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By Root 1103 0

insights seem so obvious to adults that it is easy to overlook their importance. The ability to grasp what minds do, to understand that people can hold beliefs that are mistaken or different from our own, subtends a vast swath of mature thinking. It allows us to “read minds,” not as psychics use the term but as psychologists do—to infer people’s thoughts and feelings based on their words, actions, or circumstances. Rebecca Saxe, a neuroscientist at MIT and one of the leading contributors to our understanding of the brain structures underlying theory of mind, offers the example of Romeo and Juliet. As audience members, we know that the seemingly lifeless Juliet is not actually dead, as Romeo believes, but has merely taken a sleeping potion. But if we didn’t have theory of mind, we wouldn’t be able to set aside our own knowledge and see the scene as Romeo does—and so we wouldn’t understand why he kills himself. The false belief on which the whole tragedy turns would be completely lost on us.

So, too, would entire expanses of the social landscape. Without theory of mind, we wouldn’t be able to register the subtleties of a flirtation, recognize our accidental offenses against a friend, or foresee that coming home two hours late might alarm and anger our family. As these examples suggest, theory of mind is vital to our emotional, intellectual, and moral development. (Tragically, we have some idea of how compromised we would be without it, because its absence or diminution is characteristic of people with autism and Asperger’s syndrome.*)

Once you acquire theory of mind, there is no going back; barring serious brain injury, you will never fail the Sally-Ann test again. But the attraction of naïve realism never wholly fades. Granted, we come to understand, in the abstract, that our beliefs can be skewed by any number of factors, ranging from the silent nudgings of self-interest to the limits of omniscience—the fact that, like Sally, sometimes we just aren’t in the right room at the right time. When it comes to our specific convictions about the world, however, we all too easily lapse back into the condition of toddlers, serenely convinced that our own beliefs are simply, necessarily true.†

Why do we do this? The most obvious answer is that we’re so emotionally invested in our beliefs that we are unable or unwilling to recognize them as anything but the inviolable truth. (The very word “believe” comes from an Old English verb meaning “to hold dear,” which suggests, correctly, that we have a habit of falling in love with our beliefs once we’ve formed them.) There’s a lot to be said for that answer, and much of it will get said in the coming pages. For now, though, I want to propose another, less obvious theory about why we act like our beliefs are necessarily true—which is that we are logically obliged to do so. Philosophers have a name for this theory, but, unfortunately, it’s a name that only a philosopher could love: the First Person Constraint on Doxastic Explanation. “Doxastic” means “pertaining to beliefs” that strange syllable, dox, is the same one that shows up in words like “orthodox” (“believing correctly”) and “paradox” (“contrary beliefs”). In lay terminology, the phrase means that each of us has limited options for how to explain why we believe the things we do.

I’m going to jettison this cumbersome name and (for reasons that will become obvious in a moment) call this idea the ’Cuz It’s True Constraint. Here’s how it works. Let’s say I believe that drinking green tea is good for my health. Let’s also say that I’ve been drinking three cups of green tea a day for twenty years, that I come from a long line of green tea drinkers, and that I’m the CEO of a family-owned corporation, Green Tea International. An impartial observer would instantly recognize that I have three very compelling reasons to believe in the salubrious effects of green tea, none of which have anything to do with whether those effects are real. First, having ingested vast quantities of it, at least partially in the conviction that I was boosting my