Review: Knowledge, Reality, and Value
Review of Knowledge, Reality, and Value: A Mostly Common Sense Guide to Philosophy by Michael Huemer
Most philosophy books pretend to be neutral while smuggling in their biases anyway. Michael Huemer’s “Knowledge, Reality, and Value: A Mostly Common Sense Guide to Philosophy“ does something more honest and more interesting: it tells you upfront that it aims to be fair, but not neutral. He’s going to tell you what he thinks, and argue for it, and if you don’t like that, he suggests you go get another book. He even names one.
I respect that. It’s a harder standard to hold yourself to than pretend to be “objective”, and it signals that Huemer trusts his readers to evaluate arguments rather than needing to be guided to the “right” conclusion. Whether he consistently meets that standard is another question, but the disclosure itself earns points.
The book is a wide-ranging introduction to philosophy — epistemology, logic, ethics, free will, philosophy of religion, political philosophy — filtered through Huemer’s consistently libertarian-leaning, intuitionist lens. The subtitle's 'mostly common sense' is doing real rhetorical work here, framing his fairly opinionated positions as something any reasonable person would think if they just thought carefully enough. Sometimes that’s the case; other times it may not be.
There’s a lot of good stuff here on critical thinking. The treatment of fallacies is great; Huemer walks through anecdotal evidence, base rate neglect, whataboutism, cherry picking, and selection effects with the kind of clear, example-driven writing that makes you wish more philosophers wrote this way.
His base rate neglect example involving a rare disease and a 90% accurate test is the sort of thing everyone should encounter at least once in their education. His treatment of whataboutism is sharp too, as he argues that the practice systematically prevents evils from being addressed, because for any wrong in the world, you can always point to some other, worse wrong elsewhere, deflecting attention indefinitely. I’ve seen whataboutism play out far too much in domains ranging from boardrooms to social media my entire adult life.
Huemer also offers one of the better insights I’ve encountered on the relationship between bias and knowledge: that the factors making someone biased about a topic are often the very same factors making them knowledgeable about it. A war veteran discussing war is likely both the most biased and the most informed person in the room. Discounting “non-objective” perspectives therefore risks throwing out the perspectives of the most knowledgeable people. That observation has implications well beyond philosophy, and is relevant to anyone who has ever dismissed an expert’s view because they were “too close to the subject.”
And then he turns the lens on you:
Yet while the vast majority of people are dogmatic, no one thinks that they are. You, reader, are probably dogmatic, but you think you’re not. That’s partly because the word ‘dogmatic’ sounds insulting, and hence it is unpleasant to entertain the hypothesis that one is dogmatic. To make it sound less bad, you can just replace it with the description, “systematically underestimates appropriate belief revision”. You probably systematically underestimate how much you should revise your beliefs when you acquire new information, because the vast majority of people do that, but you probably don’t realize that you do this.
All the greatest hits are here: Pascal’s Wager, the omnipotence paradox (can God create a stone so heavy he can’t lift it?), the tension between omniscience and free will, Nozick’s Experience Machine, deontology versus consequentialism. For readers encountering these for the first time, the coverage is clear and engaging. For those who’ve already wrestled with them, it reads more like a well-organized refresher.
The chapters on epistemology get complicated quickly — Huemer himself acknowledges this transition — and the later material on ethical theory is where his intuitionist framework does the most work and also where a critical reader might push back hardest.
I am probably not be the target audience for this book. Much of the terrain was familiar, and I found myself nodding along more than being challenged. Huemer’s writing style of dry humor worked well for me, so it was fine; pleasant, even. And the pre-existing knowledge is, of course, not a criticism of the book so much as an acknowledgment of audience fit.
For someone coming to these ideas fresh, like a high school or maybe a university student or others who haven’t yet thought systematically about what rationality means or why being irrational might be morally blameworthy, this would be an excellent starting point.
Huemer writes with personality and a directness that is rare in academic philosophy. His style reminded me at times of what I appreciated about Simon McCarthy-Jones’ “Freethinking”; both authors trust their readers enough to take clear positions and defend them openly.
The question I didn’t fully come to a conclusion about is whether “fair but not neutral“ earned its keep or whether this collapses into “persuasive essays with a disclaimer.” On balance, I think Huemer mostly earns it; the libertarian lens does run through so consistently that readers should be aware they’re getting a survey of philosophy from a particular vantage point, which is still kind of presented as the view from nowhere.
Rating: 3.5 out of 5
Dog-ear index: 4.3
Who is it for: Philosophy newcomers who want a clear, opinionated, and engaging introduction to the big questions, and who are comfortable being told what the author thinks the answers are.
[reminder: I highlight important parts of the books I read, and dog-ear the really important pages. The dog-ear index is simply the average number of dog-eared pages per 100 pages]
Product link for reference only; please support your local bookstore where possible: https://www.amazon.com.au/Knowledge-Reality-Value-Mostly-Philosophy/dp/B091F5QTDS