Quine suggested that we think of our knowledge as an ever-changing “web of belief”. These beliefs have ontological implications, which is to say that they commit us to the existence of “things” of various kinds, such as furniture, corporations, and even numbers. Some of our beliefs we hold very lightly, others more firmly, and we keep our commitments accordingly. We are not always very explicit about either our beliefs or our ontological commitments — indeed, we may sometimes be entirely unaware of them — but they can often be gleaned from our words and actions even by complete strangers. Granted, there will always be some “indeterminacy” about exactly what we believe and what we think reality consists of. But our peers, at least, usually have a pretty good sense how we parse our experience into objects of belief. After all, they live in the same world that we do and, for the most part, parse it like we would.
An education is both a revision and a disciplining of our beliefs. We not only come to believe things we hadn’t before believed, and stop believing things we once thought were true, we also learn to hold our beliefs more, let’s say, intelligently. Educated people are, ideally, less afraid of being wrong about something they believe. They have experienced it often enough. Having come to believe something through deliberate effort, they know what sort of doubts may be raised. They sometimes face those doubts very explicitly through the criticism they receive from their peers. And they are not afraid of this criticism either. Just as they are familiar with the experience of being wrong themselves, they are familiar with the errors and misconceptions of others. They hold their beliefs in the face of doubt and criticism, at least until it becomes too much. Then they willingly discard the discredited notion.
I said that we may hold our beliefs firmly or lightly. But it is important to remember that while the strength of a belief may be continuous, its attitude is discrete. We believe something or not. We think that something is true or we do not. We may believe something only for a moment, and hold the belief so lightly that even the slightest doubt removes it altogether, but, while we believed, we believed that something was the case. A belief is a “propositional attitude”; it is a particular take on the reality in which we live.
One of the most important lessons of higher education consists in appreciating the contingency of our beliefs. We believe any one thing only because we believe many other things. And that means that revising one belief will often require us to revise others. Holding beliefs intelligently, then, means being careful about our revisions, always considering the implications. There is no shame in refusing to believe something that requires too radical a change in our existing web of belief, even if the evidence for the proposition is, and even in your eyes, rather strong. In fact, sometimes we are put in the uncomfortable position of thinking something is true that we can’t quite bring ourselves to believe. The problem lies elsewhere in the web and it will take us a little while to make all the necessary adjustments, to make room for the new among the old. Give it time. And give your peers time to do likewise when it happens to them.
No one has ever been right about everything. That much is probably obvious. What may be less obvious is that the main purpose of an education is not make you right about as many things as possible. It is to teach you how to be wrong.