Being Wrong - Kathryn Schulz [42]
This is an admirable goal. After all, knowing what we don’t know is the beginning (and, in some religious and intellectual traditions, the entirety and end) of wisdom. Unfortunately, as we have seen, recognizing the limits of our knowledge is extremely difficult. The philosophical options—vetting our beliefs to figure out if they are justified, true, necessary, and so forth—are controversial even among philosophers, and impractical as a way to get through life. And the lay option—relying on the feeling of knowing, and trusting the theories that so constantly come to mind—leads us too easily into error. In other words, we have no sound method for knowing what we know—which means that, strictly speaking, we don’t know much of anything.
This doesn’t mean that we are dumb, or that all our ideas about the world are useless, or that the only honorable course of action is to throw up our hands and throw in our lots with the Skeptics. “When one admits that nothing is certain,” proposed the philosopher Bertrand Russell, “one must, I think, also add that some things are much more nearly certain than others.” Those are sound words to live by. And yet, as the example of blind Hannah reminds us, we must also accept that we can’t ascertain in advance which of the things we think we know will turn out not to be knowledge after all—will turn out, instead, to be wrong.
As that suggests, the idea of knowledge and the idea of error are fundamentally incompatible. When we claim to know something, we are essentially saying that we can’t be wrong. If we want to contend with the possibility that we could be wrong, then the idea of knowledge won’t serve us; we need to embrace the idea of belief instead. This might feel like an unwelcome move, since all of us prefer to think that we know things rather than “merely” believing them. That preference accords with the conventional view of knowledge and belief, in which the former is the loftier of the two concepts. In that view, knowledge is, you will recall, belief plus: plus all the conditions the philosophers put on it, and all the faith that we ourselves put in it.
In the end, though, it is belief that is by far the broader, more complex, and more interesting category. It is, I will argue, the atomic unit of our intelligence—the thing that differentiates us from machines, and that lets us navigate the world as deftly as we do. But it is true (and not coincidental) that belief is also the atomic unit of error. Whether we wrongly think we can see or wrongly remember what we did on September 11, whether we are mistaken about pantyhose or mistaken about string theory, what we are ultimately wrong about is always a belief. If we want to understand how we err, we need to look to how we believe.
5.
Our Minds, Part Two: Belief
’Tis with our judgments as our watches, none
Go just alike, yet each believes his own.
—ALEXANDER POPE, “AN ESSAY ON CRITICISM”
On October 23, 2008, Alan Greenspan, the former chair of the Federal Reserve, appeared before a committee of the U.S. House of Representatives to testify about the financial crisis that had lately engulfed more or less the entire planet. Not surprisingly, the atmosphere was somber, and Henry Waxman, the California Democrat who chaired the committee, was not in the mood to pull his punches. “The Federal Reserve had the authority to stop the irresponsible lending practices” that