Believing in Believing

-- By RyanBingham - 12 Feb 2012

The Question

What happens when we believe in things that don't accurately reflect reality?

At first glance, and at repeated glance, for that matter, it seems like a question that is too big, and too vague to even begin to ask. But it feels like something worth asking. If a jury believes something that doesn't reflect reality, for instance, it seems like something other than "justice" is happening (whatever we mean by that term). In order to explore a possible answer to the question, we'd better start by clarifying what is even being asked. What do I mean by "belief?" The knee-jerk reaction of a definition that comes to my mind is something like "the state of being characterized by my thinking that something is correct (that is, accurate to reality, as opposed to morally praiseworthy)."

Thinking It Through

On second thought, that might have some problems. There are plenty of things that I think are correct, that are actually demonstrably correct, whether I think they are or not. Certain principles of mathematics, for instance, are correct, independent of my opinion regarding them. It seems irrelevant to say that I "believe" that 2 and 2 make 4. It is something that I actually know is correct, by the very definition of the terms involved. I don't use the concept of "belief" to describe the state of my mind regarding certainties, since my knowledge takes me beyond mere belief.

One important component of "belief," therefore, seems to be uncertainty. If I'm already certain that something is correct, then where does "belief" come in? What point is there in discussing my opinion of something's correctness, when it is actually demonstrably accurate?

Another problem with my initial definition (and with my first criticism of it) might be the invoking of "reality." Reality, to me, is of course my indirect and terribly shortsighted experience of the things around me. My conception of what is Real is necessarily limited by my (in)ability to comprehend it. Saying that math can be demonstrably correct is all well and fine, but it is only demonstrably correct because it is abstract and logical, by nature. The Real world, assuming there is one, is not bound by the terms we frame it in.

This gets us to the idea that, in the world we experience, nothing is Absolute, and no proposition about our daily experience is as water-tight as we tend to think. Still, although I have no logical certainty that the sun will come up tomorrow, I don't have a lot of doubt about it. Plenty of things in our world are predictable enough that we can rely on their being "real," or, at least real enough for our purposes. For us, then, the uncertainty that "believing" entails seems to be more than just the remote spectre of falsifiability. Perhaps it involves an implicit acknowledgement that the object of our belief is actually worth doubting?

Second Try At a Definition

Maybe a better definition for "belief" is this: "a state of being characterized by an assumption that something is accurate, in the absence of enough evidence to think of it as reasonably certain." It would be state of a maintaining a supposition about some proposition's truth, without enough evidence to make for a rational conclusion. I'm not going to try to set up a universal measure for how much evidence is enough to make a given conclusion rational. If it's crossing the barrier of "more likely than not" in some contexts, it's some other measure in other circumstances.

Under this definition, belief without self-reflection means operating in a fundamentally irrational manner. That is, acting in a way that is not supported by reason. If I have practice enough self-reflection to acknowledge my present "belief" in something (under this definition), I also discover a cognizance that the object of my belief probably does not merit believing. For me, this tends to result in the non-belief of that proposition.

Even in the absence of believing, I could, of course, still entertain the possibility that the proposition could be true. I would just not be putting any stock in its veracity. If at some point, that proposition is shown to be either correct or otherwise, I could readjust my thinking.

On the other hand, if I continue engaging in "belief," and a proposition turns out to be incorrect, I have opened myself up to Cognitive Dissonance, and will remain there until I somehow wake up from it or until I die, whichever comes first. Or, if I engage in "belief" and a proposition turns out to be correct, then it essentially amounts to a lucky guess. Neither of these outcomes result in increased ability to listen to and comprehend the world around me. In fact, both of them probably work to hinder my understanding. That seems like the beginning of an answer to my first question.

Wrap-up

So, why did I feel like the question was worth asking? Maybe it wasn't. In doing a bit of research on the traditional conversation on epistemology, it turns out that many of these considerations have already been discussed ad nauseum.

Still, until now I've never personally set down any coherent thoughts on the subject. The ideas have certainly been discussed more adeptly, and more fully elsewhere, but I think I've gotten something here newly understood for myself. That is, I have developed a hunch that choosing to believe something, in spite of a lack of reasonable grounds for thinking so, tends to result in a relatively diminished understanding of the things around me, whether the belief turns out to be correct or not. As for whether this hunch is correct or not, I think I will wait and see.

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