Epistemic status: found the link, thought it was kinda interesting, mostly kicking off discussion.
This article felt somewhat related to “Have Epistemic Conditions Always Been This Bad?”, and the question of whether humanity was (briefly) in a golden age of epistemics.
Analyzing language from millions of books, the researchers found that words associated with reasoning, such as “determine” and “conclusion,” rose systematically beginning in 1850, while words related to human experience such as “feel” and “believe” declined. This pattern has reversed over the past 40 years, paralleled by a shift from a collectivistic to an individualistic focus as reflected by the ratio of singular to plural pronouns such as “I”/”we.”
Original paper here: https://www.pnas.org/content/118/51/e2107848118
Odd to me that “truth,” “believe,” and “sense” are considered “intuition” words, along with other words describing physical sensation and terms relevant to Baysian updating. From the article:
I’m skeptical of their operationalization of the “intuition/believing/spirituality/sapience” cluster, and the authors don’t provide sufficient explanation or theoretical grounding for their choice. Since the entire exercise depends heavily on this aspect of the study design, and as words have multiple meanings heavily informed by context, and with all the usual worries about reproducibility, I’m reluctant to read too much into this result.
Also skeptical. I think this is tracking something more like the rise and fall of high modernism than the rise of fall of good epistemics.