Conviction
What is a conviction? It is not just a strongly held belief. I strongly believe I am writing on a computer at the moment but that isn't a conviction of mine. I suggest instead that convictions are identity-reflecting commitments.1
Let's expand on these points.
As Wittgenstein famously opined, sometimes reasons just run out, and “our spade is turned” on bedrock.That is how we often think of our deepest convictions—as the ground on which our worldview stands. They become part of the landscape, our frame of reference, our “picture of the world” that is the very “background against which [we] distinguish between what is true and what is false” (Wittgenstein, 1969, §94).As a result, convictions feel certain. But not everything we feel certain about is a conviction. I don't need conviction for anything I'm absolutely or logically certain about. Just as the belief that I'm writing on a computer is not a conviction of mine, neither is the belief that two and two is four.This may be because convictions are often formed in a context of actual or potential disagreement. Unlike logical certainties like two and two make four, we are aware that our convictions can be doubted and challenged, even if we ourselves just cannot imagine that they are false.This is why Wittgenstein seems on the right track:What makes a conviction a conviction is not its logical certainty or how well supported it is. It is not the content of the conviction that matters; what matters is its connections, or its perceived connections, to our way of life and to what matters to us. Moreover, a conviction isn't just a bare belief. It typically involves a belief (or beliefs), but it is primarily a commitment to action; it is action-guiding.
Most importantly, convictions signify to others what kind of person we take ourselves to be. They reflect, and partly compose, our self-identity.
It is this fact that makes a conviction feel certain to us, whether or not it really is. By “self-identity” I mean my aspirational self, or what is sometimes called my self-image (Flanagan, 1996, Frankfurt, 1988, Lynch, 2019).This aspect of my overall identity is determined by several other factors, chief among them an interplay of my social-identity and my values.The kind of person I aspire to be, in other words, is partly determined by which social groups I actually belong to, my ethnicity, my race, my gender, my sexual preference, and the role that I play in my social life.What kind ofjob I have, what sort of love life I enjoy, and how I interact with others all affect who I am and how I see myself. But these social facts, while helping to determine my self-identity, don't exhaust it.That's because the kind of person I want to be is also a factor of what I care about, my values, and deepest commitments. Caring about something means identifying with it, investing in it to the point that I thrive when it flourishes and suffer when it is diminished (Frankfurt, 1988).By virtue of the fact that they reflect our self-identities, our convictions carry authority over our lives. Most obviously, they have authority over our actions; they obligate us to do some things and grant us permission to do others.A religious conviction, for example, can give believers the moral permission to blow themselves up, or cause them to engage in nonviolent protest in support of civil rights. Even a personal conviction can play this role—by excusing us, for example, from other moral demands. If one of your convictions is to put family before work, then it will make sense for you to skip a late meeting to make it to your kid's soccer game. Or, if you missed the last one, you might feel obligated to make the next one.We may not live up to such obligations, but we feel them just the same.
But convictions don't just carry moral authority. They also carry a kind of subjective epistemic authority over what we believe.
Once something becomes a real conviction, it is difficult for us, from a psychological standpoint, to doubt.That's because to doubt it would be to doubt our deepest commitments, to doubt that we are who we say we are. As a result, our own self-interest motivates us to hold convictions that are fixed, and willing to make all sorts of sacrifices on their behalf. We often are willing to explain away contrary evidence, even if doing so flies in the face of the facts or logic itself. And we do that precisely because of the authority we give convictions over our life by virtue of their connection to our self-identity. That's why I am so reluctant to give them up, and why I may feel bad or guilty for not having the courage to live up to them. It is because they are commitments central to my self-identity that giving up a conviction can feel like an act of self-betrayal and a betrayal of one's tribe. And of course the tribe may well agree. Hence, as the Yale psychologist Dan Kahan (2013) has emphasized, it can actually be pragmatically rational to end up ignoring the evidence and sticking to your convictions come what may. No one wants to crush their self-image and be voted off the island.12.3
More on the topic Conviction:
- Convictions with humility
- Rule of law and its ‘emergency exceptions’
- Court of Strasbourg’s judgments and imprisonment
- Court of Strasbourg’s judgments and imprisonment in the Italian jurisprudence
- Introduction
- CONCLUSION
- A new conception of ne bis in idem?
- CORPORATE CRIME IN THE KINGDOM OF SAUDI ARABIA (KSA)
- Preface for Students
- ThestructureofValues