If we have so many beliefs that feel right but that we have to be skeptical about, then how do we decide what we should believe?  In other words, if we cannot trust our intuition, what can we trust?  It would be nice if we could just trust the science, of course, but even that is not always informative, or even reliable.

It is not as simple as just trusting our intuition or science (follow this link for a justification of this statement).

If we rule out intuition, what can we do when science does not give us a clear answer?  One approach is to consider our other provisional beliefs (beliefs that all interconnect to form our edifice of knowledge) and assess how well the new concept fits when compared to any alternatives.  Based on all of our other assumptions, is it more likely that the proposed explanation is correct than the other possibilities?

“Likely” is the key term. It refers to the explanatory power of the concept: how many of our observations does the concept explain?  Or, even better, how many predictions does it make that are later confirmed? And what is the probability that it would make such correct explanations and predictions purely by chance, rather than because the concept is correct?  A concept that makes many specific and correct predictions should be preferred over one that makes only a few, vague predictions, especially if the latter concept can be easily adjusted to fit the observations.

As a tie breaker, we should always prefer the simplest explanation for all of the observations (Occam’s razor).

What is the Process?

The process that we will use to judge whether we should adopt a concept as a provisional belief is as follows:

The-Process-2

In Other Words:

– First: Pick the belief supported by hard science

– Second: Consider trusting mainstream scientific opinion

 – Third: Set Aside WHAT you WANT TO BELIEVE
(If it is not supported by hard evidence and has low explanatory power)

– Fourth: Pick the most likely option from the rest
(BUT DON’T RELY ON IT – Remember that it is only a provisional belief – nothing is certain)

Underlying axioms and provisional beliefs:

In the following discussion on individual topics, in each case there are some underlying axioms, in other words the fundamental statements that are taken as default beliefs (the foundation blocks of the edifice that are taken as provisionally correct, on top of which the new concepts can be laid).  These are discussed in detail on the Underlying Axioms page, and the key ones are:

read-on-icon