Inferring and Explaining

4 InferrIng and exPlaInIng central insight is that there is a whole other story to be told in terms of Connie’s nurture. All her attempts to discover the truth, to fnd evi- dence for what is true, are colored by who she is, and that is both a help and a hindrance. We don’t just see and hear the world; we learn to see and hear the world. We are endowed with a remarkably powerful central nervous systemby natural selection (or perhaps as a gif fromGod). We all have this simply by virtue of being human beings. But we are also the product of our back- grounds, our learning, our experiences, and our prejudices. It’s a sad fact but still a fact, I think, that men and women, blacks and whites, and young and old are doomed to think in somewhat diferent ways. How can there be a truth about whether climate change is real or whether uni- versal health care is a wise policy when you and I are fated to see things diferently because of our diferences in age, ethnicity, and gender—to say nothing of political afliations and religious convictions? Tough once an enthusiastic proponent, I’ve come to reject this relativistic view for two rea- sons. Rorty tells his nurture story persuasively but sort of forgets about the nature story. Con- nie’s central nervous system isn’t just there; it’s there for a reason. Its whole purpose is to pro- vide her with data about that world out there. And human central nervous systems seem to be doing their jobs pretty darnwell. It’s not just that we have survived as a species but that we have survived so successfully that we have become the only species capable of altering the entire world. So, yes, we have a problemwith cultural relativ- ism, and it is a problemwe will be forced to deal with for the remainder of this book. But we also have exquisitely designed physical apparatus that allow us to form pictures of the world out there (perhaps as it really is). All the very abstract academic stuf also has a very unfortunate spillover. It is sometimes used as a discussion stopper, even among academics themselves. If the only people I can talk with, productively disagree with, and maybe even reason with to some shared view are exactly like me, the world is going to be a pretty lonely place. Connie is certainly a product of who she is. Her age, sex, race, and socioeconomic class inevitably infuence what she sees and what she thinks about. I take that as a given. But what she’s thinking about is not just “in her head,” even if her sentences, beliefs, and theo- ries are. You and I can think about her theory, make judgments about its cogency, and ofen- times come to agreement about all this, regard- less of the countless diferences in who we are, how and when we were born, and our unique social and educational backgrounds. Since there is a world “out there” with boyfriends, best friends, and osculation (even if those descrip- tions are the products of our shared culture), I think it makes perfectly good sense to ask what really happened when he was gone that half hour or more. And that’s really just another way of asking whether her theory is true. Truth and the Popular Culture: The Need to Respect Diferences You may well ask what all the abstract philoso- phy, social science, and evolutionary biology has to do with our concerns in this book. Well, I’ve already given you one reason for including it. Te problem of cultural expectations and biases is real and infects evidence evaluation down to