Steven Pinker: belief

Transcript context

…After dinner. [laughter] First of all, by the very act of even posing this question you’re committed to reason. That’s what we’re trying to explore here. It’s too late. You’ve already committed yourself to reason. That’s one. Number two, Hume — even though he was a very insightful psychologist and he emphasized that humans are subject to all kinds of irrational passions and biases and so on — one of the reasons that he did philosophy was to expose some of those fallacies, the better that we should be able to work around them. His argument about reason being a slave to the passions was not so much a psychological claim that people will lose self‑control and they’ll let their emotions get the better of them. He’s partly making a conceptual point that the ability to go from A to B using reason doesn’t tell you what the B should be. That there’s a logical distinction between goals on the one hand or desires and beliefs. That you can’t through a chain of deduction identify what you ought to aim for. That’s just a category mistake. That’s different from the psychological claim that people are permanently irrational. People can be made more rational, I think he would say, and I would say — by the act of what we’re doing now, that is, exploring implications of ideas; by science, that is, by taking your beliefs and allowing reality to refute them or not; and historically, even though it’s true that people do all kinds of crazy things, subject to all kinds of irrational prejudices, passions, and so on. On the other hand, some bad ideas get dropped by the wayside. Not necessarily quickly, not necessarily absolutely, but we don’t have human sacrifice anymore. We don’t throw virgins into volcanoes to get better weather. We don’t have too many hereditary monarchies anymore. They don’t all work badly.…

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