As I said, there are some issues swirling around my mind that I’m not completely clear about. The temptation is not to write about them until I have achieved greater clarity. But I suspect that unless I write about them, I won’t achieve that greater clarity. So let me start with some basic thoughts about the relationship between beliefs and what happens in life:

1.) Imagine I walk out of my house one morning. As it’s early, it’s still dark, slightly misty and I’m only half awake. I see something I believe to be a cobra or some other kind of dangerous snake slightly to the side ahead of me. I jump back indoors and shut the door buying time to consider my next steps. Here are two alternative scenarios for what might happen next:

a) Ok, on further observation from a safe distance the belief that there’s a dangerous snake out there turns out to have been true. I phone the police or the local zoo or someone. They come to pick up the dangerous snake. All is fine. The correct belief that there’s a dangerous snake outside my house allowed me to react in an appropriate way to save my life and potentially that of others. By instilling a useful emotional reaction (fear) in me and triggering the right physical response (jump back, shut the door), the correct belief rewarded me by protecting me from a dangerous animal and I survive.

b) Ah, on further observation from a safe distance the belief that there’s a dangerous snake out there turns out to have been false. I look more closely and realise that a neighbour just left a coiled garden hose in the front garden. The belief that there’s a snake out there did nothing particularly useful, as it didn’t correspond with any real danger. Though I survive in this scenario too, the belief hasn’t done anything useful for me. If anyone observed me getting scared of a garden hose, it might cause me slight embarrassment. The whole episode was a bit of a waste of time.

2.) Imagine I need to get to work. I believe that there will be a train from my local train station at 8.20am that will get me there on time. So I walk to the station and get there just before 8.20am. Again two scenarios:

a) The belief that there is a train at 8.20am was correct. I catch the train and get to work on time.

b) The belief that there is a train at 8.20am was incorrect. It left at 8.15am before I got to the station and the next one doesn’t leave for another 30 minutes. I’ll get to work late and I waste 30 minutes at the train station.

In these examples correct beliefs about things reward me with a successful outcome to my projects (survival / avoidance of danger; getting to work) and allow me to plan appropriately. Incorrect beliefs can’t be said to reward me in such a way. The reason the correct beliefs reward me with a kind of success is because they correspond with something that’s real in the world (leaving aside for now all sorts of metaphysical and epistemological justifications that may be required for such a statement) with which I correctly engage in order to further my projects.

3. Let’s say that the train operator in my area is unreliable. I believe that on any given day there is a 50% chance that there is a train from my station at 8.20am. On half of the days the train drivers are on strike, there are technical problems with the trains or the trains aren’t running due to bad weather conditions. I have no way of knowing in advance whether this will be one of those days, so I walk to the station for 8.20am.

a) My belief was correct and today turns out to be one of the days on which there is a train. Great!

b) My belief was correct and today turns out to be one of the days on which there is no train. Not so great. But as my belief was correct, I always reckoned that there is only a 50% chance that I won’t have a train. Though the absence of a train is disappointing, I expected it as a possibility. It is an eventuality I took into account in walking to the station, while also planning for an alternative for the case that there is no train. In my own personal cost-benefit analysis walking to the station every day, even if trains only appear on half the days is still worthwhile. (E. g. because the walk to the station is short and the benefit of getting to work by train is great.) Believing correctly that there may not be a train allows me to avoid disappointment and plan for alternatives (taking a bus or working at home).

c) My belief was incorrect. There is never a train at 8.20am. Though there may have been one at 8.15am which I have missed. The next train may or may not be there in half an hour’s time. This is less good. It’s disappointing, a waste of time and for as long as I persist in my false belief that there is a train at 8.20am, I will never catch a train on time, even if it’s a good day for running trains.

In this scenario too, the correct belief rewards me with success in terms of furthering my plans and projects. In this case – due to the complexity of the situation – that success may not be the achievement of my most immediate goal (getting to work). But the success in this case consists of the fulfilment of my general expectation that if I go to the station for 8.20am every day, I will get to work by train on half the days. Though I don’t catch an 8.20am train in scenarios b) and c), scenario b) is different in that my project – of catching the train if there is one, and doing something else if there isn’t – is still successful. Again this success is due to the correspondence of my belief with what is actually happening in the world.

In these examples then, there is a relationship between beliefs and outcomes. Holding correct beliefs allows me to interact with the world in a way that generates a successful outcome. This is not least the case because the world is the way I believe it to be. If I hold false beliefs, the world turns out not to have been the way I believed it to be. This means I interact with the world in sub-optimal ways.

There is a certain type of beliefs that is held to be particularly important to the achievement of successes. These are beliefs about ourselves. I wonder whether the simple relationship we discussed above regarding the correspondence of real things in the world with the beliefs I hold and successful outcomes holds for this type of beliefs too.

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