Being Wrong - Kathryn Schulz [209]
† Our habit of treating many of our beliefs like facts can be seen, in somewhat sidelong fashion, in the specialized way we use the expression “I believe.” When I flag a statement as a belief, I’m not emphasizing the depths of my conviction; I’m taking pains to convey my doubt. Imagine that you and I are at a party when a distant acquaintance walks through the door. You nudge me and ask me to remind you of his name. If I say, “His name is Victor,” there’s a good chance that you’ll exclaim, “Victor! Good to see you again.” But if I say, “I believe his name is Victor,” you will probably have the sense to hold back. You will rightly hear, in that “I believe,” an implicit caveat: “this is just a belief; I could be wrong.” We attach no such caveats when we feel no uncertainty, which is why we say “Rudy Giuliani is a reactionary control freak,” not “I believe that Rudy Giuliani is a reactionary control freak.”
* This is a logical fallacy. The fact that I benefit from a given belief might raise questions about my capacity to assess it objectively, but it doesn’t bear on the truth of the belief itself. After all, people benefit from true beliefs as well as false ones.
* Monotheistic religions have a particularly interesting and troubled relationship to the idea of evidence. Belief in God is explicitly supposed to be based on faith, not proof: “Blessed are they who have not seen and yet have believed,” Jesus says to doubting Thomas in John 20:29. Yet the devout have tried to muster evidence for their beliefs since time immemorial. The shroud of Turin is cited as proof of Jesus’ crucifixion, weeping statues of the Virgin Mary serve to substantiate her holiness, the Catholic Church has a formal process for verifying miracles as evidence of God’s work, and—before modern science made the claim untenable—volcanoes, hot springs, and geothermal vents were cited as evidence of the existence of hell. More generally, the whole remarkable sweep of creation, from the human eye to the shells on a beach, is often cited as evidence of God the creator. This religious relationship to evidence might be inconsistent, but it isn’t surprising. As I suggest at the end of this chapter, we all recognize the value of evidence in grounding our beliefs, and we’d all just as soon have it on our side.
* The overall concept of this quiz and its second question come from the philosopher Willard Van Orman Quine, who worked on, among other things, language and epistemology. Imagine that a field linguist who is trying to translate an unknown language watches as a native speaker points to a rabbit and says “gavagai.” The natural conclusion would be that “gavagai” means “rabbit”—but, Quine pointed out, it could also mean, “let’s go hunting” or “there’s a storm coming” or any number of other things. Quine called this problem “the indeterminacy of translation.”
* One reason the great linguist Noam Chomsky thought language learning must be innate is that the entire corpus of spoken language (never mind the subset spoken to children under four) doesn’t seem to contain enough evidence to learn all of grammar. He called this problem “the poverty of the stimulus.” In particular, he pointed out, children never hear examples of grammatical structures that aren’t permissible in their language, such as “Mommy milk poured” or “picture pretty painted Laura.” This raises the question of how kids know such structures