How do I know when I am wrong…right…

Since I have been at a quilt show for the past several days, I have not been near a computer. And I never uploaded the app to post from my phone…so belatedly I found the prompt: How do you know when you are wrong? And its partner, How do you know when you are right?  I am combining them.

My first reaction is that I am never wrong, so how would I know the signs?

My second reaction is to ponder the seemingly closed circuit: Our worldview creates our values; our values strongly influence what detail we attend to and what we overlook. Seems pretty self fulfilling here.

On rare occasion we let a stray contradictory thought in and it creates a little cognitive dissonance. The easiest way to deal with that is to deny it, so we often promptly forget it.  The next easiest thing is to explain it away, a common approach.  How many exceptions do there have to be before exceptions no longer prove the rule?

Of course the rarest response is to change the worldview to accord with the conflicting data that has been allowed in. And I wonder how those giants who changed worldviews did it.  This thought is near the “top” because I just heard a reading from A More Perfect Heaven, a book about Copernicus by Dava Sobel at Powell’s Books. And before that a book discussion group had chosen to read The Reluctant Mr. Darwin.  Both were very cautious about going public. Both added data upon data to be sure. Still there was the fear of the consequences since their findings went against the powerful church worldview for Copernicus. For Darwin it involved church and family beliefs, but he no longer would have feared excommunication. Both knew they were challenging thee roots of current beliefs.

A first approximation at an answer would be a critical mass of data contradicts the held position.  That critical mass both says that if I continue in the dominant view, I  would be wrong, and that I am right to question it. Thus it looks like science is the way to know when I am right and when I am wrong. And that suggests the peer review is the means.  But which peers? The ones in the old perspective or ones willing to shift?

Years ago I read Even the Rat Was White. For years “science” had proved the superiority of the white race. Then science disproved the racist science.  One way was to show the irrelevance of some of the accumulated measurements. So data alone is not enough.  Peer review alone was not enough. Challenging not only conclusions but challenging the questions, finding better questions–this leads to sorting the right from the wrong.  And it takes guts to shift the question as well as to shift the construction made from the answers.

So long as I allow no alternate questions or versions into my thinking, I will know I am right. Once I let them in, I will entertain the possibility of being wrong, maybe even of finding out that the worldview I had been operating in is also wrong.