or what's actually true or false. It's more about what enables the agent. We should think about intellectual virtues in terms of what enables the learner. The agent to sort of flourish um as a, you know, as an intellectual creature, right? And so on this view, there's just something good about being open-minded vis a vis your flourishing as a human being, right? So, on the one hand, um, I'm somewhat attracted to this, to this view. Um, FOR others, it'll strike them as mysterious, like, what is it exactly that makes just being open-minded, say, good for you. Um, YOUR flourishing as an, as a human being or more specifically as an epistemic agent, as an, as an intellectual creature. Um, WHY is it an excellence of, of intellectual character exactly, if it's not really connected to truth. Um So, um, yeah, I took this to sort of move us more towards my own position, which is this epistemic respect and, and, and so that's to say like, well, it's because if you sort of do something which turns off the person's open-mindedness, and, and for that matter, other prospective intellectual virtues, It seems like you're doing something disrespectful to them, right? Like this is something that you just need to respect, you need to honor their capacity um for, for acquiring these postures, these character traits, these ways of thinking, even if it puts them at risk of believing what's false, right? So, basically, epistemic respect requires that we um That we let people make mistakes, even deep mistakes. Right? And so, it will turn out then that what indoctrination is doing by leading people to not only have beliefs, but to be closed-minded about those beliefs is that it's effectively saying, look, we can't risk, you know, the indoctrinate with all the best intentions in the world, who's leading his pupils to true beliefs and to be close-minded about the rivals, which are, in fact, we're imagining here, false and misleading. Um, HE'S basically not trusting them to get things wrong, to not figure things out, uh, on their own, to not make mistakes. Right? And I, I see that as a kind of intellectual disrespect, right? It's not respecting that learner in their capacity as a learner or more broadly as a, as an epistemic agent. So, um, one element of it is that it's sort of hindering our inquisitive nature, which I, I see as a fundamental part of what makes us human. We're naturally curious, inquisitive beings, and we start off that way extremely early on, right? Um, AS a parent, I feel like now I can say this with like some authority, right? That, that children are extremely curious, right? They're naturally curious and A lot of what we do as parents even is we, you know, sort of, we sort of silence their curiosity, uh, sometimes. And, and this is part of the danger of indoctrination, I think, right? Part of what people are worried about is like, well, when we start putting them in different kinds of social and educational systems, we're effectively silencing. The, the, the child, the adolescent, and then later the adult's inquisitive nature, right? Um, AND that, that seems disrespectful, um. So, that's the answer. So you could say, yeah, what, what makes that, what makes disrespect so bad? Well, I just take it as bedrock, you know, so at some point, explanation has to come to an end and you just have sort of basic intuitions about Uh, what's right or wrong, and yeah, it seems to me that, well, From a fasci at least. You know, you shouldn't be, you shouldn't disrespect, uh, you shouldn't be disrespectful, uh, towards people. That's something that you shouldn't do. Um, OF course, you can sometimes get over, overriding reasons, you know, I'm not saying that. This disrespect always trumps any consideration, right? Of course not. Almost nothing is like that. Um, BUT that it's one that normally needs to be respected, that normally speaking, just the risk of getting a false belief as such, um, is not good enough, uh, for, for implementing what, you know, truthful or elitic indoctrination, right? OK, yeah, so I hope that, yeah, it gets the Answers the the question adequately.

1:11:48 Ricardo Lopes: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, sure. So let me just ask you about a particular kind of example that people nowadays debate a lot when it comes to accusing other people of indoctrination or trying to come up with examples of indoctrination. So do you think that Uh, right-wing people in the US are right to charge teachers and schools of indoctrination if and when they teach about topics like Marxism, socialism, or what they consider to be woke.

1:12:22 Chris Ranalli: Yeah, that's a great question. Um, IT'S something that I deal with a lot in the book. The, the last chapter is all about. It's all about this and the function of indoctrination charges, so. On the one hand, I think that, you know, if it really is the case that There's teachers in schools and in universities that are. Leading students to believe, you know, Marxist views or let's, you know, let's go very broad and we'll just say like woke doctrines or whatever. That, yeah, I mean, on my account, it would follow that this is. Not good, right? But it, it would follow no matter what the views were, right? Um, SO it, it could be that Marxism is actually correct and that the lots of the woke positions are themselves actually correct, but on my view, it would follow that insofar as someone is indoctrinating people to believe Marxist views or Very broadly speaking, you know, so-called woke doctrines, then this would be epistemically wrongful, um. OK, so That's already a difference between what my account predicts and maybe what the right-wing politicians are doing, because I take it that the right-wing politicians. Part of their problem. WITH, with these views is, is, is this, they, they also think they're not true. Right, so it's, it's no accident that of course they're picking on, um, views that are radically at odds with their own, right? So if you were to imagine. That university educators were and teachers in schools were, you know, teaching. Claims from the Bible as literal truths or as teaching. You know, I was going to say, you know, claims about republican democracy, um, as being, you know, accurate, then they'd be happy with this, but now, you know, as, as it, as it happens, many on the right are not so keen on Uh, democracy. So, but anyway, the point still stands, which is just that if you kind of picked their own favored. Ideological positions. It's not clear to me that they actually would call out for the end of indoctrination, or that they would even. Qualify the instruction as indoctrination, right? So this was, this is part of the worry in the book that The claims Um, are not really functioning to describe a worry about indoctrination as such. It's really about the Instruction or even for that matter, exposure to. Things like Marxism and you know. Different views about uh gender. Uh, FOR example, right, so, yeah, so I guess the idea here is this, is that I, I actually don't see their concern as actually about indoctrination, and in fact I don't think it's tracking indoctrination at all. So if you go and look at the laws that have been written so far in the US and I covered this in the book, you don't actually see definitions of indoctrination in the laws, right? So that means that it's kind of like a It's free to be filled in, however, you know, accusers and maybe judges see fit, right? The, the relevant evaluators, right? So that's, that's one problem. Um, ANOTHER problem is that in the laws, they specifically target. So-called Marxist and woke doctrines, sometimes under the guise of being woke doctrines, right? So they'll say, they'll say things like woke doctrines at odds with um American values, right? But of course, that builds in a lot, like, first, what are the American values? Second, are the relevant views actually at odds with whatever qualifies as American values? And third, Even if all of that is true, is it really the case that their students are being indoctrinated or are they just being exposed to these positions? Um, OR are they just being taught that these positions are 11, you know, one among many that might be true, but there's rivals out there that also might be true. So was that when I was writing the book, I actually couldn't find that much evidence that indoctrination as such was taking place rather than just instruction of what is in fact or what they think of as Marxist positions or woke positions. And even in that evidence. There wasn't really anything going for it being indoctrinated versus just being taught in, in the sense of being exposed to, right? So if you Um, You know, if you take, say, a political science course or political theory course rather, that is explicitly about Marxism, then yeah, probably the, the teacher will be partial towards Marxism, but In my own experience as a, you know, every, every professor was once, was, was once a student, right? I mean, in my experience, they, even people that are partial towards the view still present the relevant alternatives to the view. And even if that particular educator isn't especially Good at Exposing the students to the counterarguments in their most favorable light. It's not the case that the university is prohibitive of this. I mean, the university libraries, you know, will You know, doubtless carry all, uh, you know, all, most of the relevant literature that, that will compose the counterarguments, um. And students in, in my experience have not been. Prevented from having open discussions, right? Um, OF course, what has been prevented are things like Having certain Speakers that are platformed at a university, right, um, but that's a diff, but that's different from preventing students from openly discussing these views or seeking out evidence, uh, for or against the views through, um, the university structure, right? So the long and short of it is that I couldn't actually find any clear evidence of Indoctrination taking place. The evidence I did find that would lit name indoctrination as occurring was, was far too partisan. So it was coming from someone who Was themselves, if not a right wing politician, then. Um, LIKE a right wing pundit, uh, or someone writing for a. Right-wing, um, you know, like online magazine or, or, or newspaper, uh, for example, so that it's coming from a highly partisan perspective so that Yeah, it, it could be evidence, um, but it's not, it's not gonna be uncontroversial evidence, right? Um, SO that's the, that's the issue there. So yeah, I would say to, yeah, everyone, we have to actually be quite skeptical about whether any of, any indoctrination is really occurring. I'm sure some actually is just given the chance, you know, just given chances, but I think that it's Rather, mostly a moral panic, right? And so, And, and, in the book, I tried to argue that because Mainly the right, not exclusively, but mainly because the right are using charges of indoctrination in a propaganda way, and by that I mean they're using them in a way that is Independent of the evidence, right? So even if there were good evidence that indoctrination was occurring, they would still be motivated to, to Attribute indoctrination to the relevant targets in just the same way regardless. And that's because the function of the of their attributions, their charges of indoctrination is really to serve, you know, a, a deeper political and ideological agenda, which is to kind of get Their voters and prospective voters to fear. To have this moral panic about education and the university, thus going towards the agenda of defunding public universities, of defunding public schools, having more vouchers for private, specifically religious, the, uh, religiously oriented education, and also specifically here again, of course, Christian ones, right, um, or at least Judeo-Christian ones, so. It's, uh, the evidence speaks more in favor of that's the function of indoctrination charges in contemporary, the, you know, contemporary politics in the US and, and also for that matter, in certain parts of Western Europe. Um, AND the epistemic harm here? Is that it kind of pollutes the environment for educators and students, so then students and educators are not going to. Um, HAVE a good, have an easy time identifying. You know, when indoctrination is occurring and when it isn't, right, so the idea is that when you have too many ringers, too many false instances, too many propaganda claims in your environment, um, you're always gonna be worried about is someone crying wolf, right? Um, SO I think that the danger here is not, you know, we can bracket the political stuff and just say like, well, there's an epistemic issue here, right, which is that These politicians are perhaps inadvertently making it so that the relevant people, the teachers and the students are not going to be able to trust each other when it comes to their charges of indoctrination, and that's a bad thing because we actually do want to prevent actual instances of indoctrination, right, right.

1:23:33 Ricardo Lopes: OK, great.

1:23:33 Chris Ranalli: So,

1:23:34 Ricardo Lopes: do you think that there are instances where indoctrination might be necessary, and avoidable, or even good in terms of epistemic goods like uh true belief or knowledge?

1:23:51 Chris Ranalli: Yeah, it's a great question. Um, I deal with this a bit in the book, um, especially in the chapter on the ethics of indoctrinated belief. Um, So, because indoctrination involves epistemic uh disrespect, it, there will always be a presumption against indoctrination, but, yeah, as you're, as you were sort of hinting at, um, it won't always override. You know, the relevant considerations, so. I think that if a person is in a particularly. Noxious environment where there's just lots of false beliefs that are widely spread and endorsed and the The sort of sources of evidence are all extremely messy and are mostly propagating false views and misleading evidence, then if the most effective thing you can do as say a parent or a mentor or a teacher. IS to would be to try to protect the, you know, the child or the pupil or the student. You know, it could be different levels. Students can also be full-blown adults, of course, um, would be to do something to protect them, um, from acquiring. All these false positions and misleading evidence, right? Um. So, you know, imagine a scenario where. There's, let's say a. A cult community, right, and a and children are born and raised in this cult community and the cult has very. HAS, you know, definitely false positions and they kind of manufacture false evidence in favor of these false positions and they organize the community so that it's extremely difficult for outsiders to get in and for insiders to get out. Outside critical information is, you know, doesn't really make its way in. It's always screened so that it, or rewritten to be favorable. Um, SO that someone who grows up in this environment, you know, what they're taught as being true will just really seem true, right? It's corroborated by everyone they trust, um, you know, all the way down the hierarchy to corroboration by their peers, and it's just part of their way of life, right? But imagine there's maybe like a rogue. Um, PARENT or teacher in this community who is sort of fairly secretly. Um, PRESENTING critical information, you know, views and arguments that are critical of the cult group's core beliefs and You know, let's say that this, this person is indoctrinated. Let's imagine that that's the case. Let's imagine he's indoctrinating them according to the definition, that is, he gets them to believe these views. Um, HE leads them, he instructs them so that they ought to believe the views. And he also directs them to look, I know that in this community, you're going to find just about everyone who corroborates. The opposite, who will say the other, the critics are misleading or that they won't even, they'll say, don't even consider the critics, right? It's too dangerous. Well, you know, I'm here to say that they're wrong. Well, imagine that this person is successful with some of the pupils, right? And they go on to be closed-minded with respect to their views they silently hold. They don't, you know, make it known to others that they hold them. Well, I think in this environment, it could actually be, uh, um, it's definitely epistemically beneficial trivially because they acquired true beliefs and are thus, you know, kind of ignoring or not considering any longer the false beliefs. Um, IT is still epistemically, um, well, there's still, it's still prima facie epistemically wrongful because it is in some sense still disrespectful, um, because, you know, learners need to be Able to make deep mistakes, even, right? And it would be disrespectful to kind of select the relevant epistemic values on behalf of the learners, um, rather than letting them discover that, discover what values they're going to prioritize for themselves. Um, BUT given how noxious their environment is, um, It might be all things considered better to still do this, um. Especially if what's part of the not considering. ESPECIALLY if what's part of the cult's beliefs are that the outsiders are like, you know, not just wrong, like kind of factually wrong, but there are maybe, you know, if it's, if it's part of it that the critics are evil and in the service of injustice and, and that you would be tarnished forever by so much as considering their position seriously and associating with them on any level, then You know, obviously teaching the contrary to this, uh, could be quite beneficial for people who managed to make their way out, right? Um, SO, So yeah, so I sort of think that there, there can, you know, we can imagine, we can construct cases where indoctrination is all things considered better than the alternatives, but there's still a presumption against it. Mhm.

1:29:55 Ricardo Lopes: So let me just ask you one last question then. Can indoctrination be countered and should it be countered?

1:30:06 Chris Ranalli: Yeah, um, I think it should be, um, countered, of course, and I mean, you know, it's a prediction of my own theory that it ought to be because if it fundamentally involves Um, epistemic disrespect, that is disrespect, uh, towards the learner in their capacity as an epistemic agent or, you know, someone who wants to thrive as an intellectual being. Yeah, then, then that suggests that we ought to try to counter indoctrination, you know, where, when we really find it. Um, OK, so, part of the worry I had though in the book is that even though this follows on from my own views, given how Given that The way the term indoctrination tends to get used in the public environment is so propaganda, and even when it's not propaganda, it's at least kind of Somewhat inflammatory, right? So it's kind of. It's enlisted to. Not just describe a particular kind of teaching, but to evaluate it, right? Um, SO, It, it'll be difficult to identify the cases to work on, right? To kind of like, oh, let's look into this and Um, see what, what can be done. I think what you can do on a kind of sys system level is to think about the aims of education and to think about how the aims of education can be supported, but also hampered by the person's social environment. So this means you won't necessarily have A very, you know, it kind of recommends not a very top down. Uh, PROCEDURE, but more of a bottom-up procedure because it might be that. Thinking about the school case, you know, for a moment. Elementary schools placed in environments where. There's lots of access to information. Maybe they're in university towns, there's well-funded public libraries. People, parents tend to be on the Upper ends of the socioeconomic scale, you know, they're having white collar jobs, they're lawyers, pro, you know. Work, maybe they work at a university, they're, they're dentists, they're doctors, they're, you know, uh, software engineers, things like this. Um Those tend to correlate with people that, you know, value education, have higher, have higher education credentials. Maybe they read, they expose their children to art and museums and books and, and so on and so forth, right? So, they go on trips. Um, SO, in these sorts of environments, I think, Yeah, you don't have to worry about indoctrination so much because even if it were occurring at the sort of school level, there's kind of like enough scaffolding for anti-indoctrination in their social epistemic environment as it is. Um, WHEREAS if you go into a community which lacks this kind of these social epistemic resources. It, you have to, you have to kind of like pack more into the educational system, I think, so that it will be. So the educational system will will be. TAILORED more to the development of the peoples as thinkers, as, um, you know, intellectually, um, humble, as critical, as open-minded, um, as intellectually thorough, as sensitive to the, sensitive to the evidence, um, sensitive to reasons and argumentation, and so on and so forth. So, Um, In that case, you, you have to think more about. The aims of education is not being towards knowledge and truth per se, but more towards. The development of the students as thinkers. Um, WHERE that is the prime directive, as it were, um. Whereas um in other environments, I don't think you have to give that as much attention because. Their, their, their independent social epistemic environment can kind of do the anti-indoctrinory work where the school system fails to prioritize that. So, yeah, I mean, my broad recommendation then is something like a bottom-up approach where that means you have to look at particular school systems, particular educational environments, and what the What the values and. Social resources are in those communities, right? Um, SO there's not like a one size fits all, um, directive here, right? It's actually much more messy and it'll involve Um, yeah, it'll, it'll involve the educational system as much as the parents, the teachers, other people in the community, and so on, right? Yeah.

1:35:46 Ricardo Lopes: Great. So, the book is again the philosophy of indoctrination, epistemology, ethics and Politics. There it is, the physical, a physical copy. So, Doctor Ralli, thank you so much for taking the time to come on the show. Would you just like to tell people where they can find your work on the internet?

1:36:06 Chris Ranalli: Yeah, absolutely. Um, THANK you so much, Ricardo. This has been wonderful. I'm happy to Have some broadcasting for this book. Um, SO yeah, you can find this book, um, at Routledge, that's the publisher website. You can also find it in select bookstores, of course, also on Amazon. Um, YOU can download the first chapter for free on my, on my own website so that if you see whether or not you're interested, Um, you can usually find me just by Googling my, my, my name, which is Chris or Christopher Rinalli, um. And then go to my academic website, and there you can also find some of the other stuff that I'm working on. Um, AND I also have a free Piece on indoctrination with 1000 word philosophy, so it's only 1000 words, which is very, very short, and this is like a kind of a helpful introduction, um, also for educators on uh what indoctrination is and what um is prospectively wrong with it. So you can also check that out out, check that out at 1000 word philosophy.com. Um, YEAH, and thank you so much. Uh, I hope listeners, uh, got something or learned something, uh, from this, and, um, interested to hear what, yeah, all of you think, think about these views, where I go right, where I go wrong. I'm sure I go wrong in a lot of places. Um, YEAH, so that's it for me. Thank you so much. Yeah,

1:37:41 Ricardo Lopes: thank you so much. Thank you for taking the time to come on the show, and it's been a pleasure to talk with you.

1:37:46 Chris Ranalli: Yeah, and you too. Thank you so much.

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