What you think you know on a subject you care very deeply about is wrong.
Over a year ago when I started my blog I suggested in my opening post that being offended is not a bad thing. I said I would expound on that and so I am. Better late than never.
First a distinction: some bits of information we come across, like slurs scrawled on a bathroom wall are meant to offend and to do nothing else. Many other times when we find ourselves reacting emotionally to something we read or hear it is because that information is across the battle lines from views we hold as obvious, valuable, and central to our worldview. Most of us can think of times when we have read views that we disagree with, expressed in a dispassionate and thoughtful manner, and felt a warm surge of disquiet or anger. Too many people, judging themselves to have been made offended, will read no further. This is a mistake and this reaction is directly opposed to the philosophical mode of thought that one ought to be working to cultivate.
It is a sad commentary on the state of mind of the average person and the degree to which many people are failing to cultivate the philosophical mindset, that when you present someone with information that counters their view on something, even something of little relevance, they tend to double down on that view. You have to begin an encounter like that by identifying a point on which you and your interlocutor agree, and proceed gingerly from their. Even then you may have little hope of swaying the other. Begin at all aggressively and all hope is lost.
So if the philosophical mindset is our aim, what is it and how should we proceed? First we must acknowledge the fact of human fallibility. Our knowledge is always tentative and we must always be open to the possibility that we might be wrong about anything. Our brains evolved under selective pressures prevalent in the environments our ancestors encountered. So none of us are the dispassionate, purely rational actors we take ourselves to be. Only a very small part of human cognition takes place at the level of consciousness. Our conscious thoughts are always very intimately tied up with our emotional systems. This causes our thinking on many subjects to go astray and accounts for the fierce resistance put up when faced with counter evidence to our core beliefs.
From an acknowledgment of human fallibility we move to the banishment of all sacred cows. If we want to have true beliefs, we must always be willing to pull anything into the light of critical scrutiny and abandon what is found to be inadequately supported. We should value most, then, information we find from thoughtful people, arguing in good faith against what we take to be the best view on a subject. Though at first you may feel like you have just laid eyes on a scurrilous slur on a bathroom wall, you should be able to set that aside and know that you are actually have the most valuable experience you can have in your journey into the world of ideas and you are sure to be better off.
