I’ve been wondering about otherwise sane-seeming people who believe crazy things. The politics of the last few years has made many people wonder about this, it’s a timely issue. Often, it’s religious beliefs that need to be explained, and for me it’s also right-wing political nonsense. Also, brute superstition. I’d say that at least a majority of the undergraduates I am teaching is deeply superstitious. Television programming and to a lesser degree newspaper contents are full of superstitious belief. The lapses of rationality that lead to superstition seem to be very localized and somehow isolated, they don’t really damage people’s reasoning ability in other areas. It makes me think of Aristotle’s analyses of the intellectual path from ethical deliberation to action. He sort of spells out the many places at which a person’s reasoning can be broken, the many places at which you can be rationally defective, even if everything else works well with your mind. One glitch in a chain of reasoning is enough to throw you seriously off-course. If it’s a philosophically even just slightly complex matter, people easily wander off down the strangest paths.
One thing I’ve realized in connection with superstition is that the reasoning required to resist superstition is genuinely difficult. Some people just instinctively believe in science. This is good, but many of them would be unable to articulate a defense of science if challenged by the superstitionist. Really understanding Hume, especially the Inquiry Concerning Human Understanding, has helped me a lot to see what is going on. All of it absolutely brilliant. The chapter on miracles is my personal favorite, it does a lot to explain why certain kinds of lapse of rationality are so common.
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