Conceptual empathy and conceptual naive realism

A major impediment to intellectual agreement and progress, both in philosophy and in other disciplines, is lack of conceptual empathy: failure to see that alternative definitions of a concept (e.g. freedom, democracy) are typically not simply confused, but based on different ways of seeing things that often have merit.

Unfortunately, conceptual empathy is very difficult. We seem to be naturally inclined towards conceptual naive realism. Naive realism is the fact that we have a tendency to think that “our senses allow us to perceive objects directly and without any intervening processes”, that “that others who do not share the same views must be ignorant, irrational, or biased”, etc.

Naive realism is usually discussed in the context of empirical beliefs. No doubt we are naturally inclined towards naive realism regarding our empirical beliefs. But it seems to me that we're naive realists to an even greater extent when it comes to the use of concepts. Though we're overconfident, we tend to be at least somewhat uncertain about our empirical beliefs. And we acknowledge the possibility of perceptual illusions. Such doubts and uncertainties seem to affect us less when it comes to concept use. We seem to be more confident that we directly perceive or intuit what the correct definitions of concepts are, and that alternative viewpoints are down to irrationality and bias. It's difficult but important to overcome conceptual naive realism.

(This post was originally posted on Facebook, 5 February 2020.)