[Auto-generated transcript. Edits may have been applied for clarity.] Georgie Gardiner, thank you very much for speaking with me. Oh, thank you so much for hosting.
I'm good to be here. So the conversation that we're having today is all about believing women.
And I think by now, the whole Believe Women campaign is pretty familiar to most people, insofar as what most people understand it as some kind of,
you know, an exhortation, you know, an imperative to receive accusations about sexual abuse or other abuse accusations in a particular way.
Um, you know, vis a vis with belief, actually believe women when they make these accusations.
Um, and in a way, I kind of saw it as a branch, you know, an offshoot of the MeToo campaign.
But I think it more or less has, you know, a life of its own at this point, you know, as a movement and as a demand.
And it gains a lot of traction in recent years.
At the same time, I think people still have quite a lot of questions about what it means to believe women, About what exactly this is asking us to do,
and whether there are good reasons to just believe on a person's say so, or to just believe as a default stance.
And also, you know how the demand to believe women interacts with people's ideas about what is just to the accused person.
And so I think there's a lot of, you know, kind of confusion that a lot of people feel about this, that they don't know quite how to articulate.
Um, and that's the reason I wanted to speak to you about it,
because you have written a lot about doubt and disbelief, particularly in the context of what you call she said.
He said rape accusations, um, and particularly about unjustified doubt and disbelief and what causes that?
So I want to speak all about these things or for you to speak about these things.
But I wondered, first of all, if you could say a bit about she said he said rape accusations.
And what defines those things? Yeah. Great. Thank you so much.
So, um, so now I call them she said. He said rape accusations.
Even though the kind of the hackneyed expression, the more common expression is he said, she said.
And that sort of rolls off the tongue. It's such a common expression. And we'll come back to why I change up that order.
But as she said, he said accusation is a case of a rape accusation against somebody, and then they deny it.
And there's no other significant evidence, no other evidence that would really kind of have a mark on it.
Like a witness, a recording or some other kind of, um, long string of other accusations or something like that.
Some other significant evidence. I say significant because there might be other evidence, but it's pretty paltry.
So it might be like, and I, I sort of talk about why this is poetry,
why this actually doesn't have so much bearing on whether we should believe the accusation that maybe she was she seemed fine the next day,
like she or she did well at school that semester, or that she was friendly to him afterwards.
So it's really just that the accusation and the denial, with no other significant evidence and no other case specific evidence.
So evidence specifically about that case.
And the reason I want to make that distinction is I think there is significant evidence that bears on these cases.
But it's general evidence, like generally speaking, are accusations true?
Generally speaking, how common is a rape of that kind of mode, like on on a college campus between people who are dating, for example?
That's general evidence about the world, not about the specific case.
So can we talk about that claim that the general evidence claim, because you say exactly this in one of your papers,
you make this claim that strikes me as quite significant that when we have a she said, he said type accusation.
So it's testimony, it's conflicting testimony, and there isn't any other evidence outside of the testimony or what you would call general evidence.
You say, as a matter of probabilities, just kind of background probabilities.
Most likely as soon as you have that accusation, there's reason to think that it's true.
More likely than not that it's true.
And even though it's one person's word against another is people say, and there's no other kind of corroborating evidence.
So could you take us through that thinking? You know that claim? Sure.
Yeah. And so what happens in these kinds of cases?
These she said, he said cases is that often met with like a kind of doubt, suspicion or what's seen as a kind of what.
Um, well, is it an effective, effective, effective ism means you say 50 over 50 either way, 50 over 50.
We don't know what happened. And that's seen as like the wise and careful response, the cautious response.
So you might say, well, there's the accusation, but where's her evidence. Right. And as an epistemology, I was so struck.
So epistemology is the study of evidence. Knowledge. Belief.
Reasoning. Testimony. Doubt. I was struck when people would say, where's her evidence?
Because usually we take testimony to be evidence of the claim.
We say, well, we don't have any evidence.
Well, if she said it happened, usually if I say I had cereal for breakfast, that's evidence I had for breakfast.
So why are some people so withholding, so doubtful in these cases?
So I called them, she said.
He said to really emphasise that the accusation comes first and that's really important systemically and calling them, he said,
she said kind of hides the fact that the accusation comes first, but the accusation comes first because it bears on incentives.
Who has the incentive to speak? So for people who are, um, who haven't been rape victims, like most of them,
they have no incentive to speak because they have no, no sort of fact to deliver.
Um, and then where people are rape victims, the strong incentives actually do not speak at all.
So the incentives there are often just silence rather than speech, because the costs of accusations of speaking are so high.
So it's disruptive to, you know, within families, if it's a, um, a friend of the family or an immediate family member,
or it could be disruptive to one's Profession or one's university environment.
Because again, we're talking about acquaintance rape, not these stranger rapes.
Or it's like, well, some rape occurred, but we don't even know who it is. If it's an accusation and denial, then then no one to each other.
So accusations can be very costly. Um, and most for this reason, most acquaintance rapes are not reported.
So again, just thinking about kind of bearing on probabilities, the idea is that incentives goes to probabilities.
Um, they're just unless you have some other understanding of what's going on or the reason to think so,
there isn't a good reason for people to bring an accusation that isn't true,
whereas there is a good reason for somebody to deny an accusation which is true.
And you think that bears on the probability question, right? Yeah, exactly.
So the incentives are feeding into these base rates and then also feeding into what we should make of individual cases, base rates.
This means general case. What tends to happen is the social statistics.
Can I would things stand differently if I say we knew something about the accuser.
Um, that made it seem different. For instance, this is a person who had brought spurious accusations, you know,
accusations that were later found out to be spurious in the past, for instance.
Yes, that kind of thing can then make it so that it's not merely, as she said, he's a case, but now has significant other evidence.
Yeah. Um, and those cases are relatively rare, and we can talk about what the statistics look like or false accusations.
And when we have false accusations, what do they look like? Because the string of false accusations is one of the hallmarks of a false accusation.
And in fact, that means if it's somebody who hasn't really made an accusation before,
that's evidence that it's not one of the things that patterns after a false accusation.
So it doesn't resemble a false accusation because false accusations have a certain pattern, which I'll also sketch.
So yeah. So then with the incentives for the denier, the person who's accused their incentive actually is to to usually not say anything at all.
Just keep it quiet. Um, but where they do have an incentive to speak, normally it's to deny.
And that's partly so they can at least retain a kind of, um, a veneer.
So their immediate family, their mom, their boss can just sort of have this plausible deniability of, of the veneer of carrying on with lives.
And then one can all so there's these incentives to, to lie.
In that case, we tend to focus on incentives for the accuser to lie.
But actually the the denier has incentives to lie in almost every case.
And they can always, of course, come clean later if necessary. So that's the incentives question then base rates.
And this relates now to with what false accusations look like. But we have the spectre of false accusations.
It looms so large in the public imagination. People bring up false accusations, the possibility of false accusations all the time.
Right. It has a lot of kind of prominence in the imagination, I guess.
It certainly does. And that salience, which is salience, is kind of it comes easily to attention.
It's something salient to us. Um, is epistemic pernicious.
By which I mean it's not just kind of a fact about our psychology.
It actually has these effects where it's so prominent in our mind that it's what causes us to doubt, and sometimes, in fact,
can even make it so that, you know, maybe people even should doubt because we have this kind of society infected by doubt.
And if everybody's doubting, it's kind of like, is it irrational then to to believe?
And we can talk a little bit more about that.
But the idea is that this widespread doubt can actually kind of be a really bad thing, because it means that other people should doubt see.
But it's important in you're saying this, the reason why you're saying this is because you're,
you know, as kind of an important background premise is false accusations, as a matter of fact, are actually very rare, in which case,
to be constantly thinking about the possibility of a false accusation, um, leads us astray because it doesn't reflect reality.
Right, exactly. It's like we have this kind of giant conspiracy theory that we've all kind of sort of bought into.
And every time we bring up the spectre of false accusations, we're kind of further solidifying this, this conspiracy theory,
when actually there's this really different, powerful thing we could do,
which is often just ignore the possibility because it's irrelevantly far fetched.
Can we speak more about that? Because, um,
this idea of something being irrelevantly farfetched comes a lot into your explanations of what you call undue doubt and disproportionate doubt.
So it's kind of how our thinking patterns get manipulated such that the possibility that something isn't true or,
you know, a reason to doubt something just gets a lot more airtime than it really should.
Um, and which isn't warranted. And you call this doubt mongering. So, you know, there are people who are who are doubt mongers.
Um, could you say about what does doubt mongering look like then how can a person doubt monger.
Yeah for sure, for sure. So, um, are bringing up the spectre of false accusations is one of those methods.
And maybe I would just also just say back to the base rates thing. So I went through these like large studies.
A lot of them are actually in Britain of accusations that were reported to the police often were the ones.
And there was this question where the ones that were deemed false and then the ones that were deemed true,
what do those ones that were deemed false look like? And there weren't many of them?
Um, overall, they're sort of deemed true by the police, but they tend to have a pattern,
and it tends to be most of them were things like teenagers who had missed a curfew, who needed an excuse.
And so they said that it was kind of this stereotype of in a dark alley on a bed of broken glass with weapons, violence, a stranger.
They were usually almost always actually reported by a third party.
Usually the parents were usually dropped within a day or two.
That's when we when we have accusations that are there's not even accusations because they're not accusing any particular person.
They're claims. Um, that's what false rape claims normally look like.
The other pattern that comes up is people with a string of false accusations accusing people like police wardens, okay, for financial gains.
So people that work for the state, work for the government. Um, that's another pattern.
So people who are, for example, in institutions like prisons making accusations against the wardens in a string of false accusations.
Um, whereas so those things pattern nothing like acquaintance rape claims of these.
She said he's her case. So if you see an accusation like a typical she said he's a case.
It really resembles nothing like a false. What tends to be the false accusations. So I think that's worth worth emphasising.
But these mechanisms of doubt mongering to those are few.
So doubt mongering is yeah this kind of seeding doubt.
This is causing people to have undue doubt or disproportionate doubt.
What do I mean by disproportionate? Well,
disproportionate to the total available evidence and then disproportionate to other kinds of beliefs that we would
have like other claims like what are my claim about what I had for breakfast or even other kinds of accusations?
Right. So the idea is that often, or most of the time when somebody just tells you something happened to them, um,
you rely on their testimony without really thinking anything about it to form a belief that that, in fact, is true.
Um, but doubt mongering kind of changes this when it comes to sexual assault allegations.
Yeah. Where suddenly the salience, the the possibility that they are speaking falsely, something becomes really salient to us.
It's like, why is that? So there's a few mechanisms. So one is importing, um, legal standards of proof where they're really not warranted.
Right. So this comes this is kind of strikingly common.
And I think it's really nicely exemplified by a student of mine who, in a classroom in advanced epistemology,
classrooms are really getting into this, like what are the costs of belief in different contexts?
And they had, you know, we really I spent a bit of a good bit of time looking at when is a belief,
what kinds of costs are relevant that might cause it, that you should be more withholding because the stakes are so high?
And so it sort of came up. This is an America. So it's like, well, what if there was an accusation against somebody in your frat?
These communities are sort of undergrad men.
Yeah. And the student, very bright student was like, well, I would withhold.
I was like, oh, why is that? He's like, well, he could go to prison. I was like, but you're not sending him to prison?
Yeah, right. Exactly. Your beliefs weren't sent him to prison. You're not a juror.
In fact, you couldn't be a juror. He's in your friend. And so this person.
That's such a good answer. They like we. He had imaginatively projected himself into the role of the juror.
Right. And therefore had this, like, high stakes.
But it's really not high stakes, this idea that we need to hear all the evidence or else we should have this effective stance,
this withholding, this suspension is inevitably going to lead to doubting rape accusations.
Right. And in the in the case of other again, because it's kind of comparative. Right.
That's that's really important here when we discuss other accusations about other wrongs that people have done.
We don't immediately start saying, but innocent until proven guilty.
But, you know, I must reserve judgement until I see a full trial and, you know, all more evidence coming out and this sort of thing.
And it's that asymmetry that is really quite distinctive. It is.
Yeah. And it's like if I sort of would, would if I withheld on believing any science unless I personally read all the evidence.
Right, I would inevitably not believe any science because I'm not going to read all the evidence.
And so and so similarly, it's kind of like if I'm going to withhold unless I hear all the evidence about any rape accusation.
Well, inevitably I'm just going to doubt them all. And I guess what's important here is we're talking about informal conversational contexts.
So we're not talking about, you know, if you're the juror, of course, if you're the juror, juror, you do want to hear all the evidence,
you know, and you want to sift through it and be extremely analytical and not rely on, you know, probabilities and that sort of thing.
But I think what's interesting here is, you know, these sort of legalistic standards, people start throwing them around in informal conversations.
You know, in, in context in which they ordinarily would never say things like that.
Right. That's what always strikes me about suddenly hearing something like, you know, but, you know, beyond reasonable doubt.
And I don't think you will. Hang on. When have you ever said beyond reasonable doubt?
You know, if somebody came to you and said, you know, this happened to me today. Yeah.
And I think part of the mechanism causing this is we want to think.
So I so this very point I mentioned to this very astute philosopher, brilliant, um, you know, feminist.
And they said, well, I think it's because the usual context is the courtroom.
And I was so struck because it's really not like the courtroom sees really very little of all of this.
Yeah, right. Most rapes go unreported. Um, Most victims would never kind of see their day in court.
Most rape claims actually not even accusations because the person is not named.
It's just a friend saying, oh yes, I was, you know, years ago, blah blah blah and offering very few details.
Most, most discussion about rape, rape from rape victims is not an accusation.
They're not looking for any particular consequences for the victim. They're looking for something like emotional support or bonding socially.
And so then when we import this idea that this person could now go to prison, unless you take seriously, it's this,
it's this kind of alchemy of thought where really most, most, most victims are when they're talking about rape.
It's it's much more informal. They're not naming anybody, they're not identifying anybody.
And yet then we have these kind of like this brilliant philosopher just mentioned saying,
well, the usual context of, of talking about rape or rape accusations is a courtroom.
And it's really just that's the very rare case. Um, back to the doubt mongering idea.
And, you know, the mechanisms, I guess, of doubt mongering, mongering. Sorry.
Um, you use a really nice example in one of your papers where you talk about a birdwatcher.
Um, and I just. I just found this kind of, like, very illuminating, um, where you say, well, imagine that you're a bird watcher.
And she she sees what looks like a robin and then forms the belief.
Well, that must be a robin. And then you're trying to explain what that mongering looks like, and you say, well,
somebody could come along and give her any number of possibilities like error, what you call error possibilities.
Um, that would explain why, despite the fact that she saw what looked identical to a Robin, it wasn't a Robin.
Maybe it was, you know, a chaffinch in disguise. And maybe she had been slipped some hallucinogenic drugs without her knowledge.
And then people tried to kind of manipulate her into doubting by really underscoring these error possibilities and saying,
well, you can't eliminate them. You can't you can't disprove that any of these things might have happened.
Hence, you can't really know that you see a Robin and you give a really nice response to that.
Yeah, yeah. Great. So I draw a lot on this kind of idea of if a relevant alternative theory, which I won't go into in much detail,
but the idea is if there's a claim, a belief like that's a robin in the bush or, um, this, this, this person raped.
Yeah. This, this, this person. Um, that's the claim.
And then there's a bunch of ways that that could be false. So it could be like, well, it's not a Robin.
It's, it's a particularly bright chaffinch or it's not a Robin, it's a robot.
Right. Robin. The bird is conspiracy. There are no birds. Yeah.
And the idea is that some of those might be relevant, that our evidence needs to rule them out.
And some of them are irrelevantly farfetched. It's just absurd. Like, oh, yeah, you were slipped a hallucinogenic drug or.
Oh, this just is a robot, Robin. That's. That just looks exactly like a normal Robin.
And and one part of this kind of this epistemology of rape accusations that I really emphasise using this
theory is that there will always be always be error possibilities that aren't eliminated by your evidence.
That's just an inevitable fact about, um, how evidence works.
Our evidence is never fully, completely, 100% conclusive.
There's always remaining error possibilities that aren't eliminated by the evidence that aren't ruled out by the evidence.
The thing is, often that kind of irrelevantly farfetched. So the idea of a robot, Robin, we just know to ignore it.
We kind of learn from other people which ones we ignore and which ones we don't ignore, and we just learn to ignore certain ones.
And once we really grasp that, there's always error possibilities that are eliminated.
The mere fact of error possibilities that are eliminated by our evidence is actually not a reason to doubt,
because we have to distinguish the ones that are relevant, that we have to rule out from the irrelevant ones.
And then what happens with the rape accusations is that all gets a bit squishy.
So one example is Bill Cosby. I say his name wrong sometimes Cosby or Cosby, but Bill Cosby.
I think we know who you mean. So 50 over 50 accusers had come forward over 50.
I mean, the evidence was astoundingly large. And his, um, co-star, I want to say her name.
I forgot her name. It might have been Phyllis O'Neal or something was like, hmm, he tried to buy NBC.
Somebody has a vested interest in him not buying NBC.
So she is so motivated to believe in his innocence that she kind of goes to this conspiracy theory about, like, um, keeping him down and kind of.
So we creatively go to these kinds of conspiracy theories.
And then what can happen is when you think of something like that, you have this aha moment, aha, I've solved the puzzle.
And so you have this what can feel really enjoyable, like solving an epistemic puzzle, like seeing how things fit together.
And the puzzle is find a way in which the person is innocent. That still explains all the facts that we have, right?
That's the puzzle. Yeah. And because there will always be a way to do that, right.
There's always going to be some like, well, there's a giant conspiracy or we're actually all hallucinating,
or you can get more and more farfetched to do that. There's a kind of Descartes idea that there's an evil demon controlling the world,
like The Matrix, which is an old film that maybe some of our younger.
I don't like the reference, but yes, there's always going to be a way of doing it.
And if we think of the way, then we have this aha aha moment, which is quite a nice feeling and usually means that we're on to something.
Usually if we have that epistemic emotion of are we onto something?
But here we it's misleading and it's misleading because we're too attached to one part of the thing that we're trying to make consistent,
which is in this case, Cosby's innocence. Right.
So in having the aha moment, in the nice feeling, you forget the fact that there's a matter of baseline probabilities.
You know, sometimes the simplest explanation is more likely the correct one.
It's still more likely than not that these women, many women accusing him across a a long time span,
are simply telling the truth as opposed to, you know, this very elaborate counter explanation being true.
It's like, yes, you came up with a, you know, a brilliant counter explanation. Now think about the likelihoods.
Yeah. And part of this is like the emotions of attachment, the emotions of not wanting our worldview upset.
And part of it is that we overestimate how weird, um, acquaintance rape is.
So we think of it as far fetched that one of our friends would have raped somebody.
It's not far fetched at all, but taking that on board is really disruptive to our lives.
And so the destructiveness of believing the prevalence of rape and then any specific rape accusation.
And so we can have these kinds of, again, these epistemic mechanisms where every sort of mode of acquaintance rape,
way of acquaintance rape might seem farfetched, like somebody has the freeze response or remains asleep during penetration, or sort of that.
Somebody who seems like a nice guy actually used force. They seem so far fetched to so many people, but they happen all the time.
And so I have these other kinds of examples, especially during the MeToo movement where people would post on, on Facebook these,
you know, beautiful testimonials where they would say things like, well, I believed that I would fight back.
I was confident I would fight back until it happened to me, somebody else underneath the same thing, like.
And so we we kind of have a lot of false beliefs, a lot of myths about how we think rape works,
how we think acquaintance rape works, both who who is committing rape and how and how are victims responding with.
There's a lot of mistakes about that. So that's part of what's also fuelling this doubt is that acquaintance rape seems implausible.
But it's really until, you know, a bit more. Yeah.
Um, I mean, so we're doing a lot of we're kind of piling on doubt, and this is kind of a doubt pile on, uh, and piling on doubt, doubt mongering.
Um, but I do also want to say a bit more and talk a bit more about my way of understanding doubt and where doubt comes from,
and maybe question whether there may be doubt that is legitimate for some reasons or, um, or in certain contexts.
So, for instance, you know, we mentioned the presumption of innocence before. And of course, in law there is a presumption of innocence.
And one of the mistakes people make is that, you know, they import this presumption of innocence into conversational contexts,
as if we're in a courtroom, we said, and they're not.
And there are standards of evidence that you have to prove, depending on what kind of court case it is.
But somebody might say, okay, well, in social life, um, it's not that there are no consequences for an accused person of general belief in his guilt.
In fact, there can be quite profound consequences if people typically, you know,
people on the whole believe on the strength of an accusation, especially a rape accusation, that this person is guilty.
And I do think that's where a lot of the anxiety comes from,
especially when we're then thinking about forming a belief in guilt on the basis of probabilities.
You know, generally speaking, accusations are true. Generally speaking.
You know, we shouldn't doubt, um, and yet we see what it can mean for the accused person.
Um, that belief is just kind of quite easily given, uh, in these contexts.
So I wonder what you think about that. You know, should there be any form of a presumption of innocence in social life?
Um, yeah. Yeah.
It's funny. I mean, I think this is another case where we're we're somewhat mistaken about the reality, um,
because I think we overestimate the costs of both our own individual beliefs, which I talked a bit about, but including just in informal contexts.
And then also even in some institutional cases, we tend to think of it as so readily springs to mind to the.
The college athlete who's had their career ruined, or the person who's now unemployed or.
Um, and actually those kinds of, um, costs, those kinds of consequences are actually quite rare.
So when we think about so there's a scholar, Nicole Barrera,
she did her PhD at Michigan and she looked at specifically these cases in American institutions.
He's called title nine cases. And her work suggests that actually these when people are accused, it's not particularly bad for them.
And in fact, it can be quite positive because they end up talking a lot to the deans and things like that.
So that's how sociology work, which I don't want to talk too much about.
But um, but that's kind of one context where she, where she's talking about how we overestimate the costs,
but also when we think about our individual lives,
I think we tend to think we would have these, you know, we would lose a friend and we would this person would get fired.
And that's because we have this just world hypothesis, this just world fallacy.
But we think of the world as a certain way where if somebody committed a rape.
So if we believe that they're in a, that they that they're guilty of this, then there would be all kinds of consequences.
Often not much happens really. So you're saying, actually we overestimate, you know, the stakes of belief, um,
especially social belief, if it when we're again deciding what should I believe?
These sorts of consequences don't depend on what I believe,
but also I'm kind of interested in maybe the more institutional type consequences where they do.
So if we are thinking of, you know, disciplinary hearings, you know, expulsions from college, if it does come to that.
And I completely take your point, that most often it doesn't, um, or even, you know, kind of something which I think is,
is maybe, you know, not entirely rare, which is just boycotting, you know, informal boycotting, right?
You know, there's an accusation, um, the accusations become quite public, quite prominent.
Um, all of a sudden, somebody is not invited to conferences anymore. They're not invited to anything anymore.
Um, you know, their life isn't over. Right. That would be a gross overestimation.
Um, they still have their friends. They still have their family, too. But there's a kind of a professional social boycotting response.
So in that way, maybe. Perhaps not individual belief, but general belief has consequences.
I wonder what you think kind of evidence standards should be for things like this.
Yeah. Great. Great. So in these cases where there's maybe a disciplinary, um, in, for example, a college or an employment situation,
I think these can be kind of tricky because like I've emphasised that in these, she said he said cases probably the accusation is true.
And where there's a denial, probably it's false.
And um, and to ignore that is to commit the base and to not believe that is to commit the base rate fallacy of ignoring the base rates.
And then it gets a bit tricky because sort of like, well, now what if this is an institutional context.
And so in in the US under Obama, we have we have these things called title nine proceedings.
And that's where there's this formal accusation of sexual misconduct.
Um, it then goes through this hearing and again, a lot of accusations sort of don't get to the hearing stage.
But if they do get to the hearing stage, that's the title nine proceedings.
And Obama mandated that they're governed by what's called the preponderance of the evidence standard, which, roughly speaking,
means what we call it balance of evidence in the UK, more likely than not, which a lot of people understand is like 51%.
Yeah, right. Right. Um, and so, so that the Obama administration mandated that.
And I think this is really interesting because in she said, he said cases, just the accusation and the denial will, I argue, exceed that.
But in that case, it's just an accusation and a denial. And by definition, no other significant case specifically.
When you say, do you mean just the accusation that now I'll meet that threshold. Preponderance of the evidence.
More likely than not true. Yeah. Okay. Yeah, yeah.
And so that's a little bit uncomfortable because that means that somebody could be fired or suspended or expelled just on one person,
say one person say so. And I want to distinguish really clearly distinguish this from other cases where
like there's a string of accusations or something because that's not as she said, he said case.
Yes. And where you do have things like boycotts, usually it's something like that string of different accusers, but where it could, you know,
in sometimes in these title nine cases and I think she said,
he said cases are more rare than we they sort of loom large in the public imagination, but actually quite rare.
Usually there's other evidence, but but I think this is a bit uncomfortable because it's important to be living in
a kind of liberal society where we can't simply be fired because of one person,
say so, especially because of the nature of testimonial evidence, where, for example, if we distinguish between easy to fake and hard to fake.
Now this is different from is it likely to be true? Right. Because I argue at length that accusations are probably true.
They're usually true. There's very few incentives to lie. But now we can look at some other epistemic questions about it, like is it easy to fake?
And so some kinds of evidence are really hard to fake. Like a video evidence.
Very hard to fake. But testimony. I mean, especially one with kind of acting skills, one can say all sorts of things, right?
Um, and, and I kind of argue that in these if, if accusations and, uh,
are so likely to be true that they would that she said in these accusations and denials,
probably the accusation is true that actually in theory, you could just have a written accusation,
a written denial, not look at anything else and fire that person. Well, precisely. Yeah.
If the preponderance of the evidence is a standard. And that's weird. That's really weird.
Yeah, that kind of evidence would satisfy at least that legal standard of proof of preponderance of the evidence.
And so I think we have this real tension between some, some things that we want to kind of hold dear.
Right. These tensions between the epistemic claim that I argue for,
which is that accusations tend to be true, and it doesn't have to be that they're always true.
I'm not saying 100% just above 50%, right. That's easily, easily met.
And then a sort of feminist claims that if somebody is found guilty of something like rape on campus,
then that warrants considerable consequences, like being fired or expelled or suspended,
and then these kind of liberal claims that we don't want to sort of fire people just just based on one person,
say so without some other kind of evidence. So it seems important to me there that you're saying, yes,
it is still nevertheless true that if something as a she said he said case conflicting testimony, that's all we have.
It's still more likely than not that it's true.
Despite that, there is something problematic, maybe for other reasons, about allowing that evidence alone, even though it grounds grounds belief.
You know, it's a good reason for belief to redound in those kinds of consequences, because it's still the case that it's one person, say so.
It's still probably true, but, um, it's it's it's very little, um, on which to pin such massive consequences.
Yeah. I mean, it's funny because it's like it's a little and it's a lot.
It's a little and it's a lot because it's still because it's enough to ground the preponderance claim.
So epistemic it's a lot. But evidence has lots of different properties.
And so whether it makes it probably true is one property.
But then there are these other kinds of properties that maybe have important moral and social import, like can easily, you know,
could it easily be faked if somebody tried could be politically really important or
morally really important because we want to kind of live in a certain kind of society.
And then there's other social kinds of reasons that are things like, well, when people,
um, are sort of victims of false accusations, who tends to be the victims there,
and it tends to be, for example, gay men who have had sex with somebody who who kind of somebody who has a kind of internalised homophobia.
And so then Labour denies it, or it tends to be black people. For example, um, in this American college context, black athletes.
Right? So it's kind of these questions, these political questions about who we protecting as well, can kind of come into play there.
We've been speaking about fakery, um, you know, and kind of a concerns that people have about about faked testimony.
And I suppose that, you know, the common phrase that we have used and that other people use is false rape accusations.
Um, and a huge amount of doubt mongering, as we've said,
tries to amplify the possibility outside of of what is realistic, that the accusation is dishonest.
You know, that somebody is just outright lying. But I'm actually quite interested in a different kind of a doubt.
Um, I wonder whether some of the time when people raised doubts, they're actually not thinking about the possibility of a false rape accusation.
You know, kind of a knowingly dishonest accusation, but something more like a kind of an incorrect or a mistaken accusation so that the the
doubtful thought that they are forming is not she's lying or she's lying for financial gain,
but is something more like I'm not sure what she would call rape is what I would call rape or sexual assault or whatever else it is.
And this strikes me as something a bit different, um, maybe problematic in all sorts of ways,
but but with a very different character because it's more kind of evaluative. Right?
It's doubt about judgements that we are all making and whether we're making the same judgements.
Um, and it's also it also ties into kind of maybe deep seated disagreements about what counts as what.
So that before you've heard details and I think it's important maybe when you've heard details this changes things.
But before you hear details, if you just know that there is an accusation, it is an accusation of sexual.
There are all these questions that people might have which is like, well, what exactly happened?
And I think this is why people are interested in details, because deep down they might not want to say it,
but they're wondering whether what happened is what they would call an assault.
Yeah. These questions are like, among other things, these questions of categorisation. Yes.
Yeah. My brilliant student actually just wrote a PhD dissertation on exactly this question on about specifically rape accusations.
And when people kind of agree about some of the basic facts, then disagree about that.
That's what I'm really interested in because it doesn't suggest anyone is lying.
Which which I think is what you're saying is this is often the far fetched,
the irrelevantly, far fetched possibility that that doesn't need to be excluded.
You know, maybe they're lying. Maybe it's a mass conspiracy. This is something that strikes me as well.
It's not far fetched. We know we disagree about these things. I disagree about these things with my colleagues a lot of the time.
So yeah, I wonder if that does that make for a proportion of the doubt? Yeah.
Yeah. Good. So it's kind of funny, right?
Because if people have different conceptions of something like rape, then of course, you know, one might be mistaken oneself.
So have a two narrow conception. You should count it as right. So there's a few.
Yeah. So right at the beginning when we were talking about why think rape accusations are true, I mentioned incentive space rates and that evidence.
And in a way we're kind of circling back to evidence like if somebody's mistaken, who's mistaken and why?
And so people who are victims are often mistaken, but they're mistaken in the false negative way, not the false positive way.
So what the first major book about rape accusations was called.
I never called it rape, because it was something like 73% of victims didn't characterise it as rape,
despite having excellent evidence that it counted. And so this is this question of categorisation.
But notice that's the kind of wrong direction to be relevant. Right.
Because this is cases where people are mis categorising it, but they're mis categorising something that was rape and not rape.
Whereas this other question is what about people who characterise something as rape when it actually wasn't?
And um, and I think it's worth noting that actually people who deny so rape, um, um,
people who are kind of committing rape, they might be more incentivised to do that,
to sort of self-protective hermeneutical blocks or in fact, they committed rape, partly because they didn't realise that it was um, counting as rape.
So where we have these categorisations both. It could be me, the doubter with a too narrow conception of what counts as rape.
It is one, but I'm thinking it isn't.
And it could also be that the the, um, the perpetrator isn't counting it as rape when it is, and that's causing the denial.
But, um. Yeah. And I suppose then there are these cases about somebody who maybe they, they're the,
the person who thinks of themselves as a victim and they're simply wrong.
Perhaps they were sort of, um, perhaps very drunk and they consented to sect of somebody.
And they woke up the next morning thinking, well, of course they couldn't have done that.
So thinking that they were raped, but falsely, maybe because of something like that, it was homosexual sex,
and they couldn't think of themselves as ever consenting to that, or because it was, um, they thought of themselves as too drunk to consent.
But maybe that's, you know, more like something they were telling themselves,
partly to kind of protect their own self conception as somebody who doesn't have one night stands or somebody who
who doesn't think of themselves as somebody who would either have an internalised racism or something like that,
or they had a, you know, it was actually they just couldn't imagine that they consented because it would have been cheating marital or something.
I think these cases are probably very rare, but but I think, you know, it's worth mentioning.
Um, and I think what's much more common is this other kind of playing around with conceptions, this playing around with which labels fit.
And there can be really real value in that, this kind of.
I have another project about the value of self-deception, about rape, rape victims who hide it from themselves.
It sounds so funny for the value of it. Yeah, well, it can be a good kind of ignorance.
It's so funny for an epistemology because we're normally like, follow the police. I follow the evidence.
Knowledge is good. Belief is good.
You know, um, and in this case, I argue that there are cases where having where rape victims hiding it from themselves.
Having this self-deception can actually be really valuable. Partly it lets them get on with their life.
And, um, that project is called unthinkable.
And, uh, I took in that about how that experimentally trying on different labels, he took advantage of me and and things like this,
something funny happened, uh, can actually kind of have a cognitive value of kind of this experimental thing.
Now, the problem is in institutional and legal settings where it's formal, we need clarity.
We need our words to be pretty hard and fixed. But this is kind of maybe less important in these social, emotional,
psychological cases where playing around with labels can be this kind of helpful experimental process.
And then there's this kind of clash between them where the playing around with labels,
if we're thinking of it as a legal case, it suddenly really matters and need to be very cautious.
But actually, if if what's really going on,
what's really important is the emotions of the person where there was something bad happened and they're sort of figuring out the label,
then it can be okay to experimentally try on different labels.
I'm also this I mean, this is moving on to something different, but I'm also interested in occasions when kind of purported disbelief is actually
inauthentic and is masking some kind of a different objection to an accusation.
And what's going on? Um, which may be for good reason.
The the doubter, um, doesn't want to be forthcoming about.
So cases where people might say, she's not telling the truth, she's not telling the truth.
But if if you think about it, it just seems implausible that they don't really believe the accusation.
Um, and so I wonder if this is this is a kind of case where the anger and the objection is about something totally different,
but for kind of interesting psychological reasons, it, it gets kind of spun out into just straightforward disbelief.
You know, she's just not telling the truth. Yeah, this this idea of, like, the kind of if it's not the perfect victim, it's not a victim at all.
So if the person seems to have deserved something, or rather because they are sort of in prison or something like this,
um, or they also were, um, also abusing the other person and, um, that kind of thing.
So, so in her book credible, uh,
Deborah Heimer discusses these kinds of this kind of motivation where it's something like there's the belief question,
the evidence question, and then there's the the question about dessert or what's warranted or how,
how much do we want to destabilise the world as well.
So I think sometimes we want people are motivated to sort of claim doubt or to overemphasise the
potential for doubt because they don't want the destabilising force of belief in their lives.
So wives, for example, with respect to an accusation against the husband,
it would just be such an upheaval, um, for that, uh, for the accusation to be true.
And so they sort of socially claim it's it's a false accusation,
even though in reality they do basically believe the accusation, they just sort of don't want to.
I think they're kind of admitting it to oneself, and then they're saying it out loud, kind of ossified, can solidify a claim in one's mind.
I think also with rape, rape victims too, when they say something to somebody else, it it occupies it, which it sends it to stone.
It makes it concrete. So you've said it, now it's out. Yeah. This is the label.
Whereas if it's just kind of playing with the ideas in your mind, there can be a lot more malleable, a lot more kind of hard to grab.
You can't grab them. It's sort of you don't have to apply a label if you're just thinking it through in your mind.
You can just sort of think through in a much more mushy kind of way.
So I think that's a big part of what's going on to is, is keeping it mushy in the mind.
Yeah. Yeah, I understand that. Um, I mean, I wonder if the Brett Kavanaugh, um, case was for some people.
For some, the disbelief that was being voiced. Another example of this in that, you know, I mean,
I even had conversations with people in which at one point they seem to be saying it's just not credible.
Um, you know, why is this person making this accusation now?
It's politically motivated, etc., etc. and after we'd gone through all the reasons why it is credible,
finally we got to, um, but something like this that happened years ago shouldn't derail this person's life.
You know, it's just not serious enough. And then you realise, okay, so that's what's really going on.
That's what's really motivating.
So why has it ended up being presented as a belief about as an objection about truth and credibility, when it was really an objection about dessert?
Yeah, great. And this actually kind of calls to mind the kind of Stanford swimmer example of the father's,
um, claim why should his life be ruined or whatever for 20 minutes of action.
So similar. And I think this relates back to that just world hypothesis thing where we want to believe that, um, these big consequences, we believe.
So we want to believe of ourselves. Of course, we're committed to big consequences. We're committed to not being friends with the person anymore.
We're committed to this. Of course, people who are guilty would go to prison.
Um, we wouldn't hang out with them anymore. We would fire them. They would get fired, whatever the claims are.
And so we don't add. That's not actually true.
And so we say it's a lack of belief so that we can continue thinking, you know, where I do believe it, then I would blah blah blah, right.
We wouldn't as opposed to maybe kind of confronting the desert question a bit more head on.
Right. If people have anxieties, genuine anxieties about what is proportionate in response to what.
Maybe that's the conversation that we should be having. Yeah.
And another huge role. Uh, another huge factor here is attention.
Like the role of attention. What do we pay attention to when sort of both in the media.
What kinds of claims and cases get airtime. So the kind of the Duke lacrosse case, a false accusation gets a lot of airtime.
And then in our own minds, when we're thinking about a person, what springs to mind, um, what kinds of things would be more readily forget?
And so there's the question of what do we believe? And then belief can only really play big cognitive roles.
If you act on it, think about it rather than ignore it.
Um, sort of make other inferences from it and, and sort of be inclined to remember it rather than forget it and bring it up to other people.
And so rape accusations can also play this kind of when, when they are in fact believed they can.
The cognitive role that they play can be downplayed through these kinds of other mechanisms,
like attention and and not connecting up all the other dots.
And so again, that kind of lowers the stakes of belief. Um, yeah.
It's almost like we kind of partitioned the belief off it gets kind of put into a
little box and doesn't really Infuse the rest of our thoughts in quite that way.
And this might also be partly because there's something a little bit mind boggling about how serious rape is and how common it is.
Like this is genuinely very challenging to grasp.
Yes. And it's this kind of banality of its kind of banality of evil.
Like, um. How? Like the acts of Hannah Arendt.
Like how how how evil happens.
And yet it's so, so bad.
And so I have this I'm editing a book called The Philosophy of Sexual Violence, and one of the papers in it, it's really fantastic.
I think it's called The Banality of Rape. And it really wrestles with this question about how it's so common and so bad.
Right. And, uh, and really how to grasp that cognitively. Well, thank you so much for this, Jodi Gardiner.
Thank you so much. I really appreciate this opportunity to talk about these topics.
It's not the most fun to talk about, but I'm really grateful for the opportunity.