Читать книгу Philosophy For Dummies - Tom Morris - Страница 38

False beliefs can creep into our minds in all sorts of ways. And they can affect our lives deeply. On September 13, 1996, I was flying across the country on a plane that was nearly empty. Shortly after take-off, I mentioned to the flight attendant how unusual it was to see all the unoccupied seats. She said, “Oh, that often happens on Friday the 13th. People are afraid to fly.” My seatmate, a gentleman I had just met, laughed loudly with a snort and said, “What superstitious nonsense! Unbelievable! Ridiculous!” The left lens of his glasses promptly fell out onto the cabin floor. He looked shocked and said, “Gee, I just lost a lens, and these glasses are less than a year old.” Reaching down to pick up the loose piece of glass, he launched back into his tirade against superstition, saying. “I guess I’m supposed to think that this happened because it’s Friday the 13th! Ha!” As he fumbled to insert the lens back into his frames, he looked up at me with astonishment on his face and said, “I’ll be damned. The frame just totally broke.” Indeed. It might have been enough to make a less philosophical man … superstitious.

People can be absentminded. They’re often misinformed. Occasionally they seem to see what’s really not there or miss completely what is. At other times, they draw false conclusions from what they do in fact know. They have prejudices. They have blind spots and many forms of cognitive bias. One of the strongest forces in human life is the power of self-deception — the ability to believe what you want to believe and hide from yourself what you’d rather not face, regardless of what the facts are. Philosophers want to discover and help you learn how you can more reliably avoid the false beliefs that might steer you wrong and even derail your life. They seek to help you understand how you can resist many wrong opinions and attractive falsehoods that can be so deceptively easy to accept along the way. This chapter is addressed to some of those concerns.