On Being Certain: Believing You Are Right Even When You're Not | 
 enlarge | Author: Robert Burton
Publisher: St. Martin's Press
Category: Book
List Price: $24.95
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Avg. Customer Rating:  10 reviews
Sales Rank: 8708
Media: Hardcover
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 272
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.8
Dimensions (in): 8.4 x 5.8 x 1.2
ISBN: 0312359209
Dewey Decimal Number: 153.4
EAN: 9780312359201
ASIN: 0312359209
Publication Date: February 5, 2008
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Product Description
You recognize when you know something for certain, right? You "know" the sky is blue, or that the traffic light had turned green, or where you were on the morning of September 11, 2001--you know these things, well, because you just do. In On Being Certain, neurologist Robert Burton challenges the notions of how we think about what we know. He shows that the feeling of certainty we have when we "know" something comes from sources beyond our control and knowledge. In fact, certainty is a mental sensation, rather than evidence of fact. Because this "feeling of knowing" seems like confirmation of knowledge, we tend to think of it as a product of reason. But an increasing body of evidence suggests that feelings such as certainty stem from primitive areas of the brain, and are independent of active, conscious reflection and reasoning. The feeling of knowing happens to us; we cannot make it happen. Bringing together cutting edge neuroscience, experimental data, and fascinating anecdotes, Robert Burton explores the inconsistent and sometimes paradoxical relationship between our thoughts and what we actually know. Provocative and groundbreaking, On Being Certain, will challenge what you know (or think you know) about the mind, knowledge, and reason.
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| Customer Reviews: Read 5 more reviews...
It's Not What You Know it's Whether You Really Know It July 16, 2008
I think my title above gets to the substance of Dr. Burton's narrative. How do we know what we know? Dr. Burton posits that the feeling of knowing is a necessary biological function required to allow humans to contemplate thought and take action. In other words, there has to be some reward for a person to think about and know what they are concluding and this reward comes in the feelings of knowing, certainty and correctness. The problem is that the feeling is not always corroborated by the facts. How many times have you been dead certain of something, only to be later proven wrong? And of those times, how many are followed by hindsight reframing of the situation to maintain your correctness?
Burton delves into the physioligical details, philosophical ramifications and cultural and social implications of the reality that we may never be able to grasp 100% certainty on any subject. The subject poses conundrums about issues like free will, religious beliefs and other areas, and Burton explores these in his text.
My concerns are that Burton starts out by stating that some of what he discusses is his own speculation, but never clearly tells us where that occurs. In addition, he is guilty of his own bent towards certainty when he states that the case for evolution is air-tight (it's not). Finally, someone once said that the seeds of destruction of a false belief are contained in that fasle belief's own logic. So, if the conclusion is that we can never be 100% right, then that very conclusion can never be 100% right, so maybe it's wrong and we can be 100% right. Kapeesh?
That being said, there is a lot of interesting material about how the brain works, and a lot of food for thought about how it is that we know what we know.
Certainly Interesting July 14, 2008
A readily readable and thoughtful look at how our minds work in relation to things our minds produce like thoughts and ideas. It goes on to raise important questions about the implications of "the feeling of knowing" for philosophy, psychology and indirectly politics. It is a worthwhile read. It might have been improved by a more extensive look at the neurology of this erstwhile affect.
 One of three recent great books on our weird minds June 15, 2008
4 out of 4 found this review helpful
I rank this second among my favorite three books this year on the topic of the oddities of normal human thinking - right after How to Measure Anything: Finding the Value of "Intangibles" in Business and just above Predictably Irrational: The Hidden Forces That Shape Our Decisions.
How Burton treats the issue of certainty is an interesting compliment to how Hubbard treats uncertainty in How to Measure Anything: Finding the Value of "Intangibles" in Business. Burton looks at situations where we can feel certain but be wrong. Likewise, Hubbard looks at how we can be "statistically overconfident" and will usually underestimate our uncertainty if we attempt to assign odds to uncertain events. Hubbard seems to offer more empirical data on this topic and, more importantly, how to adjust for this error.
There seem to be more and more books in the genre of quirks in human reasoning and perception - specifically, how we feel certain or uncertain. But these are among the very few I would recommend. Save your money on the rest.
 Lacks depth June 8, 2008
14 out of 23 found this review helpful
In the initial chapters of this book, Robert Burton explains that knowing is primarily a feeling; a feeling that something is certain even if we have evidence to the contrary. He then proceeds to briefly discuss artificial neural networks, used later to construct the metaphor of "the hidden layer," which, he goes on to claim, is "the interface between incoming sensory data and a final perception..." This may well be true, but he doesn't provide adequate evidence in support. Basically what he says is that thinking and emotions are in certain ways a unitary structure which is heavily influenced by genetics, which sounds right, but then he concludes that humans' world views are determined by their genes and the peculiarity of their neural machinery. He has not provided a warrant for this claim. It is true that the Platonic/Cartesian rationalist view of human nature is no longer tenable, but to say that human beings are not pure rational minds is not to say that it is not possible for human beings to use reason to critically evaluate experience.
The title of chapter 12 (The Twin Pillars of Certainty: Reason and Objectivity) contains an unwarranted assumption, namely that reason and objectivity are what the feeling of certainty is based on. It seems to me that the more reasonable and objective people are, the less certain they are. Burton seems to castigate scientists for believing in certainly, but his evidence consists of a few anecdotes. Isn't he attacking a straw man? Science does not talk about certainty but about degrees of probability based on available evidence. The strangest chapter is number 13, where Burton attacks Richard Dawkins for "believing in the myth of the autonomous rational mind," and Daniel Dennett for insisting that the secular and scientific view of the world ought to be accepted by everyone. "Try telling a poet to give up his musings and become a mechanical engineer, says Burton, in an either-or fallacious attempt to convince us that someone cannot be a poet and accept a scientific view of the world. Even the Dalai Lama tries to have a scientific view of things.
There are interesting ideas in the first eleven chapters of this book, it is unfortunate that the author did not expand on them, did not provide more elucidation and data, but chose instead to attack Dawkins, Dennett and science itself.
I am certain June 2, 2008
3 out of 7 found this review helpful
I try to keep up with brain research and read everything I can to help me out of the old psychology paradigm and into the new neuroscience understanding of what makes us tick. This book is a wonderful contribution to some of the stuff in our hidden layer of "knowing." I recommend it highly to anyone curious about their own biases which are so easily justified by the conscious mind. This could be called the Gibson behavior. Too many of us seem to cling to little understood bad ideas. Buy this book, it will help.
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