Certainty is relative. An individual belief may move in one direction or another on the scale of certainty, but it doesn't really do anything useful to try and move the entire scale; the scale is measured by its end points. In other words, there have to be some things of which I am most confident. Into that category goes my opinion of beliefs which appear to make no sense, where I have gone to great lengths to find out what the arguments in favour are and been astonished by their poverty, and where it's very easy to see how they could come to be widely believed while lacking all real merit.
The second question is a smidgeon away from "how do you decide what you think?", because obviously you can't turn your critical lens on everything at once and so you have to have some way of settling on what really needs it. The answer is (1) I try not to decide what I think, but to find myself persuaded of things - deciding what to think doesn't seem to have a role for evidence and such. (2) in order to describe how that process works, I would pretty much have to describe my entire brain, which I think will exceed LJ's comment limit.
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timeasmymeasure
no subject
Date: 2008-08-03 11:45 am (UTC)The second question is a smidgeon away from "how do you decide what you think?", because obviously you can't turn your critical lens on everything at once and so you have to have some way of settling on what really needs it. The answer is (1) I try not to decide what I think, but to find myself persuaded of things - deciding what to think doesn't seem to have a role for evidence and such. (2) in order to describe how that process works, I would pretty much have to describe my entire brain, which I think will exceed LJ's comment limit.