Interpretive blindness and the impossibility of learning from testimony
Résumé
We model interpretive blindness, a type of epistemic bias that posesa problem for learning from testimony, in which one acquires infor-mation from text or conversation but lacks direct access to groundtruth. Interpretive blindness arises when a co-dependence betweenbackground beliefs and interpretation leads to a dynamic processof bias hardening that impedes or precludes learning. We arguethat when bodies of data areargumentatively complete, even con-straints from hierarchical Bayesian learning designed to promotegood epistemic practices will fail to stop interpretive blindness.