Friendship and Understanding

In Nicole Holofcener’s recent film You Hurt My Feelings, an author, Beth, overhears her partner confess to a friend that he thinks her latest book is no good. This revelation comes as a shock to Beth, as Don had previously indicated he liked the book, and a rift opens up between the couple. This is partly due to Don’s prior dishonesty. But it is also partly a result of the sheer fact that Don fails to appreciate his partner’s new work. The film suggests that as Beth’s partner, Don ought to have been more appreciative of Beth’s work and by disliking the book he betrays an expectation that he will judge her work more favourably.

Is this expectation legitimate? For the sake of argument, let’s grant there are legitimate expectations to act and behave differently towards our friends and loved ones. For example, had Don been asked by an acquaintance to read a draft manuscript, he might reasonably have refused, and we would not ordinarily criticise her for doing so. But things are different when it comes to those closer to us. Had Don refused to set aside time to read his partner’s work, we may well judge him to be letting her down, indicating that we recognise the existence of obligations, duties, and commitments to devote our time and attention to people close to us, making sacrifices for them that we would not be expected to make for mere acquaintances. But what is less clear is whether these expectations extend beyond practical matters and into the realm of thought. Whether, that is, we expect our friends and loved ones to think well of us. Beth’s apparent sense of betrayal at Don’s low opinion of her book suggests we do.

Beth is not alone here. Several philosophers defend versions of the Epistemic Partiality Thesis, the idea that friendship (either platonic or romantic) involves normative expectations to think well of our friends.[i] ‘Normative’ here meaning that this is not a descriptive claim about the shape that most friendships tend to take, but a claim about what shape they ought to take. Good friends are those who form beliefs about their friends in a partial, biased manner. So, given the same body of evidence, a stranger might reasonably conclude that I am not a particularly gifted writer of blog posts, while a close friend ought to view my blogging more positively.

The implication here is that friendship necessarily involves a degree of irrationality or epistemic impropriety. After all, standard epistemic norms of belief demand that only things like evidence or truth make a difference to what one ought to believe. Good beliefs are formed impartially, free of bias and partisanship. So, the friend who forms an epistemically partial judgement about the quality of my writing is, in doing so, guilty of violating epistemic norms of belief.

This raises a dilemma. In certain situations, we will be faced with a choice between being a good friend and being a rational thinker. What to do? Defenders of the epistemic partiality thesis tend to argue that friendship is a more important source of value than rationality and, therefore, in the face of such dilemmas, our commitments to our friends should take precedence. To butcher an E.M. Forster line: If I had to choose between betraying rationality and betraying my friend, I hope I should have the guts to betray rationality.  

In a forthcoming article co-authored with Michel Croce, we argue that the epistemic partiality thesis cannot be right.[ii] Our guiding thought is that friendship cannot legitimately demand that we form biased judgements about our friends because such a bias would preclude the possibility of seeing the truth about our friends and good friends ought to see the truth about their friends. Call this an epistemic conception of friendship. Broadly similar accounts of friendship, or love, can be found in the work of Cathy Mason[iii] and Katherine Dormandy[iv], who argue for the centrality of knowledge or accuracy in love and friendship. We agree with these authors that friendship requires accurate beliefs and knowledge. The particular view we favour, however, holds that what really matters is something more than merely knowledge or accuracy; what matters for friendship is understanding.

On our view, friendship is in part grounded in understanding—understanding the truth about our friends. What this means is that two people can be good friends only to the degree that they understand each other. A good friend will have genuine understanding about their friend’s character, values, abilities, and so on. To flip this claim on its head, failures of understanding between friends are failures of friendship—and deep, systematic misunderstanding between people undermines genuine friendship.

The notion of understanding we have in mind here entails true belief and knowledge.[v] But beyond this, understanding involves grasping relations between a coherent network of known propositions, as well as the ability to integrate new pieces of information into the network, and perhaps also to predict and interpret new observations. Our claim therefore is that genuine friendship requires seeing the truth about our friends in a holistic sense: understanding how their different experiences, values, beliefs, hopes, desires, quirks and idiosyncrasies hang together to constitute the person they are. Successfully understanding a person in this way is compromised by biased judgement, which is why the epistemic partiality thesis must be false.

Towards the end of You Hurt My Feelings, Don and Beth have an honest conversation about their feelings towards each other. To their mutual surprise it turns out that each loathes the gifts the other buys for them. The scene is part of a turning point for the couple in which they overcome their misunderstandings and in doing so strengthen their relationship. Part of the moral here seems to be that although it may have been difficult for Beth to hear that her partner did not like her new book, this was not because Don’s judgement amounted to any kind of betrayal. Indeed, by the end of the film Beth comes round to agreeing with Don that this was not her best work, suggesting not only that understanding is necessary for friendships but that friendship may in turn aid certain forms of self-understanding.[vi]

[i] See, for example, Keller (2004). ‘Friendship and Belief’, Philosophical Papers; and Stroud (2007). ‘Epistemic Partiality in Friendship’, Ethics.

[ii] Croce & Jope (Forthcoming). ‘Understanding Friendship’, Philosophical Issues.

[iii] Mason (2020). ‘The Epistemic Demands of Friendship: Friendship as Inherently Knowledge-Involving’, Synthese; (2021). ‘Iris Murdoch and the Epistemic Significance of Love’, New Philosophical Essays on Love and Loving.

[iv] Dormandy (2022). ‘Loving Truly: An Epistemic Approach to The Doxastic Norms of Love.’ Synthese.

[v] See for example Kelp (2021), Inquiry, Knowledge, and Understanding; Kvanvig (2003), The Value of Knowledge and the Pursuit of Understanding; and Pritchard (2009). Knowledge, Understanding and Epistemic Value. Royal Institute of Philosophy Supplement.

[vi] This research was made possible by a Leverhulme Trust Early Career Fellowship (grant no. ECF-2021-709).

Photo: from Holofcener, N. (Director). (2023). You Hurt My Feelings [Film].
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