Being Certain

BEING CERTAIN

By

William Cottringer, Ph.D.

    The other day my daughter Abby was given a question to answer by the instructor of her epistemology class as a high school senior. The question was something to the effect of, "How do you know the truth of something and be certain about it?" I think this is the single most important question that could ever be asked of a high school or college student, It probably deserves to be asked and answered as a part of graduation qualification.

    How do you arrive at the certainty of some truth you know? In the end doesn't that judgment require a leap of "faith" in the source of the truth and the very process of knowing, itself? Here's what I had to say to my daughter about the various sources we are reduced  to have faith in:

1. We usually accept the information we take in through our senses, unless we are under the influence of some mind-altering drug which makes perceptions questionable and then we are unsure (However the intriguing Internet optical illusions really make you wonder).
2. We generally trust what our firsthand experiences tell us. If we feel cold, the weather is undoubtedly cold, and if we bump into something because we can't see it is probably too dark.
3. We usually find some authority to rely on—books, movies, media, teachers, ministers, lawyers, experts or even friends.
4. We believe the scientific method is one of the best rigorous ways to prove something to be true or untrue and be sure about that, especially if the research is replicated with the same consistent results and all the research has adequate scientific controls.
5. We read and listen to people and decide to believe the information or not. The more we validate this information from others and personal experience in a variety of contexts, the more certain we are of it being true.
6. We often intuit something to be true or not by our gut instinct. The more we validate our intuition, the more certain we become of our intuitive abilities.
7. We think about all this information from all these different sources and evaluate it as being true and certain, usually to a degree we are comfortable enough believing it to be that way.
8. We tie all this together with our communication system. We invented specific words to represent particular realities and have faith that the words accurately and completely represent the things they stand for.

     There is something very important to be aware of in this whole process. To really be certain about the truth of something, we have to question the very way we process the information itself; but the paradox is that we have to trust and have faith in the truth and certainty of one of the above sources.

    The process of scientific research in psychology and brain operations warns us that the brain isn't very well-wired to capture the truth. In fact it may be designed to distort the truth. Consider the following dozen "truths" about the brain's thinking, which can lead you to the scary conclusion that all you think you know may not necessarily be so.

• Most thinking is unconscious. You are really very unaware of how you know things or judge the truth or certainty of something.
• The brain is aimed at being efficient, which means it wants to oversimplify things and compress complex realities down into simple artificial, dualistic categories—yes or no, right or wrong, good or bad and so on.
• We are limited by the brain's closure habit—wanting to fill in the gaps of something with anything that will fit and complete the picture.
• We tend to automatically reject any new information that doesn't somehow fit with what we already know.
• Almost every minute we make huge leaps of faith in making wild assumptions that we never verify in any way.
• Feelings have a way of distorting facts and feelings and thoughts are often so tangled up you never know when one stops and the other starts.
• We tend to make a lot of false connections of things we see appearing together in time and space and fail to notice important true connections between things going on below the surface.
• We frequently allow one personal firsthand experience to become a universal fiat.
• We seek to prove what we already know rather than engaging in the more productive process of trying to disprove something.
• We prefer literal concrete things we can see and touch as opposed to more abstract, metaphorical meanings we have to think hard about, despite their higher value.
• We often look for more irrelevant information, making things more complex than they need to be, rather than trying to use what we already know, better.
• We often overlook the importance of our viewpoint—what we see depends mostly on where we are doing the looking. A change of viewpoints in seeing the world as flat vs. round opened world trade. Seeing life as positive or negative or a mixture has a lot to do with what actually happens.

     To make "truth" even more untrustworthy, all the words we invented and use to describe all these truths we know to be certain, are questionable themselves in representing what they are suppose to represent. Take the word "love" for example. Can any two people agree upon what exactly it means without some sort of misunderstanding?  As we are seeing, truth itself is a difficult idea to get agreement upon. To assume communication is good, without checking it out, is a fatal assumption that can lead to nothing but uncertain untruths.

     So, the wise warning is to be extremely careful about what you think you know and then start using a stricter standard for accepting the certainty of a truth you know and an even stricter one in communicating this information.

     When you start using such critical thinking to judge truth, a few interesting things happen:

1. You begin to realize that you really don't know that much compared to all that is available and become much more open to unlearning what you thought you knew (and didn't) and learning what you need to know to be more successful.
2. You understand that things are not always as they first appear.
3. You sense a need to avoid taking artificial sides with opposite appearing issues; you are more inclined to want to reconcile these "halves" and put them back together as being what they are—two sides of the same coin.
4. You start looking for the truth of something somewhere in the middle between extremes, and even in the middle of a right extreme itself.
5. You prefer to find a way to include ideas into what you know rather than exclude foreign ones.
6. You delete the extreme word "certainty" from your vocabulary and embrace tentativeness and other such "golden mean" balanced points.
7. You take much more care in the words you use and the way you write and speak them, to eliminate all possibilities of your tentative truths being misunderstood by miscommunication.
8. You start remembering a lot of important truths that you had forgotten.
9. You start separating the 10% commonsense from the 90% nonsense.
10. You look for valuable principles that work in a variety of situations.