“Yes, I’m certain of that” is often taken to be an assurance that the speaker really knows that the attested fact or opinion is correct. But it’s not clear that a feeling of really knowing something is a good predictor of really knowing something, as discussed in “On Being Certain: An Overview,” at LDS Science Review. The post is a review of Robert Burton’s book On Being Certain: Believing You Are Right Even When You’re Not.” The post implicitly suggests we should be more modest in phrasing our claims and arguments. The application to religious discussion seems obvious, but the critique applies to every topic where people often feel they really know.
Here’s a nice summary from the post at LDS Science Review:
Burton argues that we should split thoughts into two components: the information of the thought, and the brain’s unconscious assessment of the thought which comes in the form of a feeling. Viewed in this way, the feeling does not, in itself, constitute evidence of correctness or incorrectness. This makes sense; we’ve all had the experience of being quite certain about something only to be confronted with incontrovertible evidence that we were wrong.
posted May 18, 2009 at 7:11 pm
Thanks for the plug, Dave.
posted May 18, 2009 at 11:35 pm
I was struck by the following paragraph from the introduction;
“The revolutionary premise at the heart of this book is:
“Despite how certainty feels, it is neither a conscious choice nor even a thought process. Certainty and similar states of “knowing what we know” arise out of involuntary brain mechanisms that, like love or angst, function independently of reason.”
What struck me is how non-revolutionary this statement appears to me, personally. Of course “certainty”, “knowing”, “believing”, “being sure” and “having faith” transcend the cognitive functions of the brain. Try to win over someone with rational arguments—even powerful rational arguments—which contradict their worldview.
“A man convinced against his will is of the same opinion still.” – Dale Carnegie
It is extraordinarily difficult to convince someone who already has a given “level of certainty” regarding some issue.
For example, I have personally always found the claims of homeopathic and osteopathic medicine rather suspect, despite knowing several people who swear by each or both of these practices. It just does not seem to me, from my experience, to be the way the world works. It would take not only some very comprehensive and convincing double-blind studies showing real efficacy of these practices – at or above the level of correlation of the studies which linked smoking with lung cancer and emphysema in the ’50′s—as well as a reasonable model explaining how these techniques work, and why they sometimes don’t—to persuade me to change my position.
On the opposite side, I have so much experience in receiving answers to personal questions and direction in my personal life from the study of the scriptures that I find unfathomable comments such as “the scriptures seem irrelevant to me” and “the roadmap to life doesnt’ work”.
posted May 19, 2009 at 12:22 am
I read an interesting book that provides some conclusions that have stuck with me. The book is called “Deep Survival” by Laurence Gonzales. He studied why some people survived traumatic experiences (getting lost, shipwreck, etc…) while others died. He even studied why we end up in traumatic experiences-some of them being avoidable but we do it any way. At one point he concludes-this is my paraphrasing-”We believe we know what we think, but what we really know is what we feel.” I thought that had an interesting application to how we “know” the gospel is true.