Some issues are particularly hard to think about because we have strong prejudices, one way or another, about them — we really wish that some (cherished) things were true, or conversely we fear that their (abhorrent) opposites might be true. Examples abound:
- In religion, beliefs about God, death, sin, ...
- In politics, beliefs about justice, equality, human rights, laws, the proper distribution of wealth, ...
- In medicine, beliefs about conventional vs. "alternative" therapies, effectiveness of mental regimes on disease, ...
- In philosophy, beliefs about existence, meaning, truth, ...
How to deal with such preconceptions? Perhaps the best one can do is to become conscious of them, and to apply extra caution and skepticism when an argument lines up "nicely" with what one instinctively hopes to be true.
Saturday, June 05, 1999 at 20:30:57 (EDT) = 1999-06-05
(correlates: VarietiesOfNotCaring, NegativeResults, Emily Dickinson, ...)