...IT'S ALL PROVISIONAL
If you'd care to drive yourself nuts someday, ponder the difference between knowledge and belief.
I believe, or at least I've been taught to believe, that Newton's law of gravity requires all apples to fall down, absent some other force like a hurricane.
I'm fully prepared to believe, however, that there's an exception to the rule on the first occasion that I see an apple fall up, without the high wind, of course.
Einstein came up with not so much an exception as a reformulation of Newton's gravity law by postulating a space-time continuum in which apple-falling was a special case, part of a larger system. Apples needn't fall up for Newton's theory to be wrong, but the theory, or law, if you like, is limited to the here and now in orchards on terra firma.
So, do I know that Newton's law of gravity is right, or wrong (or Einstein's), or is this simply something that I believe?
Do the people who believe in God know that God exists, or is this simply something they believe, despite evidence that a reasonable person would find persuasive?
If I believe in something strongly enough that I say that I know it is true, is this evidence of my good sense or something far more sinister?
For example, if I say that I believe in my horoscope, the one in the newspaper any day of the week, or that I believe in my lucky stars, because sometimes the alleged predictions seem consistent with another belief that I happen to hold, that this is my lucky day, for instance, am I nuts, or what?
The reason this comes up is because of an interesting quote in Adam Liptak's "Sidebar" column in today's New York Times, reprinted below.
Maybe it's the mark of an insane person that you're absolutely convinced you're right.
- Carlton F. W. Larson, a law professor at the University of California, Davis
Is that a legitimate definition of insanity?
It certainly seems correct to apply it in some cases.
Insane people, by definition those having a significant break with reality, meaning that no amount of reason will persuade them that they're wrong, live in an alternate reality. There's no sense arguing with them, or showing them proof that they're wrong, for they'll assume that your proof is counterfeit and that you are the agent of malevolent forces seeking to undermine their world, which you are.
Why don't we institutionalize people who believe in astrology?
God?
Democracy?
You know, those people willing to start a war for their ideology as though theirs was the only way to live.
No one that we know, of course. Forget Iraq.
The view that I hold is that all of my beliefs, except do unto others, is up for grabs. Justice Holmes famously observed that many a man's fighting faith has gone by the boards. The system of Soviet communism has collapsed. Red China has abandoned the Red and is now flourishing, having thrown off their chains.
Monarchists are laughed at by republicans, and vice versa.
The operative principle, unless and until a better one comes along, is that all knowledge is provisional; all belief is provisional.
I'll tell you where this is not applied, legally, and is enforced for all it's worth, and more. A criminal conviction is one of our most seriously guarded acts of belief. Let's say you are accused of a crime that you did not commit; don't laugh, it could happen to you. See all the domestic violence incidents, and claims of child sexual abuse, where some of those accused have been accused falsely. I won't mention false accusations of rape and murder because you know that couldn't happen to you of someone you love. Dream on. Your belief has outrun your reason. Of courst it could happen to you. No one expected the World Trade Center to collapse either. The FDNY was sure it couldn't, in light of the non-collapse in the 1993 truck bombing in the garage. FDNY stood corrected in 2001.
Why are criminal convictions so jealously guarded?
Perhaps because they are so hard bought. A police department and prosecutor's office invested time, money, and energy to obtain that conviction over opposition. The last thing it wants to be told is that the bad person they'd worked so hard to put away is not a bad person. Once a bad person, always a bad person. The victim is still dead. The participants in obtaining the conviction move on, becoming supervisors and judges. The last thing any of these folks want is to see their work deemed wrong. So they fight to uphold it.
Sometimes the jury verdict is based on sufficient evidence as to inspire the view that it is based on knowledge of the facts, and sometimes merely only that it is based on belief.
Which is the higher standard? Knowledge, of course.
Which is the legal standard? Belief. All a jury needs to do in order to convict is to persuade itself, or be persuaded, to the point where it can say that it "believes beyond a reasonable doubt" that the accusation is true as stated. That's what the jurors did in Salem, 1692, in voting to convict so many women, who were hanged as witches. The only problem was that there were no real witches. The whole town believed in witches, however.
The Newton's law of Salem was that there were devils and witches. It took an Einstein to put the matter in a broader context. What if the Devil, clever fellow that he was, made the witchcraft victims, the young girls, point out as culprits not the Devil's real henchmen, but innocent neighbors who would take the fall instead? This re-theorizing is called "paradoxical intervention," incidentally.
If the world seems a bit of a magic show, that's because it is.
When you watch a performance by magicians, or illusionists, as they style themselves, you realize, don't you, that there's been a lot of preparation in setting up the arrangements by which to fool you, from misdirection to plants in the audience, pre-screening of volunteers from the audience, etc. And so you are taken. The "willing suspension of disbelief," this has been termed. You enter daring the magician to fool you, at some level wanting him to try to fool you. And you are fooled, if only because the hand is quicker than the eye.
Richard Feynman took delight in debunking people who tried to fool him, or worse, themselves. He liked to figure out and explain how they did it. He was unusually good at figuring out the difference between real and make believe, especially in science, where fooling yourself is the big bugbear.
We love to fool ourselves.
I think I'll pray to God that I no longer fool myself.
Care to join?
Amen.