Certainty is everywhere. Fundamentalism is in full bloom. Legions of authorities cloaked in total conviction tell us why we should invade country X, ban “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn” in schools, eat stewed tomatoes, how much brain damage is necessary to justify a plea of diminished capacity, the precise moment when a sperm and an egg must be treated as a human being, and why the stock market will revert to historical returns. A public change of mind is national news.

But why? Is this simply a matter of stubbornness, arrogance or misguided thinking, or is the problem more deeply rooted in brain biology?

I only jest, of course. We all rely on some degree of confidence and intuition to make it through our days. Usually these blind, confident guesses get us through life pretty well, so no wonder we have such “confidence” in our confidence!

My interest in Burton’s book is why there are so many B’s running around in the world (many of them in positions of power).

However, if you are using some unfamiliar operator, or hard-to-grasp numbers, then you will not be so certain. This is why simple arithmetic (and principles of calculus, and so on) must be drilled in to students, rather than simply explained.

Can’t picture an unfamiliar number? Quick, what is
4025.35169073514923335704910781764
+ 5974.64830926485076664295089218236
How certain of the answer will you be the first time you work it out? If you confirm it a few times, then it will be familiar (certain). My grandfather was a calculator. He sat in the back of a bank churning out totals of columns of numbers. The old fashioned way: Without an adding machine. He was certain of his calculations, when the second total matched the first.

Darwin was certain about evolution because he was familiar with theology, geology, and biology from years of study in each field. Everything about his theory fit with familiar ideas in all of his previous studies.

HUH?
I just wrote down a column of figures (2 + 2 +2)
then I added them up
and thought about it
and am certain they total 6.

I don’t get it.

That’s why I look forward to reading Burton’s book. If it isn’t a thought process, what is this feeling of confidence, and why is it so often effective, even when the content that accompanies that confidence is a bald-faced lie?

Because certainty never arises from a thought process, it doesn’t mean that we can’t ever know anything. It just means that truth is often hard work, the work being that we need to be able to demonstrate connections between new claims and well-established claims. But then again, if the work is connecting new claims to well-established claims, isn’t that another way of saying that we base our evaluations of new claims on beliefs in which we are “confident”? I’ve talked myself in circles, I’m afraid.

It’s fascinating how cognitive dissonance operates: to the point where some people consider their subjective belief in their own correctness to trump any objective evidence. This is most common in religion, of course, but it turns up in politics and plenty of other places as well. Too often, we dignify that with labels like “intuition” or “gut feeling”. We need to get more people to understand that guesses and hunches are worse than useless if they can’t be supported with facts.

Is certainty in this context the same as confidence in or comfort with a conclusion?

“Despite how certainty feels, it is neither a conscious choice nor even a thought process.”

If certainty never arrises from a thought process does that imply that we can know nothing? In the extreme case it would mean we should disengage from everything because we have no way of knowing that what we do is correct in any sense.

If on the other hand we are talking about the line between confidence and certainty, that we should always keep in the back of our mind that we might have missed something, be wrong in some way then there could indeed be benefit.