Today at lunch I heard a really fascinating talk on certainty and knowledge by Robert Burton, author of a recent book called On Being Certain. It's a terrific project, because it makes a radical but to my mind entirely plausible case about the nature of certainty-- that it's not the product of logical operations, but an emotional state whose inner workings are (for now at least) forever mysterious.
But first, let's back up a bit. For a long time psychologists have mapped (and argued over) the differences between knowing things, and knowing that you know them-- between cognition and metacognition. The work of Ben Libet in the 1980s showed that there's a "ready potential"-- a gap of several hundred milliseconds between when we make a decision, and when we become aware of the decision. More recently, John-Dylan Haynes' work shows that this potential can, under some circumstances, be a lot longer.
There are also interesting examples of people being certain about things under circumstances where certainty is not really possible. William James, in his study of religious experience, talked about "felt knowledge" and mystical states: "Although so similar to states of feeling," he wrote, "mystical states seem to those who experience them to be also states of knowledge." Deja vu and cortical stimulation all generate a feeling of certainty, even in the absence of evidence. Baseball players talk about being able to see the ball and adjust their swings accordingly, when neurological studies show that they can't possibly have enough time to both track the ball, figure out how they should change their stance or the angle of the bat or the speed of the swing, and execute. Ditto for tennis players and other athletes who require lightning-fast reflexes; really, many of those sports shouldn't really exist at all.
All of this leads to Burton's argument that there's a really big disconnect between knowledge and certainty. Here's the book blurb:
In On Being Certain, neurologist Robert Burton challenges the notions of how we think about what we know. He shows that the feeling of certainty we have when we "know" something comes from sources beyond our control and knowledge. In fact, certainty is a mental sensation, rather than evidence of fact. Because this "feeling of knowing" seems like confirmation of knowledge, we tend to think of it as a product of reason. But an increasing body of evidence suggests that feelings such as certainty stem from primitive areas of the brain, and are independent of active, conscious reflection and reasoning. The feeling of knowing happens to us; we cannot make it happen.
What does this mean? Looking at 2+2 = 4 gives us both a correct answer, and a feeling that it's right (metacognition); looking at Einstein's theory of special relativity does not. Likewise, optical illusions are things that we can logically know work one way, but emotionally feel wrong.
We normally thing of thoughts and logical and reasonable, but they consist of lots of things: sensory inputs, biological predisposition, prior experience, and mental sensations. All of these are flexible, contingent, fragile, constructed, and otherwise... uncertain. Certainty isn't a logical conclusion, it's an emotional state. "Certainty and other feelings of conviction," Burton says, "are neither conscious choices nor even thought processes. They are mental sensations that arise out of involuntary brain mechanisms that, like love or anger, function independently of reason." Later in the talk, he added, "The feeling of knowing operates as an intermediary between the world, and your conscious thoughts... We think of the feeling of knowing as the logical result of a line of reason, it's actually the other way around."
However, while that "a-ha" feeling of certainty is not something you can arrive at through logical means, it can be trained. After all, physicists do look at the theory of relativity, and have that a-ha feeling.
I suspect you could take this idea and blend it into things like the sociology of science-- how does it mesh with concepts like tacit knowledge?-- and Kuhn's arguments about the psychological dimension of paradigm shifts (something that hasn't gotten a lot of attention among later readers).
Recent Comments