Absolute Truth

There is an op-ed in the Keene Sentinel about the constitutionality of gay marriage.  Next week there will be an opposing POV by Chuck Douglas, a pal of mine - a former US congressman and NH Supreme Court justice.  Remind me to catch that.

This week’s op-ed discusses gay marriage in terms of Loving v. Virginia, which ruled that the Commonwealth could not forbid interracial marriage. The writer asks if the Constitution likewise forbids banning marriage on grounds of sexual orientation.  Her paragraph-ending comment before discussion is “It absolutely does.”

Such phrasing puts me off.  I understand that this is something of a debate tactic, convincing others by one’s own certainty, as in my prior post about confidence versus correctness being the better evolutionary strategy.  Maybe it’s a lawyer thing, and works often enough to be the recommended mode of arguing.  Showing the least doubt might be fatal in front of a judge or jury.  But it has the opposite effect on me.  Jes’ sayin’.  It suggests that you are unable to understand an opposing POV, and thus have no justification for your assuredness.  Even harebrained ideas often have something going for them after all, even if they are not sufficient to carry the day.

I ran across a post on another site in which the author made good arguments, yet was so determined to strike down opposing views that he declared them to have zero truth values.  Zero is a very small number.  You might convince me that Samuel is very dangerous and Daniel is not very dangerous at all, but if you assert that Samuel will definitely become a murderer and Daniel will definitely not, then I know you are a fool.  In the instance of this particular essay, the zero truth value was not mere hyperbole or artistic license, it was the entire point of the post.  His assertion, quite cleverly put, was that there was no possibility whatsoever that there was any truth in his opponents claim. The claim had a Borges-like “Garden of Forking Paths” reality at best, but certainly no connection to this one.

It relates to my anosognosia and May We Believe Our Thoughts series from two years ago.  If one cannot allow even a 1% chance that one is 1% wrong, that is pathological. I am not that certain about even personal information, such as my name and date of birth, if it comes to that. (Yes, we can probably construct a situation under which I would allow 100% certainty for some bit of information.  But these don’t occur in nature.)

I have been toying with the idea that this is a personality trait in some cluster of very intelligent people, in which the authoritativeness is tied into some autistic, not-self-observant characteristic.  It is very easy (for me, anyway) to fall into confirmation bias on such imaginings, so I’m not pursuing it too hard.  One can construct both environmental (consistent experience of being the smartest person present, encouraged by parents who were similarly constructed) and brain-based (deficits in alternative-narrative abeyance located in the anterior cingulate gyrus or something) theories for it, but hell, that doesn’t make it more true, just more plausible.

Curious, though.