What I really do think about truth

The subject came up at dinner tonight about how philosophers tend to adopt extreme views and defend them, even though it's more likely that the truth is somewhere in the middle. And the issue came up about whether the philosophers who defend the extreme view for a living actually believe them.

I do know that when I was a professional philosopher, I did feel I had to adopt extreme views, probably for a variety of reasons - to contrast myself to others, to align myself with a school of thought, for marketing to make my views easy to remember. I remember distinctly that once I wasn't working in the field any more, I was free to acknowledge that the truth was probably somewhere in the middle, some modest position that most people would agree to. And now I've been back into it, I find myself once again defending extreme views, most recently that there's no such thing as consciousness and no difference between conscious and unconscious states.

So, the question tonight was, to what extent does the philosophers who makes a living defending a view actually believe it, and both of my interlocutors, neither of whom has ever done philosophy for a living, thought they didn't. But I think they do, or rather, that the difference between really believing something to be true and defending it loud is pretty blurry, and that you would eventually convince yourself of your own arguments.

Because what I think about beliefs is, it really really is, that in order to get by you make some core assumptions and decide to stick to them in the face of almost all evidence. You adjust beliefs on the periphery on the basis of new evidence and hypothesis and testing, but the core ones you hang onto, just because they are your core, and you require much bigger proof and argument before you give them up. But because the human theorising mind works this way, you live always with the possibility that your core assumptions might be radically false.

I really do really believe this. I really believe that I might be deeply, radically wrong about the most basic beliefs - about life, and the universe, and colour, and atoms and everything. Perhaps at too impressionable an age I read all the brain-in-a-vat stuff, or maybe it goes back as far as Horton Hears a Who, but I really do honestly believe that I might be completely, radically wrong about everything, and I've lived with this skepticism for most of my life, and it doesn't really bother me. I think it leads to a kind of cynicism, a kind of nihilism, but it's a cheerful nihilism. That's what I really, honestly do think about belief and truth - it's not just an extreme position I'm adopting as a philosopher.