Being Wrong - Kathryn Schulz [184]
“being mistaken at the top of one’s voice.” Ambrose Bierce, The Devil’s Dictionary (NuVision Publications, Feb. 2009), 191.
a more public, action-oriented analogue to knowledge. This might seem like an imprecise way to define certainty, since presumably we can experience a private, passive version of it as well. For my part, I’m happy to acknowledge that this definition is provisional—convincing in some ways, a bit off in others, but at all events useful for exploring the furthest extreme of “knowing” and its relationship to wrongness. Some recent philosophers, however, including Keith Frankish and Daniel Dennett, argue that this definition isn’t provisional at all—that certainty is always a consequence of social interaction, and specifically of communication. In the privacy of our own minds, these philosophers claim, we treat every proposition probabilistically. It is only when we must make pronouncements that we are forced to generate absolutes. That makes fighting with your brother, giving a speech before Congress, and writing a letter to the editor all equally good ways to produce certainty. (I’m grateful to the Harvard philosopher Peter Godfrey Smith for bringing this argument to my attention.)
a man is hiking in the Alps. James, The Will to Believe, 96.
“pathological certainty” (FN). Hirstein, 22. The reference to obsessive-compulsive disorder and pathological doubt is on pp. 97–98.
“help to make the truth which they declare.” “Remarks on Spencer’s Definition of Mind as Correspondence,” William James: The Essential Writings, Bruce W. Wilshire, ed. (State University of New York Press, 1984), 24.
Wittgenstein argued. Ludwig Wittgenstein, On Certainty, G. E. M. Anscombe and G. H. von Wright, eds. (Harper and Row, 1969). The quotation at the end of this paragraph appears on p. 33, as does the first quotation in the next paragraph. The “I should not make sure by looking” quotation appears on pp. 18–19.
“‘turtles all the way down’” (FN). Clifford Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures (Basic Books, 1977), 29.
doubt “a cognitive luxury.” Hirstein, 6.
“Doubt comes after belief.” Wittgenstein, 23.
Daniel Gilbert. Daniel T. Gilbert, Douglas S. Krull, and Patrick S. Malone, “Unbelieving the Unbelievable: Some Problems in the Rejection of False Information,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, Vol. 59, No. 4 (Oct. 1990): 601–613.
“native hue of resolution.” William Shakespeare, Hamlet, Susanne L. Wofford, ed. (St. Martin’s Press, 1994), 82.
“vigorous, bold and heroic.” Jenkins is quoted in “A Critical History of Hamlet,” Wofford, p. 185. I’m indebted to Wofford’s brief history for the point that Prince Hamlet was not always regarded as the embodiment of doubt and indecision.
“Everlasting broodings.” Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Lectures and Notes on Shakspere [sic] and Other English Poets (George Bell and Sons, 1904), 344.
“Prince Pussyfoot.” John Yoklavich, “Hamlet in Shammy Shoes,” Shakespeare Quarterly, Vol. 3, No. 3 (July 1952): 217.
“fust in us unus’d.” Shakespeare, 115.
“action comes as naturally as breathing” (FN). Maynard Mack, “King Lear in Our Time,” excerpted in William Shakespeare, King Lear, Russell Fraser, ed. (Signet Classic, 1998), 227.
both doubt and certainty are as contagious as the common cold. See for instance Michael A. Hogg et al., “Uncertainty, Entitativity, and Group Identification,” Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, Vol. 43, No. 1 (January 2007): 135–142; and “Why Do People Join Groups? Three Motivational Accounts from Social Psychology,” Social and Personality Psychology Compass, Vol. 2, No. 3 (2008): 1269–1280.
“an answer that is possibly (or even probably) wrong.” Hirstein, 5.
article on umpiring (FN). Joseph Berger, “Calling ’Em as They See ’Em,” the New York Times, June 7, 2009.
William Safire. See William Safire, “On Language; Flip-Flop,” the New York Times, March 28, 2004; and William Safire, “The Waffling of the Wishy-Washy,”