Being Wrong - Kathryn Schulz [178]
a Cassandra figure. “The Born Prophecy,” Richard B. Schmitt, ABA Journal, May 2009; and “Clinton’s Belated Advice Should Be Heeded,” Liam Halligan, the Telegraph, May 23, 2009.
“grave concern about this [proposed regulatory] action.” The press release from which this statement comes is available at http://www.ustreas.gov/press/releases/rr2426.htm.
in Born’s word, “absolutist.” “Prophet and Loss,” Rick Schmitt, Stanford Magazine, March/April 2009.
the everyday concept of belief and the philosophical one differ…in how we experience them. In fact, it is almost impossible to distinguish between implicit assumptions and explicit convictions based on anything but personal experience. You might guess that explicit beliefs are more important than implicit ones, since we spend time and energy defending the former while generally remaining oblivious to the latter. But this is manifestly not the case. Take my implicit belief that my father is, in fact, my father. I am deeply invested in this belief, I make frequent and significant decisions based on the presumption that it is correct, and I would be almost inconceivably shaken if it turned out to be wrong. It’s tough to imagine, then, how this belief could be less important than my convictions about, say, Reaganomics. Nor are explicit beliefs always hotly contested and implicit ones always broadly accepted, although the examples I used in this chapter (about the regulation of financial markets versus the likely behavior of mattresses) might reasonably suggest as much. Let’s say I explicitly believe that I am good at math. My friends and family might share this belief, or they might not trust me to so much as tally the Scrabble score, but either way, my belief is not important enough to merit much controversy. Conversely, I might unconsciously believe that men are better at math than women—needless to say, a deeply controversial stance. This suggests another difficulty with trying to distinguish between implicit and explicit beliefs, which is that they are not mutually exclusive. After all, plenty of people explicitly defend the notion that men are better at math than women. What I believe implicitly and experience not at all, others may believe explicitly and experience as central to their worldview.
beliefs “are really rules for action.” William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience (Touchstone, 1997) 347. The words are James’s (and he stood by them), but in context, he was paraphrasing his fellow philosopher Charles Sanders Peirce, and describing Pierce’s then-new philosophy of pragmatism.
Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory. The National Science Foundation’s fact sheet about LIGO (including the quotation about ripples in the fabric of space-time) is available at http://www.nsf.gov/news/news_summ.jsp?cntn_id=103042.
“a half-billion-dollar machine.” The quote is from Wertheim’s contribution to What We Believe but Cannot Prove: Today’s Leading Thinkers on Science in the Age of Certainty, John Brockman, ed. (Harper Perennial, 2006), 177.
distal beliefs. I have borrowed the idea of distal beliefs from the philosopher Robert P. Abelson, who glossed the concept in an article called “Beliefs are Like Possessions,” Journal for the Theory of Social Behavior, Vol. 16, No. 3. (Oct. 1986): 223–250. As Abelson points out, we also face the opposite of the problem of distal beliefs: we have plenty of beliefs we could act on—say, that it is terrible for impoverished people in our own hometown to go without food and shelter—yet fail to do so.
“the theoretic instinct.” William James, Talks to Teachers on Psychology: And to Students on Some of Life’s Ideals (Holt, 1906), 47.
there is suggestive evidence that babies as young as seven months are already theorizing. That suggestive evidence is as follows: researchers have shown that five-month-old babies don’t seem to know anything about gravity and other basic physical properties of the world, since they are unfazed when, say, objects float in