Last time, we were left with a question we could not settle. We had gone in to decide one thing — whether a person can be blamed for what they believe — and we came out with less than we brought, because the two figures who had tried hardest to draw the line were still on opposite sides of it, and neither would give way. Clifford: earn every belief, or you wrong everyone. James: some beliefs you have to form before the evidence is in, or you lose the very things that only believing first can reach. Neither could be signed for. And underneath the deadlock, a suspicion had begun to form — that the two of them had been arguing, the whole time, about the wrong thing.
Tonight we follow that suspicion, because I think it is the heart of the matter.
Consider what Clifford and James have in common, these two men who could not stand each other. Clifford says: aim your belief only at the evidence. James says: sometimes aim it past the evidence. They disagree completely — and notice that they are disagreeing about the same thing. The belief. Which belief you may end up holding; which is permitted; which forbidden. Both of them treat the belief you arrived at as the thing you are answerable for. And neither one ever turned and asked the other question. Not which belief you ended up with — what you did to get there.
So tonight we stop refereeing between the two of them. We turn the question around until it faces the listener directly, and we go looking for the part of all this that was actually in a person's hands.
This is Philosophy for Us — philosophy for everyone, no degree required.
This is the fourth of eight episodes on one question: are you responsible for what you believe? The first three set it up — the opening question, then Clifford's case for the prosecution, then James's reply, and a deadlock we could not break because both sides were arguing about the wrong thing. Tonight that changes. We are done with whether the belief is permitted. We are going to look at the sentence people reach for to prove they meant well — I sincerely believed it; I did my own research — and ask what that sentence is actually doing. Because I think it works as a defence in a particular way: it draws attention to one part of what happened, and away from another. And I think you can see, if you are willing to look, exactly which part it points at, and which part it keeps you from seeing.
Start with the sentence, because the sentence is where the problem is. I sincerely believed it. Or, in its modern form: I did my own research. When a person says that — when your uncle says it, when you say it about your own politics, your own health, the thing you are sure of about someone — what is actually being claimed? A claim of innocence. The claim is: whatever turned out to be true, the believing cannot be held against me as a fault, because I did not invent it and I did not lie; the thing simply seemed true, and I went with what seemed true. And that, it feels, settles the matter. A sincere belief is an innocent one. You cannot be blamed for honestly seeing the world the way it looked.
I want to grant the strongest part of that straight away, because it is real, and we are not going to take it back tonight or on any other night. You cannot believe at will. Try it. Decide, right now, by an act of will — the way you decide to lift your arm — that the wall in front of you is not there. You cannot. You can say the words; you can picture it; but you cannot make yourself actually believe something your eyes are telling you is false, simply by choosing to. Belief does not work the way picking up a cup works. It is not something you do. It is something that happens in you: the world comes in through your senses, your sources, your reasoning, and at the end of that a belief is simply present, whether you wanted it or not. You did not decide it, and you are right that you cannot be held to account for it.
So far the defence holds. Here is where it goes wrong.
That one true thing — that the belief itself is not chosen — gets treated as if it applied to the whole event, until everything looks like a single involuntary happening that no one could have helped. And it is not a single thing. There are two things here, and they have been going under one name.
The first is the belief: the state, the settled conviction — the treatment does not work; my side is right about this; that person cannot be trusted. That part did arrive. You could not simply have decided otherwise.
But a belief like that does not appear from nowhere. It has a history, and the history is the second thing, and the second thing is nothing like an involuntary state. Before the belief, there was a stretch of time in which you were believing — actively. You went looking. You typed something into a search box, and you typed that and not something else. You opened some sources and not others. You found one person who agreed with you and one who did not, and you decided, on the spot, which sounded credible — and if you are honest, the one who agreed with you usually sounded more credible, and it would take real work to show that agreement was not the reason. There was an expert you set aside because of his tone, or his manner, or his face. There was a question — the obvious one, the what if I am wrong question — that you could have typed and did not. And there was a moment, an actual minute, when you decided you had looked into it enough, and stopped. And that minute, more often than not, was the minute the answer began to agree with you.
Every one of those was something you did. Not an involuntary state — the process that led to it. You chose the search terms. You chose whom to trust. You chose when to stop. Each was an act, carried out by you, over time, and at each one you could have done otherwise: typed the other question, opened the next source, stayed with it past the point where it became comfortable. That is not a state that befell you. It is a sequence of choices, and they were yours.
Now consider what the sentence does. I sincerely believed it. It points directly at the first thing — the belief, the involuntary part, the state you genuinely could not help. And it points there so that you look there, and keep looking there, and never turn toward the second thing standing beside it. This is how a legal alibi works: an alibi is not a lie about where you were; it is a true statement about one place, offered so that no one asks about another. I was at the involuntary belief. I sincerely could not help what seemed true. Granted. But the belief was never the only thing present. There was a whole process of believing beside it, and that is the part the sentence keeps out of view. I am not claiming tonight that the believing is where blame falls — whether it does is a genuine argument, and it comes later. Tonight's claim is smaller, and harder to evade: the believing happened, it was yours, and the sentence you have been relying on is built to keep you from seeing it.
And this is why the question you have been carrying — did I choose this belief, or not? — is the wrong question, and has been all along. You have been stuck between two options: either I chose to believe it, in which case perhaps I can be blamed, or I did not choose it, in which case I cannot. And you have been so relieved to settle on the second — I did not choose it, so I am clear — that you never noticed both options are looking at the same place. Both are about the belief. Chose it, did not choose it: the same part, the involuntary result. The question is real, but it is aimed at the wrong thing. The part with the choices in it was never the belief. It was always the believing.
I could keep telling you this, and you could keep half-agreeing, the way one half-agrees with anything heard in passing. That is worth nothing. This only matters if it does something to one of your own beliefs, where it costs you something. So take one of your own, and let us run it through.
Take a belief you got wrong. Not one of the leaps you are glad you made — those were last week — but the other kind: something you were sure of, sure enough to act on, sure enough to say aloud to someone, that turned out to be false. Everyone has one. The diagnosis you were certain was nonsense until it was not. The person you would have sworn was lying, who was not; or the one you would have sworn was honest, who was not. The political claim you repeated for two years that quietly turned out to be wrong, and that you never went back to correct with the people you had told. Find a real one, and hold it still.
Now run the two parts across it, one at a time, slowly, because everything depends on how honestly you do this.
First, the belief — the conviction itself, as you held it then. Ask the question you have been relying on: could you simply have decided not to believe it? Sitting there, with everything in front of you looking the way it looked, could you have willed yourself to hold the opposite? The honest answer is no. It seemed true. It seemed true the way the wall seems present. You cannot will a belief against the way things seem to you, any more than you can will yourself to find funny a joke you do not find funny. So keep that. That part is real, and it stays clean the whole way through tonight. You did not choose the belief.
Now the second part — the part you have not looked at, because the defence has kept it out of view. Go back to before the belief was settled, to when it was still forming, when you were in the middle of it. And do not think about it in general terms. Be specific, because the defence survives on vagueness and fails on detail.
Where did you first hear it? Who told you, or what did you read? When you wanted to know more — and you did want to know more; you would say you looked into it — what did you actually do? What words did you search? Notice that you chose those words. There is a way to search that hunts for the strongest case against a claim, and a way to search that brings back the people already making it, and you reached for one of them. When the results came up — the one that agreed with you, the one that did not — how long did you spend on each? Be honest about the difference. You read the agreeable one generously, filling in its gaps, granting it the benefit of the doubt. The disagreeable one you read looking for the flaw that would let you set it aside. Was there an expert, a real one, who said the opposite — and did you find a reason to discount him that had nothing to do with his argument: his tone, his employer, something about how he came across? Was there an obvious question — the how would I know if I were wrong question — sitting right there, and did you type it, or feel it coming and steer around it?
And then the last one, which matters most. When did you stop? There was a minute — an actual moment — when you decided you had looked into it enough, closed the laptop, and the belief was now settled. Find that minute, and ask what was true of it. Was it the minute the evidence ran out — when you had genuinely followed the thing to its end and there was nothing left to check? Or was it the minute it began to feel settled — when the discomfort of not knowing gave way to the sense of having it, which tends to arrive at exactly the point the answer turns agreeable? Most of the time, if you are honest, you did not stop because you had finished. You stopped because it felt finished, and it felt finished because it had begun to tell you what you wanted to hear.
Now hold both parts in front of you at once, and notice that they do not match.
The belief — involuntary, unavoidable, the part you have been pointing at to show your innocence. And the believing — the search you steered, the sources you weighed unevenly, the question you did not type, the minute you chose to stop. One of them is a state that arrived. The other is a series of small things you did, each of which you could have done otherwise, and which together built the belief you then turned around and called involuntary. You made something, over time, with choices in it — and you described it as something that happened to you. That is the substitution. That is the position you did not know you were occupying. Sincere belief is innocent was never a finding about belief. It was a matter of where you were looking. You kept your attention on the one part you did not control, and stood the whole time on the part you did.
And here is the sign that this is a genuine effect and not just a clever description. You can run this same split on someone you are sure believed badly — your uncle, the person whose wrongness exasperates you. He says I sincerely believe it; I did my own research, and you see it at once for what it is: not a defence but a way of hiding all the looking he did not do, the studies he did not read, the doctor he waved off, the forum he stopped at because it finally agreed with him. You see his believing straight through the sentence. You have never had trouble seeing his. The only believing you have never been able to see is your own — because in your own case, and only there, you keep your attention politely on the involuntary belief, exactly where the sentence directs it. The same effect. You simply only catch it when it points the other way.
So that is the part you chose. It was there the whole time, beside the belief, and you spent years looking past it. The belief did arrive, and you are right that you cannot be held to account for a state that arrived — but you have been using that fact to keep out of view the process that produced it. That is the position you have been occupying without knowing it: sincere belief is innocent, which sounds like a fact about belief and is really a decision about where to direct your attention.
And before you let yourself off for the believing the way you have already let yourself off for the belief — before you decide the search, the sources, and the stopping were all just as involuntary — there is one word we have to deal with. Because you have a defence ready for all of that looking I have just walked you through. You have a single phrase meant to prove the believing was careful, not careless — that you did do the work. It is the phrase your uncle uses. It is the phrase you use. And it is the one we have to take apart, because at the moment it is carrying more weight than any sentence in the whole defence.
I did my own research. Take the proud sense first, because the proud sense is real and not to be sneered at. There is a version of that sentence that names the most careful thing a person can do. It means: I did not take it on someone's say-so; I did not accept the headline; I went and looked, I checked one source against another, I went hunting for what might prove me wrong, and I held off being sure until the claim had survived all of that. That is not a fault. It is the whole ideal — the refusal to be simply told. Said and meant that way, the sentence is earned.
Now take the way it is actually used — at the table, by your uncle, by you about the thing you are sure of — and look at what is underneath it, because it is almost never that. What it usually names is this: I had a feeling, or a side, and I went looking for it, and I found it, and finding it felt like learning. I typed in the thing I already half-believed. I scrolled until I reached the people saying it back to me, confidently, with footnotes I did not follow. I felt the question close, and I called that closing knowledge. And then I stood up with a new credential: I had researched it. I had done my own. No one told me what to think; I went and got it myself. And that last part — my own — is doing quiet work, because somewhere along the way the word "research" stopped meaning a thing done well or badly by a standard outside the person doing it, and came to mean only: a search I conducted myself and was satisfied by, whose authority rests entirely on the fact that I did it. Which is exactly backwards. A search whose only rule for stopping is when I am satisfied is a search that ends the moment it tells me what I wanted; and a search that ends the moment it agrees with me is the one kind of looking guaranteed never to correct me.
That is the thing to see, and it is worse than laziness. Laziness would be not looking at all. This is looking — sometimes for hours, sometimes for years — in a way built from the start to confirm. It has the motion of inquiry and the purpose of confirmation. And here is the whole self-deception stated plainly: the sincerity offered at the end — the honest warmth of but I really believed it; I really did look into this — is not innocent of the carelessness. It is produced by it. The reason you so honestly believe you were careful is that you ran a search designed to make you feel careful. The diligence you are sure you showed is the feeling that search was built to produce. You are not lying when you say you did your research. That is the trap. You did do something, and it did feel like research, so you can say the sentence with a clear face — which is exactly why it works as a defence where an outright lie would not. A liar knows where the truth is hidden. You have hidden it from yourself. The confirming search manufactured the very sincerity you now hold up as proof that you have nothing to hide.
I want to be careful here, as I have tried to be throughout, because there is a cheap conclusion available and I do not want it carried out of tonight. The answer to "do your own research" is not "stop researching and trust the experts." That is a different argument — we spent part of this series on which authorities have earned trust, and on how power decides whose word gets believed, and I am not reopening it, because it is real and hard, and "trust the experts" begs every question in it: which experts, and how would you recognise a compromised one? The problem with "I did my own research" was never that a person looked instead of deferring. Looking is good. The problem is the kind of looking: a search run to confirm, held to no standard but the searcher's own comfort, stopped at the first agreement. That is not too much inquiry. It is barely inquiry at all, in the shape of inquiry. The impulse under the slogan — do not simply be told; own what you believe — is the right impulse, and we are going to need it. What is bankrupt is what the slogan has made of it.
So set the word down where it can be seen. I did my own research. Said one way, it names the most careful thing a person can do. Said the way it is usually said, it names the exact stretch of the believing where the looking stopped because the wanting was satisfied — the place, if there is a fault anywhere in this, where the fault would be. Not in the belief that arrived. Not in the sincerity, which was real. In the believing: in the search you steered, the minute you chose to stop, the disconfirming question you felt coming and walked around. I did my own research is not proof of innocence. Half the time it is the confession, delivered with a straight face by someone who does not know he is confessing.
So that is where the believing actually was; it was yours, and you can now see it — and that should change what you can honestly say at the table. But there is still one move left that I owe you, because I said I would not pretend it away. After all of that — after watching your own search bend toward the answer you wanted — you can still turn and ask: but did I choose any of it? Did I decide to search the agreeable way, or is that simply how my mind went? Did I decide to stop, or did it just stop, the way attention stops, the way one does not decide to lose interest? Perhaps the whole of the believing is as involuntary as the belief. Perhaps it merely felt done when it felt done, and felt done is not something I did but something that happened to me — in which case you have taken one involuntary thing, divided it in two, and called the first half mine. That is the one objection still standing. It is a serious one, and I am not going to answer it in the last few minutes tonight, because answering it properly is the whole task of next time. But before you rely on it, let me say exactly what you would be carrying out.
So here is what you carry out of tonight, and it is not a verdict. It is the loss of a defence.
You came in able to end an argument with one sentence. I sincerely believed it. I did my own research. You used it the way your uncle uses it — as the thing that closes the case, the proof that you meant well and therefore cannot be held to account. And that sentence still holds in one place and has failed in another, and it is worth being clear about which is which, because the part that still holds is real and I am not taking it from you.
What still holds: you cannot believe at will. The belief that formed in you formed. You could not simply have decided to see it otherwise, and no one — not tonight, and not in any episode coming — is going to try to blame you for a state that arrived. The sincerity was real, too. You were not lying. Keep both.
What has failed is the use you were putting them to. You were taking those two true facts — I cannot help what seems true, and I was not lying about it — and stretching them over the whole event, to cover a part they do not reach. Because beside the involuntary belief, the whole time, stood the believing: the search you ran, the sources you weighed unevenly, the expert you waved off, the question you felt coming and stepped around, the minute you decided you had looked enough — which kept turning out to be the minute the answer began to agree with you. That part was never a state that arrived. It was yours, a piece at a time, each step something you did and could have done otherwise. And your one sincere sentence was pointing the other way the whole time — at the belief you could not help — so that you would never turn toward the part you steered.
That is the whole of it, and now you have watched yourself do it. You called yourself innocent by pointing at the one part you did not control, and holding still, out of view, the part you did. That cannot be unseen. The next time you reach for I sincerely believed it to settle something, you will hear the question now sitting under it — not did you choose the belief, you did not, that was never the point — but what did you do to arrive at it, and would it hold up if anyone other than you had been watching the looking?
Now, I owe you the objection that still stands, because I said I would not cheat you of it. You can still say: perhaps the believing was involuntary too. Perhaps I did not choose the search or the stopping any more than I chose the belief; perhaps it all simply happened, the way attention happens, and you have divided one involuntary thing in two and pinned the first half on me. That is a serious move. It is, in fact, the most serious form of you cannot help any of it, and next time someone stands up and makes it in full — the case that the whole thing, the believing included, is no more yours to answer for than your own heartbeat. I am going to give that case everything it deserves, because it is the deepest version of the position you have been standing on, and it would let you off entirely. And then we will find out whether it holds. I will tell you now, so you are not waiting for it: no one walks out of next week the winner. The people who think the escape can be closed do not agree with one another on how; and the person who thinks it never needed closing is still standing at the end. Next week does not resolve this. It sharpens it.
So do not take the objection yet. Do not decide tonight that the believing was involuntary too — that is only the defence looking for somewhere deeper to hide, the same move run once more. Instead, carry the working form of it, and actually do this, because this is where the night is put to use, or is not.
Pick a belief you hold right now. Not a settled one you have made your peace with, but a live one — one you are currently sure of and quietly want to be true. Your health, your politics, the thing you are certain of about a person. Do not re-argue it; re-arguing it is only the confirming search again, with the sense of closure mistaken for proof. Instead, go back through the believing. How did you come to hold it? What did you search, and why those words? Whom did you find credible — and be honest about whether they were credible or merely agreeable? And then find the minute — there was a minute — when you stopped looking and let it settle. Find it. And ask the one thing I cannot answer for you and will not pretend to: when you stopped there, was that something you did — a place you chose to set the looking down — or something that happened to you, the way hunger stops, with no choice in it at all?
You will not be sure. That is the right place to be unsure. Because if it was something you did, then there was a part of all this with your name on it after all, exactly where you had set your defence. And if it merely happened — if even the stopping was outside your control — then perhaps you really are off the hook, all the way down. I cannot tell you which, tonight. But notice where it leaves you, because it is the reverse of where you came in. You walked in with sincerity as the answer. You leave with it as the question. And you were the only one in the room when you decided you had looked enough.
That is next time: the objection put at full strength, by the philosopher who has made it most powerfully.
Thanks for listening. I'll see you next time.