There is a growing amount of rhetoric in scientific circles about the nature of belief and scientific endeavour. I was exploring digg the other day and I came across this article. In it the author discusses the wisdom of crowds phenomena and evolution. What struck me when I reflected on the article was how a lot of scientific literature and things like this article still fail to grasp the concept of belief. Belief is a powerful concept and one that is largely overlooked.
So what is evidence
Evidence can be described as a empirically verifiable facts in scientific terms. Something that we have come to accept ‘as is’ through a rigorous testing process. Harvard psychology professor Daniel Gilbert gave us the idea that we believe first and then go about constructing doubt. More to the point, we do not analyse first, we believe then we analyse. In an earlier article I spoke about the conjecturing process whereby I felt that we follow what Sherlock Holmes does. We reason through the facts and come to a meaningful conclusion, somehow, magically apart from belief. How can this happen? We look at the facts first? I don’t think we do. I think we work of assumptions, hunches and so on and then go to the tools to prove our point. What if the tools are just ways of confirming what we believe instead of actually verifying things? Has happened plenty of times before hasn’t it?
Facts may or may not be real facts they are tainted by what we believe and value we add to them. I can attribute causality to anything if I want and it will make no difference to you or anyone because to me that’s evidence. I can set up a hypothesis test and so on, it will only prove what I want it to. When you say that ’cause and effect’ is, you will not be persuaded otherwise. Why? Because you believe it.
Are scientists immune from this? I don’t think so. If they were immune from it then what they said would be perfect knowledge. The testing procedures we use to work things out are models. They are not reality. We use them to support (with evidence) our version of events. A belief is therefore built into the thing we are constructing because it’s built on the premise of something we think might be related. When the news caster tells us something that happened, ‘A man was shot in the head,’ that’s a fact he was. But then, ‘police suspect the wife.’ They ’suspect’ the wife? That is simply another way of saying we believe the wife is the killer but we lack enough evidence to prove the case. In such a case the belief spurns on the search for evidence not vice versa. The belief in evolution spurns on the search for it’s existence and validity. If this weren’t the case then why do we even bother?
Beliefs: the driving force
Why do we vote the way we do? Beliefs! Why do we believe? There is something deeper in what Dan Gilbert has found and I think we need to pay more attention to the ways in which we believe. In particular why is the human mind predisposed to belief? Why is it the case that we hear things and believe them? Why do we read a book like the origin of the species or the bible and think yes that’s it. That is a thought that has plagued me for years.
When I was a child my father used to tell me all kinds of stories. Stuff about the easter bunny and the like which I know now to be a load of crap (or do I?). At the time however I believed them and acted as if they were so. Until one day I realised that they weren’t. These beliefs limited me in how I understood things because a window was formed for me to look through. In became a way of seeing. When the tooth fairy shoved a dollar coin underneath my pillow in exchange for my tooth do the ‘evidence’ of the missing tooth confirmed what I believed. The tooth fairy existed.
The tooth fairy however does not exist. Even though I believed it first I went about confirming my doubts as I got older and yes I can say with a certain degree of confidence that I am sure she or he doesn’t exist. I can believe it if I want to and live the rest of my life with my belief as the evidence for the tooth fairy’s existence. Will I be a happier person for believing it? I don’t need evidence to believe, my faith is the evidence. Until I go searching for a new belief to replace the old one I have all the evidence I need. Think about your life…how many things do you believe and it’s enough?
Belief is evidence?
Say I take away belief from evidence and the evidence ’speaks for itself’. If this were the case then what would the evidence say? It wouldn’t say anything because what makes evidence ‘conclusive’ is the fact that we believe it. The two go hand in hand. Any evidence is useless without somebody to understand it and put it into context. The same set of facts shown to different people will yield a different point of view. Yet in some cases the evidence itself will create beliefs that later are changed in light of new evidence. So evidence without belief cannot exist.
Here we come to my final point in this post. Belief comes first in everything we do. We learn to construct our doubts later as we grow older. Yet, what we believe about religion, science, the death penalty, abortion, rape, murder and so on comes from what we think the evidence is saying to us because of our beliefs. There is no test that proves anything outside of someone believing it. We believe in the process of scientific testing so we hold it up as being relevant as leading to the ‘truth’… until a better test comes along. It’s a way of seeing that’s useful for now but it’s built on the foundation of beliefs about things and what we have come to expect from the scientific process. There is more faith involved in such things than those in the middle of it would care to admit.
In closing this post I would like you to picture with me what you think a pink elephant looks like. Can you see it? If you can then we have shared something. We both have seen a pink elephant. What I think people do not understand is that beliefs are like a blank piece of paper. They are largely impressed on us or written by us. Either way there is no escaping them. We all think, feel and act on the things we believe. Whether it be science or solipsism, they are ‘actual’ and drive us to act. Beliefs are real. They are causally effective. What do you believe?
Technorati Tags: rhetoric, belief, scientists, pink elephant
Powered by MightyAdsense
October 24th, 2007 at 4:17 pm
I would say that it was Spinoza who gave us the idea that belief precedes analysis and confirmation or rejection. Gilbert did experiments to determine whether Spinoza was right—and he was.
October 24th, 2007 at 10:36 pm
Yes I should have said that in my article. An early paper by Gilbert actually cites the difference between Spinoza and Descartes. Thanks, Luke.