Which philosophers have considered irrational conviction

Question

It seems a characteristic of humans to be convinced about a matter in the absence of overwhelming evidence, even where logic suggests that are other valid alternative positions to take. We see this in many areas of philosophy in which rival schools of thought promote mutually incompatible ideas, and in science, for example, where there are ardent supporters of rival interpretations of quantum theory and the nature of consciousness. Religion is perhaps the most extreme example, while famously, of course, a dozen economists will hold at least thirteen conflicting beliefs. Are there any philosophers who are particularly known for studying that tendency of humans to hold convictions in the absence of categoric proof?

Answer 1

Most recently, the community of scholars who addresses irrationality with force and recognition is the behavioral economists, and one of the most famous scholars associated with it is Daniel Kahneman. He won a Nobel prize along with Tversky for it. Dan Ariely is another popular face of the movement including his work Predictably Irrational (GB) If one wants to consider it philosophy (not all philosophers accept a naturalized epistemology), then it would be considered a question of philosophy of mind as well as philosophy of psychology. Essentially, what you are asking is why are some people resistant to acknowledging fallacy and characterizing that property of some thinkers as a irrational. This is also a philosophically challenging area because it's not quite clear or canonical what it means to be rational or irrational. A lot of smart folks are claiming there is a benefit to being irrational in various forms because it's a faster way to make a decision than explicit reasoning. Thus, any philosophy tied to intuition (SEP) is also relevant.

Preface aside, two famous philosophers who address irrational conviction are Stevenson and Ayers. In non-cognitivist emotivism, the gist is that ethical propositions reducible to emotion, and presuming emotion is irrational, then ethical propositions are irrational. There might be some support for that in neurology from the somatic marker hypothesis which says that judgement in the head takes its queues from judgement in the gut. This certainly seems to suggest an endorsement of embodied cognition (SEP) at first glance. You might be interested in SEP's moral cognitivism vs. non-cogntivism, instrumental rationality, and bounded rationality as an introduction. I own the Oxford Handbook of Rationality (GB) which is an anthology included work by a number of clever philosophers such as fellow Midwesterner Robert Audi.

Answer 2

I think we build models of the world outside and inside of us, and then use those models to be and act in the world. Very much like models in physics or in AI these days: we see various occurrences of various phenomena, infer correlations and sometimes causes, and that all goes into an internal model we make of the world. Then we use that personal model to make predictions and generate actions.

Maybe after a while we use those models without checking the results against reality, or without demanding a proof, and that becomes a conviction. Requiring proof or revising the model may not be economical to our psychological lives, so we become content to be "convinced" of something without proof.

The models can also become maladaptive: maybe they are adapted enough for us to conduct our lives, without being quite "truthful". Maybe that's another reason we can be erroneously convinced of something. It's like a mistake in the model, but it works, and we leave it at that. Not every conviction is so maladptive that it leads to bad personal outcomes anyway, so we can probably tolerate some amount of mistaken convictions.

Also, the model includes a self image, and our convictions (true or false wrt the world) might be constitutive of that self-image. Again, revising that image can have a psychological cost that we may not be capable or willing to incur. So we live with erroneous convictions rather than question them.

One last observation: it's not always possible to get a proof that would alter our convictions. Many convictions do not have a single, true solution - they are subjective positions, and also, checking a conviction might be a whole research program: if someone believes in parallel universes (and that fits somewhere in their internal model and is useful to them), how would they go about actually verifying that parallel universes exist? So their model may include unverifiable convictions as well as unverified ones.