The+Believing+Game+&+the+Doubting+Game+(w1d2+notes)

There is a radical asymmetry at work in the academic community, from top to bottom, one that puts the process of doubting as the supreme example of "critical thinking", and believing as merely the absence of doubting. But this is a serious gap in our whole intellectual process, and it fails to recognize the importance of, and the unrivaled power gained by "entering in" to a set of ideas, that can't even be approached by the primarily destructive process of doubting. When I encounter a new set of ideas and play "the believing game" with them, I am not just "being gullible" and assuming they are true, I am trying to assume a point of view, a posture, where I see the world //as if// those ideas were true. And I can ask myself the creative (not destructive) question, if I believed this were true, what else would follow?

Part of the belief in this asymmetry comes from canons in philosophy of science that it is possibly to conclusively //falsify// a theory, but it is never possible to conclusively //prove// a theory. But where do theories come from? They are ways of seeing the world, and in order to understand a theory, we need to "try it on", we need to "see the world" through the spectacles it offers us. We don't do this by "distancing" ourselves from it, or by being an "objective observer" of it - we try to merge with it, not unlike the way we try to merge with a tool that we want to wield in a skillful manner. When we do this, we temporarily shift the boundary between "self" and "environment", with the tool moving over to the organism side of the boundary.

Once we open our eyes to the presence of these two "games"– the believing game //and// the doubting game – that we can play with different kinds of objects, material, ideas, and so forth, our intellectural repertoire is virtually doubled, and what has been opened up to us is potentially useful not just in learning, but also in teaching, debating, writing ... and, arguably, we find an intellectual balance where before we were unbalanced (and mostly angry because of the mostly negative destructive things we found ourselves doing "in the service of our intellect").