A Bizarre and Unlikely Proposal

An unrealistic idea to help navigate discourse

Despite all appearances, I have a few friends. And I was recently talking to one of them about a disagreement she was having with someone online. So far, so normal. But something struck her as incredibly strange about the interaction. She realised halfway through that she was treating her interlocutor like they were 100% sure of their worldview, and they were treating her like she was 100% sure of hers.

And we do this all the time! How often do we truly have total certainty in our opinions? I would wager it is pretty rare. Yet we constantly talk and act not only as if we are totally convinced of our own views, but also as if everyone else was totally convinced of theirs. Even though we know this is unlikely to be the case.

So, what to do? Well, I have a slightly tongue-in-cheek proposal.

When I ran discussions at university I would occasionally ask people their position on an issue, and then immediately ask them to rate the strength of that position, on a scale between 0 and 1, with 0 meaning “A blind guess” and 1 meaning “I am totally convinced of this position, and if it was false my world would collapse”. And unsurprisingly I got back mostly numbers ranging from about 0.5 to about 0.8. Most people, when push came to shove, actually were only moderately sure of their beliefs, even if these were beliefs they seemed very emotionally invested in. On one occasion I asked an ardent theist how certain they were in their belief in God, and I got back a 0.6. I was gobsmacked. If I was asked to guess I would have thought their beliefs were much more certain than that.

But there was also something deeply affirming about this discovery. It is so easy to go through life imagining that everyone else has got things figured out: from their personal philosophy to their politics to their personal fashion choices. And engaging in this exercise can make us realise the profound uncertainty that binds us together as a species. We are ultimately all just on the cusp of being lost in most of our beliefs. And I don’t know about you, but I find that comforting.

So my experiment for you to try is this: when you give your opinion on something, accompany it with a “percentage of surety”. So you might say “I think that euthanasia should be legalised with 60% surety” or “I agree with this article with 40% surety”. You can probably do this more artfully than me. Likewise, when someone provides their own opinion, consider asking them how sure they are of it, on a percentage scale. I think you will be surprised at some of the answers.

Obviously, I am not so naïve as to think that this will ever catch on to the point of being mainstream. If nothing else “looking sure of yourself” is a great rhetorical strategy. But try it out for a week or so, and let me know how you get on.

And if you want to learn more about this topic, consider reading about the philosophical field of “partial beliefs”. I think you will find it fascinating.

All the best,

Joe

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