Fixing Our Beliefs

From my friend Jon Haber's excellent blog Degrees of Freedom

Fixing Our Beliefs

So how is one to balance intellectual humility (which asks you to resist the urge to insist you are right, even when you might be wrong) and intellectual courage (which asks you to stick to your guns, even if your argument receives a setback)?  Fortunately, I ended up pondering this conundrum while reading some essays by Charles Sanders Peirce, the father of Pragmatism.

Pragmatism, the only school of the Western philosophical tradition to have originated in America, will be making an appearance more than once between now and Election Day.  For now, however, I just want to focus on how one of the founding documents of this philosophical movement, Peirce’s The Fixation of Belief, can help us navigate the choppy waters between intellectual humility and courage.  In that essay, Peirce proposes that doubt motivates all of our thinking and that all of us constantly generated beliefs large and small in order to dispel the discomfort of doubt.  Once generated, the author describes four ways those beliefs can become fixed in our minds.

One is an a priori method which simply involves believing (or continuing to believe) things that make you comfortable.  This fits well with the human tendency towards cognitive bias which involves only accepting information that supports current beliefs while ignoring facts that conflict with preferred storylines.

Alternatively, one’s beliefs can be established by authority, such as a priesthood (secular or religious) which establishes what is allowed vs. forbidden to think within a society.  Such authority is often challenged by free spirits, many of whom come to their beliefs through tenacity, which involves settling onto a belief system and boldly holding onto it at all costs (regardless of whether it is right or wrong).

While all three of these methods for fixing belief (a priori, authority and tenacity) have something to recommend them, none of them are of much use if your goal is getting to the truth.  If that is your purpose, Peirce proposes science as a model which treats beliefs as conditional, even as more and more experiments are performed and evidence amassed to asymptotically get us closer and closer to ideas likely to be true.