This post is by Alejandro Vázquez del Mercado, Professor of Philosophy at UNAM (Mexico’s National Autonomous University), where he coordinates the Seminar of Cognitive Diversity.
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| Alejandro Vázquez del Mercado |
Bereavement deeply affects every aspect of life, but reflections on its epistemic impact are comparatively scarce in philosophy.
In my view, the best way to think about this is in terms of epistemic functionality, a core notion from the Epistemic Innocence framework that I’ve found extremely fruitful. When evaluating epistemic functioning, the focus is not on the degree of justification possessed by the beliefs of the bereaved, but on the person’s ability to regularly acquire epistemic goods, such as true beliefs, evidence, and understanding.
Bereavement studies provide an important starting point to understand how the death of someone close is epistemically disruptive. The ambivalence and dissonance pertaining to the fact that the deceased is no longer present is an important source of impairment which has been described in this literature, as well as in philosophy.
In a way, the belief (or belief-like representation) that the person is absent is not fully internalized. It doesn’t adjust to the rationality constraints of typical beliefs, which is manifested in incoherence, lack of inferential productivity, and in automatic behaviors like putting an extra place at the table. Outside extreme cases of denial, the bereaved can perform the relevant inferences, but that doesn’t mean they are readily available.
(One may wonder why this is practically relevant. Suppose the deceased was the only provider of a family lacking social security. It is crucial to make as soon as possible the inference that the monthly income will stop coming).
Moreover, doxastic disruption tends to extend towards other areas of life, as the impact of the event undermines even our most basic assumptions. A striking example comes from a study on bereaved children by Silverman and Nickman:
A child said she had to go outside to look at the sun. She could not understand how anything could be the same when she was told that her father was dead. […]
The special tension in these children was very clear. While being very aware that their parents were dead, they experienced the parents as still existing in themselves and in their world, sometimes attributing living qualities to their par¬ents’ spirits.
Other epistemic sources of disruption are not directly doxastic, but can be better described as affective. For example, feelings of unreality and alienation have figured prominently in bereavement studies, as well as in works dealing with the phenomenology of grief. Beliefs about our immediate surroundings have a very important role in guiding and motivating action, but when the world is experienced as unreal this ability is diminished. Ultimately, a lack of motivation to explore the world and meaningfully engage with other persons has an impact in the quality and amount of information that is acquired.
There are other important areas beyond the affective and the strictly doxastic (the distinction between both is not entirely clear-cut, and largely depends on the chosen focus of study). The role of the environment --and how it is shaped before and after a person dies-- is another important source of epistemic disruption, which I address in a forthcoming work. It’s also worth consulting Michael Cholbi’s recent work for insights regarding the role of attention (though admittedly, I’m a bit skeptical towards the more ambitious project of providing a single, unified account of grief).
Hopefully, these examples serve as an illustration of how bereavement is an important topic for applied epistemology. The practical takeaway is not that we should seek to eradicate the source of disruption –such as ambivalence or feelings of alienation-- but that we may better understand and support the bereaved –both in professional and personal settings-- by attending to the epistemic challenges they face.