Kripke, Confirmation Bias, and the Curse of Certainty: Why We’re Doomed (and Why I Drink)
Lessons from applied philosophy
By David Ragland
A friend and I were recently trading reflections on the sad state of political discourse — how divided we’ve become, and how much angrier and more entrenched everything seems compared to when we were younger. Somewhere in the exchange, the late philosopher Saul Kripke entered the conversation.
Referencing Kripke in a conversation about political division might sound like intellectual posturing — especially coming from two guys who mostly just like to drink beer and shake our heads at the state of the world. But the truth is, Kripke’s ideas have a surprisingly practical application.
If I’ve learned anything over the years, it’s that curiosity and humility are far more useful than raw intellect. And it’s that same curiosity that keeps drawing me back to thinkers like Kripke. His work on necessity, naming, and epistemology might seem abstract, but it speaks directly to the ideological traps we keep falling into — traps shaped not just by misinformation, but by our very assumptions about what we think must be true.
Kripke, best known for Naming and Necessity, wrote about rigid designators and the limits of descriptive identity, but what fascinates me more is how his thinking anticipates what some might call Kripkean dogmatism — a kind of epistemic stubbornness where people cling to what they want to believe, even in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary.
As an illustration of the concept, if there are 100 pieces of solid, research-based evidence on any given topic, humans have a tendency — esp. in current times, and with no small thanks to social media, cable news, algorithmic feeds, ideological bubbles, etc. — will pick 1 to 3 that confirm what they already believe and discard the other 97 to 99 as fake, biased, or irrelevant. This isn’t just confirmation bias, or anchoring bias. It’s dogmatism with a Kripkean twist: the belief that your view is necessarily right, that it couldn’t not be right — because it feels right, because your tribe says it’s right, because to doubt it would be to lose part of your identity.
This affliction isn’t limited to the left or right. It’s everywhere. It’s in the way we argue on social media, the way we consume news, the way we surround ourselves with like-minded voices who echo our sense of righteousness. The ancients — Asian sages, Greek philosophers, Roman Stoics — all warned us about this. Any time ego and emotion enter the equation, especially in a context where winning becomes the only metric that matters, reason takes a backseat.
But here’s the thing: rationality isn’t binary. It’s a sliding scale. The more we actually consider the full spectrum of evidence, the more our thinking begins to resemble something like objectivity. And if we’re willing to entertain even a sliver of doubt — just enough to say, “Maybe I don’t have the whole picture” — we begin, paradoxically, to understand more. Science, at its best, is a process of trying to prove itself wrong. Politics, at its worst (which, increasingly, is to simply say, politics), is the practice of trying to prove oneself right, at any cost.
Which of these do we think is more conducive to progress?
The problem is that breaking through Kripkean dogmatism is like trying to drill through case-hardened steel with a rusty hand tool. It’s maddeningly difficult, if not impossible. Consider this: the Flat Earth Society still exists. And when you show them photos of our spheroidal planet from space, they say things like, “Well, you can’t trust photographs — those can be faked.” I’ve had similar conversations with political ideologues on both sides of the spectrum. The more facts you present, the more resistance you encounter.
We’d like to think that rational argument can change minds. And in theory, it can. But that assumes a few things that, frankly, are in short supply: curiosity, humility, and a genuine passion for truth. Maybe, sadly, it also requires an above-average intelligence — a willingness and ability to process complexity and nuance. Which, by definition, means most people are excluded. I don’t say that to be elitist — personally, I mainly just have the curiosity and passion for the truth parts of the equation — but I’m just trying to be realistic.
So yes, I’m a little cynical. But we do seem to be a bit doomed.
Given this realization, I guess it’s not surprising that I always seem to have a bottle in front of me. But as Tom Waits put it, “It’s better to have a bottle in front of me than a frontal lobotomy.”
Still, if you’ve made it this far, maybe there’s hope after all.
Further Reading:
If Kripke’s Naming and Necessity feels a bit dense (and it is, he was a true prodigy after all), I recommend starting with Chapter 2, where he lays out the problem of identity and necessity in plain but powerful terms. For a more accessible dive into these themes, check out Rebecca Goldstein’s Plato at the Googleplex, which weaves classical philosophy into modern-day dilemmas with humor and insight. And if you’re intrigued by the psychology of dogmatism and belief, Jonathan Haidt’s The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion is essential reading. It explains why reason so often becomes the servant of emotion — and why we double down when we should step back.
Let’s keep questioning, doubting, and — at least occasionally — changing our minds.
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