what if I am wrong?

Alan Greenspan, former President of the Federal Reserve Bank, testified before Congress following the financial crisis that he had been wrong about his economic assumptions for 40 years. His error contributed to a devastating crisis. Many people say that their greatest fear is not death, but being wrong.

In my previous blog we looked at an important question about what it means for an object to be "good." I gave basically two alternative core assumptions that would determine which worldview would influence how a person would answer that question. I have blogged before about core assumptions and defined core assumption as a fundamental belief we hold so dear that we do not question it, but use it to "prove" many of the other beliefs we have. If there are more than one core assumption, what if we have the wrong one?

There is a close association of the notion of core assumption and faith. They are not the same thing but easy to confuse as being the same. A core assumption is a belief we do not prove and faith is conclusive evidence we cannot observe. Because both operate somewhat "invisible" to us, they feel kinda like they are the same. We will come back to this in a bit.

You may have heard the phrases, "walking by faith" and "walking by sight". Since core assumptions are based on what's invisible or non provable to us and inference is observable, we can illustrate these two ways of "walking" like this. At first glance, you may think I am saying that the size of our core assumptions are different. That's not what I am trying to convey.

We all actually have core assumptions about similar things, like what makes something "good" or are we dependent on circumstances to be happy? The differences in size of core assumption in this illustration is the degree we trust our core assumption versus trusting inferences we make through rational inquiry and testing observable data. Many Philosophers have created the idea that we must trust inference and therefore we must spend time and effort growing our bag of knowledge to be more skewed toward that gained by inference. In that way, we are trusting evidence we can observe ("walking by sight")and not evidence we cannot ("walking by faith"). You can think of it this way, we sit in our core assumptions (what we believe without questioning the evidence) and walk by the evidence we trust to be true.

The ultimate outcome of our life, however, is not how much we can trust evidence, whether gained by scientific inquiry or accepted without question. Outcomes are based on how right the evidence we cannot observe (faith) is that we base our core assumptions on. Greenspan was a very smart economist, well versed in inquiry and testing ideas with science. BUT, the crisis occurred because he had the wrong unobserved evidence in his core assumptions from which all subsequent inquiry was based.

If we don't have evidence of what is true that's one thing, but if we do not even care which direction we are going, well, that's another!

The latter is just as wrong as the former and greatly to be feared.

Ponder that a bit, will ya'?