College Sex - Philosophy for Everyone: Philosophers With Benefits (25 page)

move, or using a moan-to-pleasure classification method that seems obvious to
you
. Meanwhile, you’re wondering, with disappointment, why your partner just doesn’t get it. For the Murphy Browns of the world, a fully satisfying sex life didn’t just happen. They have, among other things, gained knowledge and wisdom about getting and sending the right messages.

Epistemology Helps You Be More You (… in bed)

For anything you want, you need justified beliefs to help you succeed in getting it. One of the things you should want most is to maximize your autonomy.You are, at your best, a self-directing person with unique pref- erences, values, and projects. To be autonomous is to have your integrity in these terms cultivated and protected, so that you have the power to promote your special goals and aims.

Your autonomy is impaired when you base your actions on problem- atic or false information, since you are blocked from engaging in informed self-direction. If someone lies to you about having been HIV tested, or about loving you, she steals your autonomy: you might make commit- ments and engage in acts that you never would if you were in possession of the truth.
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You also deprive yourself of autonomy when you deprive yourself of knowledge. You’re most likely to have a rewarding sex life (which spills over into a rewarding life in general) if you learn about your distinct sexual preferences, projects, goals, and aims, so that you can increase your autonomous ability to promote them.

Our thinking ranges from low-level (basic and specific) to high-level (complex and wide ranging).
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Justified beliefs at any level can be benefi- cial. For instance, “An uninformed pre-orgasmic” asks Alice a pretty low-level question, limited to a basic factual issue:

I was wondering if it were possible for a man to tell if a woman has had an orgasm. If so, how noticeable is it to a man and is there a substantial amount of fluid involved in a woman’s orgasm?
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Getting an answer does give her more to work with in making autono- mous decisions. However, she – and you – can gain knowledge at increas- ingly high levels of complexity and magnitude. Each upward step expands your awareness and gives you more power to guide your life through

informed choice. For instance, you could seek (and gain) justified beliefs in response to each of the following, increasingly high-level, questions:

• Why is “an uninformed pre-orgasmic” person asking this question? Is she wondering how easily she can get away with faking an orgasm?
  

• Why would a young woman
  want
  to know how to fake an orgasm?
  

• What harm might come to a woman from setting up her sexual life in a way like this?
  

• What cultural influences might shape and restrict people’s approaches to sex?
  

• How might my own culture have influenced my approach to sex?
  

• How might I change in response to what I’ve learned about all of this?
  

Justified beliefs at higher levels are like increasingly powerful intellectual cli- maxes, and they’re a good way to reach better climaxes elsewhere: they help you discover your best desires, get rid of misconceptions and impediments, and learn to get what you want in the most meaningful and profound ways.

How To Get Better Sex From Epistemologists

Knowledge, justified belief, and epistemic effort are good for you: not just good for your knowledge base, but good for
you
, including the sexual you. My research project is to find ways to expand people’s ability to evaluate and question themselves epistemically, take on an active, self- directed role, and become conscious authors of their epistemic selves. The authority I invoke as an epistemologist comes from our disciplinary expertise on knowledge and justification, not our more esoteric scholarly disputes.We have determined particularly plausible distinctions, concep- tual frameworks, definitions, views, and intuitions. These include not only ideas within our broad shared knowledge base, on which we’ve been focusing, but also particular epistemologists’ valuable and effective works and innovations. It’s a crying shame that the great insights of those whose expertise is on thinking and knowledge almost never directly reach the vast majority of thinkers and knowers. Let’s go through some helpful work from a few of them. I think these are especially relevant to thinking about sexual matters, and I’ll give examples to illustrate.

Hilary Kornblith’s work on rationalization is a good instance of a useful epistemological view.
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One ought first to accumulate evidence and reasons

and think about them, and then form an appropriate belief. One rational- izes, on Kornblith’s account, when he starts with a belief and produces reasons that would support it. Take Todd, who needs, psychologically, to believe he’s good in bed. He sincerely thinks he’s looking at all the evidence and reasonably deciding what it indicates.Without even realizing it, though, he starts off believing he’s good in bed, and then he picks and chooses the evidence and reasons substantiating that belief. He thinks, “She’d say some- thing if she weren’t enjoying it,” and selectively focuses on times partners have complimented his performance. An especially insidious factor is that Todd gets the illusion of being a responsible thinker, because he does reflect on reasons – just not with the right motivation.

Once Kornblith gives us a name and description for this phenomenon, we realize it makes a lot of sense of our experiences. This can provide insight into when and why it happens, and what makes it hard to recog- nize rationalization happening in oneself.We end up with more resources to notice and correct for rationalizing in ourselves and others.

Another helpful concept is what Jennifer Church calls “taking it to heart.”
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Knowledge goes beyond merely possessing true information and having a surface ability to “regurgitate,” she says: truly known beliefs involve more depth of understanding.

Here’s an illustration. In the
New Yorker
article “Red Sex, Blue Sex,” Margaret Talbot explores evangelical Christians’ lack of dismay at Sarah Palin’s daughter Bristol’s teenage unwed pregnancy. Talbot reports that such pregnancies are not at all unusual among evangelicals. She cites stud- ies finding that although 74 percent of white evangelical adolescents say they believe in abstaining from sex before marriage (as compared to half of mainline Protestants and 25 percent of Jews), they are more sexually active than Mormons, mainline Protestants, and Jews. She adds, “On average, white evangelical Protestants make their ‘sexual debut’ – to use the festive term of social-science researchers – shortly after turning sixteen. Among major religious groups, only black Protestants begin having sex earlier.”
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Such teens might affirm a belief in abstinence, and even take pledges of abstinence, yet the belief somehow doesn’t really sink in. This illustrates Church’s contention that a person might acknowledge a proposition as true, build theories and plans around it – and yet not take it to heart.

Here’s another example. Jane accepts, when she thinks about it, that it’s wrong to invoke a double standard for men and women in using labels like “slutty,” but privately she continues to hold on to the double standard. A belief taken to heart guides one’s automatic thoughts, feelings, and actions, whereas a belief not taken to heart seems more like “a mere phrase

on a page or in someone’s mouth, the implications of which must be worked out deliberately and laboriously.”
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In her unguarded moments, Jane says her friend Li Mai “sleeps around” and looks “easy” to men, whereas in her more mindful and careful moments she can – not quite consciously – work out and say what follows from the less prejudiced view.

Church holds that we can affect what we take to heart by making certain choices, so we are responsible for our deeply held commitments. Jane could change the way she thinks about more promiscuous women: she could choose a metaphor of “adventurers” rather than “tramps,” remind herself to think of a sexually active male friend whenever she catches herself using the double standard, and work to associate images invoking empowerment, choice, and independence with such women.

Recognizing Church’s distinction allows us to look at our own and others’ beliefs in terms of a scale from accepted only on the surface to deeply taken to heart. This invites us to explore implications and respon- sibilities, and it provides us with a tool for doing so.

Although we should try to scrutinize and evaluate certain of our deeply rooted commitments, we should recognize that in most cases it’s advan- tageous to have beliefs so firmly entrenched and automatic that we don’t have to make a conscious effort to form other beliefs on their basis. Kent Bach develops this notion when he talks about “jumping to conclusions”

– unconsciously, automatically drawing inferences from beliefs and expe- riences. If we always had to stop and think through beliefs like whether the couch would be a soft place to make out, we couldn’t function. To make beliefs justified, though, the default automatic processes must rec- ognize and respond to the real situation, not continue on “autopilot” when that’s inappropriate.
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Antoine and Erika have made love every Saturday during the two years they’ve been dating. They no longer have to even mention it – Saturday night is a ritual both cherish. One Saturday, however, they have a huge argument, and then Erika is uncharacteristically withdrawn and even somewhat hostile, and is avoiding casual physical contact with Antoine. Normally, there’s no reason Antoine should go through a step-by-step set of inferences to form the belief that Erika is willing and eager to make love on a Saturday – it’s epistemically okay for him to assume it, and consciously going through a reasoning process would just waste his time and mental resources. Tonight, though, he should notice that there’s a relevant difference in the situation, and his normal default reasoning should be interrupted. Not having taken into account the different fac- tors in the situation, Antoine jumps straight into foreplay at bedtime,

blithely assuming Erika is as willing and eager as always. Bach contends that we’re justified in making snap judgments and automatic inferences, but only if we’re reliable enough at detecting exceptions.

Bach himself isn’t discussing how his insights might be used to help people improve their reasoning, but my approach would explore such a use. I advocate finding opportunities to formulate epistemic guidance from epistemological research even when that was not the epistemolo- gist’s original intention – as I will do with the next view, as well.

Richard Foley argues that it’s epistemically best for one to be inter- nally consistent. We should “have beliefs that are to our own deep satis- faction – ones that do not merely satisfy us in a superficial way but would do so even with the deepest reflection.”
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If one could really examine herself and apply her own intellectual standards to her thinking – with- out allowing herself to rationalize or hide anything – the rational beliefs would be those she wouldn’t criticize herself for having. Antoine ought to believe as he would if he could step back and see that he is unintention- ally failing to live up to his normal standards of belief formation.

Using Foley’s model, we can recognize that there’s a core set of episte- mological principles within each of us, whether we realize it or not, and that we are at our most rational when we believe consistently with those principles. Taking this idea further, we can try to figure out how this can be helpful, rather than just descriptive. As with most epistemic self- examination and improvement, it might be hard to identify those princi- ples and decide whether you’re meeting them, but it’s worth trying, to the best of your ability.

Leslie Stevenson pursues this concept quite explicitly, arguing that we have a responsibility to try to increase our awareness of the features that might make our beliefs more or less justified, and to at least be able, in principle, to articulate the basis of a belief.
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He proposes that epistemi- cally responsible people use the method philosophers call “wide reflec- tive equilibrium.” This is a state of balance or coherence among a set of beliefs, arrived at by deliberately making adjustments among one’s gen- eral principles and particular judgments. Ideally, our beliefs about par- ticular cases or in particular situations match our general principles.With wide reflective equilibrium we should reflectively increase this matching, or balance, using all of our information and reasoning strength.

Consider the following example. Randy is an evangelical college stu- dent who considers himself a believer in abstinence before marriage. If asked, he would affirm this view, and criticize those who believe other- wise. He would draw support from the views of his religion, family, and

community. However, Randy, like so many evangelical young men, has impregnated his girlfriend. He formed beliefs along the way contrary to his general principle, as when he decided to have intercourse with his girlfriend. Randy, like Jane and Antoine, has beliefs and principles in a state of disequilibrium; they all have beliefs in “tension” with one another

– beliefs that are conflicting or inconsistent.

To increase equilibrium, the first step is to try to detect tensions in your belief system. This involves, first and foremost, a willingness to accept responsibility for your beliefs and principles, and work toward changing them. To detect tensions, you must learn about yourself and your belief system.You can do this by introspection, observation of your actions, perhaps asking others for their observations and insights, and – I hope – using some epistemological concepts and ideas.

Once you detect what seems to be a tension, you have several options (I’ll italicize them for ease of use). First, I suppose, you could
do nothing
. However, ignoring the problem doesn’t often make things better: it just reduces the likelihood of getting what you want and preserving your own and others’ autonomy.