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False Beliefs With a Purpose and Optimistic Bias
Falsas Creencias con un Propósito y Sesgo Optimista
Paniel Reyes Cárdenas
1
UPAEP University, Puebla, Mexico
panielosberto.reyes@upaep.mx
In their insightful work on False beliefs and their relationship to optimistic bias, Anneli
interested in introducing trans-disciplinary understandings of the epistemology behind the
social use and the psychological mechanism of optimistic bias and thereby show their useful
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tablishing a dialogue with some of William James’ ideas about the place of optimism and the
possibility of reading it not so much as a bias but even, in some cases, as an epistemic virtue.
Keywords: optimistic bias, epistemic virtue, false belief, belief-formation, William James
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cinantes estudios interdisciplinarios contemporáneos que arrojan evidencia sobre el uso
social y psicológico del sesgo optimista. El tono de esta nota crítica va a ser bastante fa-
vorable al entendimiento de que las creencias intencionales son epistémicamente valiosas
-un punto no siempre fácil de defender, pero ofrecerá algunos comentarios sobre por qué
cómo William James trató este tipo de formación de las creencias.
Palabras clave: sesgo optimista, virtud epistémica, creencias falsas, William James
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troduce us to fascinating contemporary inter-disciplinary studies that throw
evidence on the social and psychological use of optimistic bias. As these au-
1
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thors point out, the case of optimistic bias seems to exhibit a poor relation to
seems to justify a thwarted truth-conditioning of belief if not downright false
belief, or, additionally, that this beliefs can be quite unreasonable given the
evidence ad hand. People with strong evidentialist concerns will respond, al-
belief leads us to inconsistency and thus we ought to forget about entertai-
bias is acceptable, specially when is involved in circumstances when a per-
son might be involved in a dire need for medical or psychological recovery
The tone of this critical note, however, it is going to be quite sympathetic
to the understanding that purposive beliefs are epistemically valuable -a not
could be considered as an epistemic virtue, as opposed to one of some tolerat-
present a case of understanding the truth of a belief not only as a relationship
of such belief to past evidence, but to future inquiry. Such is the case that will
emerge by considering some of William James arguments in his famous 1909
The Will to Believe and Charles Sanders Peirce’s idea that the most important
(Peirce 1898, 178).
of belief-formation and then we tend to favour a process of belief forma-
tion that is based on considering truth as the sole end of inquiry, and that
our judgment of how reasonable a belief is sometimes is only exclusively
oriented to past evidence. Truth, conceived in this traditional approach, is
a constitutive component of any content inasmuch as it is a candidate to
be considered knowledge. However, as Davidson points out, how do we
recognise a true proposition when we see it? My view is that the act of ac-
knowledging truth is more complex than a fact-checking exercise, the truth
of a proposition is certainly not a tag that has to be compared to a single sta-
it will be stated that the reasonableness and truth of a belief should not be
exclusively assessed in terms of past evidence, but also in terms of the co-
rrelation to future evidence that can be established by adopting a given pro-
mising belief. Some of these beliefs can be the object of what has been called
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False Beliefs with a Purpose and Optimistic Bias
5), beliefs that are result of optimistic bias are both false and irrational:
misrepresent how the world is or is going to be. Epistemically irrational be-
liefs and predictions can be either true or false, but what makes them irratio-
Given this distinction between truth and rationality, falsity or inaccuracy is
primarily makes these cognitive states problematic is the worry that they are
true or accurate by luck, and still count as irrational. Alternatively, beliefs
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Though we live in times where truth seems to be discredited and even
considered irrelevant, in my opinion, truth is very relevant and we cannot
build a cogent epistemology without it. Indeed, truth is the sign we have to
agree that evidence is in accordance with the facts: truth is clearly one aim
of inquiry, an indispensable one. However, I think it is important to distin-
evidence in the context of description, we have to strive for truth and other
things in the context of discovery in order to unblock the road of inquiry.
The context of description is oriented to past evidence, it assess the value of
at hand. The context of discovery makes us sensitive to future evidence, it as-
sesses the value of a belief in terms of how this belief will help us to carry on
the process of inquiry in which a given belief uses the place of a hypothesis
the context of discovery, but then again, even here optimisms necessitate
is taking place: indeed, we use the word ‘bias’ to express an abnormality
that distorts a description of reality, one that gives up on self-controlled and
self-monitored doxastic control.
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we want to be optimistic in the context of discovery, but here, as elsewhere,
there are not clear boundaries in the distinctions of contexts and therefore we
to approach evidence according to the facts of a bulk cumulative past that
we call evidence, and this implies that we have a duty of strictly never lie to
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us to perform actions that generate true beliefs and thus, the evidence re-
quired. The adoption of weak evidentialism over strong evidentialism opens
our possibilities for interaction between the context of description and the
context of discovery, and even more importantly, the adoption of optimism
about discovery opens up the possibility of formulating working hypothesis
that allow us to pursue inquiry. I suppose, however, that the bar is set high
as to what counts as an optimistic belief that is not unreasonable and hypo-
thetically valuable. I think the account presented by William James below can
help us to achieve such aim.
A pragmatistic view allows us to understand that self-controlled inquiry
can be the end of the process of belief formation. Such kind of process does
not exclude truth as one of the relevant ends, but it does not adopt a dogmatic
his classic paper ‘The Will to Believe’ (1897) [henceforth WB].
William James’ important dilemma comes to the fore in order to under-
• Strategy A: Risk a loss of truth and a loss of a vital good for the certain-
ty of avoiding error.
• Strategy B: Risk error for a chance at truth and a vital good.
Beliefs, hence, in the context of discovery, could thus behave as habits of
thought, habits of action and habits of expectation in which the two contexts
interact.
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ing: even if truly unrealistic views of ourselves usually lean to unrealistic
(and thus false) beliefs, the adoption of these in the context of discovery is
consideration is similar to a version of Pascal’s wager: weak evidentialism
allows us to accept pragmatic considerations to entertain a belief if there is
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False Beliefs with a Purpose and Optimistic Bias
no clear evidence in the side of the context of description, but the context of
discovery can henceforth be pushed forward and open us the ways to achieve
is a candidate that, if turns out to be the adequate one, it will make the rest of
2
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wards our driving skills. Let us suppose that I am not good at performing one
my temporary inability of park correctly as a way to change it: it might be
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cal arrays might be improved by acting as it were: this is clearly a context of
can actually alter my chances of performing well, and thus seems rational to
entertain ideas that even though are not accurate in the context of descrip-
might be an instance of this, but then again, this apparently harmless and
somewhat useful set of considerations have to be thought through, otherwise
we could run the risk of mistaking a context for another and thus allowing
inconsistency.
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pose is what can provide them of reasonableness, as long as they help us to
see the kind of containment that we have to deploy to treat falsity: as long as
falsity is regarded in the right context of inquiry then we contain the potential
explosive nature of inconsistency (we would not allow ourselves to entertain
evidently false beliefs in the contexts of description), we might know that in
p, but adopting
p
future inquiry, and therefore the likely false nature of p can be neutralised
by an entertainment of p as potentially true. This means that the possibility
of the falsity of p might be ignored for the sake of discovering what would
optimistically ensue if we accept p, this will apply only when the hypothetical
entertainment of p helps us in a momentous need to carry on out fo inaction
the distinction of contexts of inquiry can be a pragmatic way of deal with this,
and a way of having a practical use of paraconsistency, i.e., of an exploratory
neutralisation of evidence as considered as the bulk of past experience in or-
der to open ourselves to future experience.
2
This example, as far as I am aware, is not in her direct writings on the topic, I listen to it in an
argumental exchange we had at a conference in 2015.
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