Being Wrong - Kathryn Schulz [34]
Plato’s definition kicked off 2,500 years of debates about the nature of knowledge. The earliest objection to it came from the Skeptics, who argued that no beliefs are verifiably true, and that therefore (my niece notwithstanding) we can’t rightly claim to know anything. Other philosophers, by contrast, feel that we can claim to know some things, but argue that Plato didn’t go far enough in specifying which ones. For these thinkers, knowledge is belief with a bunch of backup: belief that is not only justified and true, but also necessarily true, impossible to disprove, arrived at in a certain fashion, and so forth.
For my purposes, there are two important things to be learned from these debates. The first is that knowledge is conventionally viewed as belief plus a bunch of credentials, an idea we’ll return to at the end of this chapter. The second is that even if you happen to be a professional philosopher, it is very difficult to figure out what, if anything, you can rightly claim to know. This isn’t an issue that particularly troubles the rest of us, not because we are such brilliant natural philosophers but because the experience of knowing something seems relatively straightforward. For most of us, whether or not we know a particular fact isn’t something we think about; it is something we feel. As William James wrote, “Of some things we feel that we are certain: we know, and we know that we do know. There is something that gives a click inside of us, a bell that strikes twelve, when the hands of our mental clock have swept the dial and meet over the meridian hour.”
James did not mean this as a compliment. The feeling of knowing something is incredibly convincing and inordinately satisfying, but it is not a very good way to gauge the accuracy of our knowledge. Blind Hannah presumably “knew” that she could see, but we know that she was wrong. That’s the problem with the feeling of knowing: it fills us with the conviction of rightness whether we’re right or not. Perhaps the most vivid way to see this problem in action is within the domain of memory, where all of us have experienced the sensation of a powerful inner certainty, and where the feeling of knowing has received some of the most extensive attention. In this domain, the “knowledge” in question is knowledge of what happened in the past—except when it turns out not to be knowledge at all.
On December 7, 1941, a thirteen-year-old boy named Ulric Neisser was listening to the radio when he learned that the Japanese had just attacked Pearl Harbor. The experience made a huge impression on the child. For decades to come, he would carry around the memory of a radio announcer interrupting the baseball game he’d been listening to with a bulletin about the bombing.
In its vividness, intensity, and longevity, Neisser’s recollection was typical of how our minds react to unusually shocking events. Think about your own memories of a different national tragedy—the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. If you are American, I will bet my bank account that you know what you were doing that day: how you learned the news, where you were at the time, how you felt, who you talked to, what you thought about what had happened. I will further bet that those memories are unusually vivid and detailed (certainly far more so than your memories of, say, September 5, 2001, which probably don’t even exist), and that you have a high degree of confidence in their accuracy. But—one last wager—I will also bet that, to one degree or another, you’re wrong. Neisser certainly was. Forty years after the fact, something suddenly dawned on him: professional baseball isn’t played in December.
By then, as fate would have it, the thirteen-year-old baseball fan had become a psychology professor at Emory University, and, in 1989, he published a groundbreaking study on memory failures like the one he had experienced. Before Neisser’s work, the going theory was that we are able to remember surprising and traumatic events far