Letters to the Editor
-
I don't think he's answered the question
An interesting discussion of cognition, indeed it is. Doubtless it points in the direction of the neurological underpinnings of how we come to conclusions. The question, however, was what makes us so sure of ourselves?
I, too, have observed a rise in "certainty" over the last several decades. I think the source of this rise is an educational system that neither requires the breadth of knowledge (i.e. the diversity of subjects learned) nor the depth of knowledge in any subject as compared to an earlier time. I remember thinking to myself somewhere around the end of my junior year in college on my way to a degree in physics that the more I learned, the less I thought I knew. I thought then and I think now that what had happened to me was that I had passed the knee of the curve and I now knew enough of the nuances and niggly details to know how easy it was to come to an inaccurate conclusion because I had failed to recognize some facet of the problem.
Generalizing the concept - the less you know, the easier it is to come to a conclusion because you have less data to process and you have little or no understanding of the nuances and niggly details that can radically alter the situation (like the presence or absence of the word "kite"). I suspect that people in this condition are more likely to say, I believe rather than I know because, after all, they've checked their beliefs against everything they know and everything's cool. The fact that what they know is only a tiny fraction of everything there is to know about the subject and it's related and analogous subjects is not, unfortunately, the merest of details.
While the study of neurology of thought is both fascinating and important, using it to provide an answer to the question posed will not, in my view, pass Occam's Razor. I think mine will.
-
Science
"Science is merely a systematic acquisition of facts about the world gained through observation and experimentation. It has no goal."
No it is far more than that. The acquisition of data - which are shaped into facts by a consensual filtering process that often takes decades or even centuries - is merely the first step and hardly the most important.
Science attempts to take the world's data, the perceived facts, and provide the best possible provisional explanations for the phenonmena those facts describe. Informed speculations becomes hypotheses and hypotheses that survive and adapt (most likely mutating far beyond their original incorporations) gradually evolve in the marketplace of ideas into theories. Theories exist until better theories displace them, but in any case they constantly evolve.
Compare and contrast with "belief" - which starts with an idea that ignores most of the data, and all inconvenient facts derived therefrom, and proceeds to spread its virus not by providing tangible benefits but by parasitically living off the hosts of those sustained, nourished, enriched, and comforted by the benefits of science and rational thought in general.
-
Everyone should study epistemology
I don't know anything for certain, except that I exist. For all I know I could be a very creative disembodied mind, inventing for myself other minds along with the physical world. To be certain of anything beyond this I must make assumptions. If I assume that I am not fooling myself, that there are other minds and a physical world, then I can make certain other inferences, but not without that basic assumption.
Also, most people, epecially smart people, are right 95% of the time, so the natural assumption when encountering some new idea or conclusion of theirs is that is correct. If they were to assign to a given conclusion even a minimal probability that it is incorrect, the world would be a much more civil place.
-
What about empirical evidence?
It seems that the article gives short shrift to the value of empirical evidence. The laws of chemistry and physics do provide some level of certainty when used to interpret the outcome of experiments; apples fall to the ground, water boils when heated.
However, we now know (believe?) that we don't understand WHY apples fall to the ground, and Dr. Heisenberg assures us that some of those boiling water molecules are (probably) on the moon. And now they're back! Between these two causes of uncertainty - the physical and perceptual - perhaps nothing is completely knowable; yet how can civilization exist if nothing is knowable?
It's a good thing we didn't realize this before we invented fire or the wheel! All we can do is act on beliefs backed by the best evidence we can generate given all the constraints on "knowledge," and sally forth. I, for one, will continue to believe that it is not a good idea to jump off buildings or put my hand in the boiling pot.
-
Most people didn't seem to understand the article
The article did not suggest that "believing" that the moon is the gourd of the gods is equivalent to believing scientific knowledge about the moon.
However, both are beliefs, grounded in assumptions. Getting defensive about that doesn't help anything, and admitting it doesn't weaken science.
That does not make them "equal". I accept science because its underlying assumptions are assumptions that I and most other people intuitively accept. The tribesman with his beliefs about the moon, which he has no way of studying at a physical level, strongly accepts the assumptions underlying science in every day life - the usual accuracy of his senses to describe the physical world, the independent existence of other people and their value for confirming his observations about the physical world, the ability to determine causality or association through observation or experiment, and so on.
If he didn't accept those assumptions he wouldn't be able to function as a hunter gatherer.
Yet we cannot really "know", but can only guess or prefer to believe, that the whole world isn't a matrix-like illusion, that we weren't just brought into existence with false memories, etc, etc, etc. Your religious tradition may require you to "know" some basic theological things, but you can't really "know" that milk turns into yogurt due to a certain type of bacterial fermentation. You can only choose to believe this because it is by far the best explanation, in the context of the assumptions which you hold, and which you would be a hypocrite to deny.