Book Review: The Certainty Trap

A Socratic antidote for the certainty of currently popular dogmas

In my utopia, I would make The Certainty Trap required reading for a certain segment of the population. That segment, however, likely has little overlap with the subscribers to Ataraxia or Bust; instead, it is a book readers here will likely want to recommend to certain others.

Those certain others are dogmatists who do not understand anything about dogmatism. They don’t see it in themselves. They’ve just fallen into it, because dogmatism is what good people believe in, because that’s what they’ve been told, because the ethics of the matter are obvious and certain.

And it’s not just any dogmas that these dogmatists hold. The dogmas the book addresses are ones that have been fashionable among college students for the past several years. A reader not prone to being favorable towards those particular dogmas may not experience the beneficial effects of the author’s attempts to rid the reader of their certainties.

The stories in the book are based on Ilana Redstone’s experiences as a professor of Sociology at the University of Illinois, where these sociological certainties are regular topics of conversation. Redstone turns out to be a midwife in the tradition of Socrates, and is explicitly inspired by him (page 7). Like Socrates, she’s gentle with the young who are not exceptionally headstrong. She’s like the Socrates of the Theatetus. She does a superb job at pointing out what is causing the dogmatizing without unduly threatening the dogmatic reader with reasons that their cherished beliefs are not true. Instead, she successfully undermines the certainty of those beliefs.

Redstone introduces her book with a story from her time in the Peace Corps, in which she was confronted with a situation that made her question her ability to distinguish good from bad. Good and bad were not only not unambiguous; they were often present simultaneously in the same thing. This ultimately led her to a different way of thinking, which she describes as,

The challenge before us is to continually find the doubt, name the uncertainty, and interrogate and clarify our thinking—each and every time we think the solution to a complex problem is obvious or easy. What we’re describing goes beyond simple intellectual humility. After all, it’s often the things for which we don’t realize we lack humility that do the most damage to our thinking. These tend to be the values, beliefs, and principles we take so for granted that we don’t even think to say them out loud.

One of her best stories she borrows from Princeton Professor Robert George, who developed a clever method for exposing his students’ faulty thinking about their own ability to judge things.

I sometimes ask students what their position on slavery would have been had they been white and living in the South before abolition. Guess what? They all would have been abolitionists! They all would have bravely spoken out against slavery, and worked tirelessly against it.

Of course, this is nonsense. Only the tiniest fraction of them, or of any of us, would have spoken up against slavery or lifted a finger to free the slaves. Most of them—and us—would have gone along. Many would have supported the slave system and happily benefited from it.

So I respond by saying that I will credit their claims if they can show evidence of the following: that in leading their lives today they have stood up for the rights of unpopular victims of injustice whose very humanity is denied, and where they have done so knowing: (1) that it would make them unpopular with their peers; (2) that they would be loathed and ridiculed by powerful, influential individuals and institutions in our society; (3) that they would be abandoned by many of their friends; (4) that they would be called nasty names; and (5) that they would risk being denied valuable professional opportunities as a result of their moral witness. In short, my challenge is to show where they have at risk to themselves and their futures stood up for a cause that is unpopular in elite sectors of our culture today. (page 143)

The book explores various fallacies that induce certainty, such as the Fallacy of Equal Knowledge and the Fallacy of Known Intent. One particularly useful thing she points out is,

Much of what drives the Fallacies of Equal Knowledge and Known Intent comes from a very human need to categorize the world around us. Plato, recognizing this need, famously said that categories should “carve nature at its joints.” Perhaps a simpler way to think about the idea put forth by Plato is that categories should make sense. There should be breakpoints where sufficient differentiation warrants a new grouping. Cats and dogs are both mammals, but they’re clearly different animals. So, when I encounter one or the other, I can be highly confident of what it is and call it what we collectively understand it to be. Part of the reason I know to call a cat a cat is that we broadly agree on what the defining characteristics of a cat are. (pagee 98)

Readers familiar with Pyrrhonism will recognize here the ancient Pyrrhonist critique of Plato, Aristotle, and others that their methods of division and categorization are unsound. We do not have the ability to “carve nature at its joints.” Nature is adiaphora. Readers familiar with Buddhism will see that, too. Those classifications are impermanent, without self-essence, and subject to dukkha.

The book is a gentle waking up from this dogmatism. It does not go so far as to advocate suspension of judgment about non-evident matters already believed in, but it does undermine convictions that those beliefs are certain, or, even, easily justified, showing that this is not so - that the believer has accepted the belief uncritically.

Readers with an interest in Redstone’s work might wish to check out her Substack, also called The Certainty Trap.