Your complimentary articles

You’ve read one of your four complimentary articles for this month.

You can read four articles free per month. To have complete access to the thousands of philosophy articles on this site, please

SUBSCRIBE NOW

Articles

The Funnel of Righteousness

Peter Worley tells us how to be right, righter, rightest.

We enjoy being right. There are many ways to delight in this pleasure, some more noble than others. We might feel good when we’ve made a good argument, drawing on good evidence, cogently structured. Or we might only care about others believing us, no matter how that’s achieved. But there are few who derive no pleasure at all from being right, or being thought to be right. Indeed, the sense of being right really matters to us. You had an argument with a friend or family member and it has been playing through your mind ever since: Were you right to have said that? Did they understand the points you were making? Or you may feel that you were seen as wrong in a board meeting because of some group-think rather than because you hadn’t made a good case. And so on.

Here I’ll identify different aspects of being right. This is designed more as a life-guide than a piece of theoretical philosophy. It’s to help us assess what’s going on next time we relax into a sense of self-righteousness. Are we right to? When, if ever, is it right to feel righteous?

Consider this: A teacher asks a class, “What’s 2 + 2?” Alison says, “22”. Belinda says, “4”. Who’s right?

Now imagine that Alison’s reason for her answer is “Because if you add the digit ‘2’ to another digit ‘2’, you get ‘22’”, while Belinda’s reason is, “Because 4 is my favourite number.” How does this affect your assessment of who’s right? There are some who would say that Belinda is right, even though her reasoning is wrong. One thing I want to do in this article is to explain how Alison and Belinda are both right and wrong.

First I want to describe and distinguish between a whole series of weaker and stronger senses of ‘being right’. It’s a weaker sense if there’s a greater probability of being wrong; it’s a stronger sense when the probability of being wrong is less. Being right and wrong are, on this understanding, by degree – a dimmer switch, not an on-off switch. There will be contexts under which the weaker senses may be sufficient, and I will give examples of these.

The Funnel

Having these weaker and stronger senses creates the possibility of arranging them in order of strength, to make a funnel, with the weakest sense of ‘being right’ at the top, and the strongest at the bottom. Potentially, some claims can be assessed for rightness by means of this funnel: drop them in at the top, where the conditions of rightness are easiest to satisfy, and then continue to assess them against stronger and stronger standards of rightness as they go downwards. Here then is the funnel of righteousness, to be followed by explanations of each dimension:

(1) Feeling (phenomenological dimension)

(2) Belief (cognitive dimension)

(3) Agreement (sympathy dimension)

(4) Persuasion (rhetorical dimension)

(5) Consensus (social dimension)

(6) Rules of the game (criteriological dimension)

(7) Verification (empirical dimension)

(8) Justification & Qualification (logical dimension)

(9) Triangulation (coherence dimension)

(10) Fallibility (defeasibility dimension)

(11) Right answer later! (contextual dimension)

I have omitted to include a moral dimension to my funnel, and will leave the reader to attach any intuitions of moral right or wrong they may have to the application of the funnel. That said, there are several conditions moral thinking may conform to here: morality may be a version of conventional thinking (see consensus) or legal demands (see criteriological) or it could even just be a feeling (phenomenological). Let me however make one distinction of moral criteria for good and bad thinking: between acting in good faith and acting in bad faith in your discussions or arguments. In the former, you would ensure that you have not left out anything relevant when addressing your listeners, even if they’re already satisfied with your idea. By contrast if you’re only interested in, say, seizing the moral high ground, then it’s enough to make people believe that you’re in a superior moral position, and so, paradoxically, you might be willing to advance any argument to achieve this, even if you know it’s false. Any feeling of being right achieved through careful and proper attention to all the salient conditions and details is then of secondary importance, if any.

Image © Joel Hasemeyer 2024 joelhase.myportfolio.com Instagram: @joel_hase

The Dimensions

Feeling (phenomenological)

Our feeling about what we think is right is so important to us that many people now say, “I feel that…” when expressing an opinion instead of “I think that…”. This includes adults and teachers as well as children and teenagers. However, in most cases, just the feeling of being right is not alone sufficient to warrant action, meaning, actually doing something, asking others to do something, or being disposed to act. But there are times when it might be. One example is when a parent has a feeling or hunch that their child is in danger. Here the cost is small if the agent is wrong, yet the cost of not acting if they are right is high. So erring on the side of caution may well be a case where a feeling is sufficient for action. Indeed, there is scientific evidence that our ‘gut feelings’, ‘intuitions’, or ‘hunches’ can be legitimate motivations to act. However, we must not think that this means feelings always provide good grounds for acting. They’re not immune to error.

Belief (basic cognition)

In the above example, it’s not necessary that you’ve formed a robust belief that your feeling is informing you of something true. If asked, you may express some doubt about your feeling, and yet you may still be disposed to act, erring on the side of caution. By contrast, religious (or political) faith is an example where a feeling is often accompanied by a belief – for instance, that Jesus is the son of God and that he rose from the dead. For many people, a feeling that they’re right combined with belief that it’s true is sufficient to commit to that belief and ensuing actions.

Agreement (sympathy)

This is when you experience ‘being right’ as a result of someone else agreeing with what you say. No argument need be made, no persuasion needs to have taken place: you may simply have stated what you think and the other person is in accord with what you said. If the primary purpose of the discourse is to bond, then this is sufficient.

We need to still be careful of this weak sense of ‘being right’, as agreement is often considered to be a sufficient condition for truth in an echo-chamber such as a social media group. Algorithms reinforce these groups as being peopled by those with similar views, and the consistent sense of sympathy strengthens the feeling that the members of the group are in the right. This can result in unsavoury examples of group-think. I’m sure you can think of some yourself.

Persuasion (rhetoric)

In other cases, you will be required to make a case to get someone to agree with you. If so, then ‘being right’ in this (still) weak sense depends on your having successfully persuaded them – so that the other person accords with you as a result of your making a case. You’ll need to meet this condition if, for example, you’re looking to be elected for something.

This level of establishing ideas may be pragmatically sufficient but not morally sufficient. For instance, it may be the case that the person doing the persuading only persuades by making promises they have no intention of keeping, or by lying about evidence. They say what they needed to say only in order to be elected. Lying about empirical facts, however, is morally wrong. (We’ll come to empirical evidence soon.)

Consensus (society)

It was once ‘right’ in some cultures to believe that the Earth is flat, that it is no more than about six thousand years old, or that women were the property of their fathers or husbands. But this is ‘right’ only in the sense that these were generally accepted conventions, and conventional thinking changes. Most people in the West now think that the Earth is not flat but roughly spherical, a good deal older than six thousand years, and that women are not the property of men.

Culturally dominant or socially prevalent views change via a host of means, including persuasion and arguments and evidence contrary to the conventional thinking. There is for instance the famous (if possibly apocryphal) story of Galileo being made to recant that the Earth moves around the Sun not the other way around as the Catholic church’s official doctrine stated, but having done so, muttering to himself, “But it still moves.” Here Galileo still believed he was right despite having just said something to the contrary and before the general consensus changed, partly due to his own efforts.

Rules of the game (criteria)

I was once leading a class of eleven-year-olds, doing some philosophy in schools work with them to help with their critical thinking in preparation for an exam. We were looking at dimensions and shapes. I drew a square and a cube on the board, and stuck an actual cube on the board with blue-tac, then asked them what dimensions the shapes were. Many said that the square was 2D – though some argued that the ink I used had a degree of depth, which therefore made it 3D! Many also said that the real cube was 3D because you could turn it around. But most of the disagreement was to do with the drawing of the cube. Some said that it was 2D, others 3D, until a girl said, quite rightly, that “It’s a 2D representation of a 3D shape.” Notice that those who had said 2D were not wrong, even though her response was more accurate (can we talk about being ‘ more right’?). But when the teacher heard this, although impressed with the answer, he said, perhaps cynically, “But if you see that question in the exam, it’s 3D, okay?”

This is interesting because there’s a sense in which saying that it is a 3D shape seems wrong, even though it looks like a 3D shape. However, this shows a sense in which ‘being right’ is about knowing what is expected in a particular situation. Exams are a good example of this, where being ‘right’ is about knowing how to answer according to specific criteria. (This is all the more the case as exams increasingly become box-ticking exercises.)

Verification (empirically true belief)

This includes what we might call being right scientifically. Here we’re right because our claim has been shown to be true. For instance, if you’re arguing with a housemate about whether there’s any milk in the fridge, and one of you says, “Let’s check!”, you both go to the fridge, open it up and discover there is none, then the one who said there was none is right and the one who said that there was some is wrong. It might turn out that the last time he looked, there was some milk, and maybe he had good reasons for thinking the situation hadn’t changed – perhaps he didn’t realise that someone else was in the house. In this case, he met the conditions of feeling and believing that he was right, but fell short in terms of verification and justification. However, he may have no worse reasons for believing what he believed than you: it may just be a happy coincidence that the truth agreed with your claim. In other words, you may just have got lucky! Either way, you’re right, in that the world has corresponded to your belief about it, and this has been discovered by empirical investigation – you looked to check.

Of course, empirical investigation is not always as simple as ‘just looking’. Sometimes evidence, experiment, argument and triangulation are needed precisely because we cannot ‘just look’. This leads us to the next few dimensions.

Justification & Qualification (logic)

This is when someone carefully thinks through why they think something is or is not the case, makes an argument to express this, and also makes the necessary qualifications to ensure that the claim doesn’t go beyond its limit. It may or may not be accompanied by empirical verification.

Funnel of Scariness: a tornado in Manitoba
Photo by Justin Hobson © Justin1569 at English Wikipedia. Creative Commons 3.0

I sometimes use a toy rugby ball to help manage speakers in a classroom (you can only speak if you’re holding the ball). The ball has an Irish flag on it, and as a result, I occasionally get asked if I’m Irish. I sometimes then use this opportunity to introduce classes to inferential thinking: I ask the children, “If I have an Irish rugby ball, does that mean I’m Irish?” Some have said it does; some have even said that it definitely means that I am Irish. Others have said that it means that I am definitely not Irish; and yet others that it means that I could be Irish, but not necessarily.

Now according to logic, those who say it means I’m Irish are wrong because it does not follow that I’m Irish simply because I have an Irish rugby ball. Interestingly, according to the rules of logical inference, they’re wrong even if I am Irish, because their claim connects their thinking that I’m Irish with the presence of the ball, but there are many reasons why I may have an Irish rugby ball and not be Irish. In this situation, if someone were to simply claim that I am Irish with no appeal to the presence of the ball, they would be right according to the verification condition, even though we would resist saying that they know this; the truth just accidentally happens to correspond to their claim. Those that say it means I’m not Irish are also wrong, for similar but inverse reasons. But those that say that I could be Irish are right even though they’re not making a concrete claim.

Notice that being right according to the logical condition does not require that the world necessarily corresponds to the conclusion, just as my argument here does not require that I be Irish (or not). This highlights that there are two parts to logical justification: testing for validity (does the argument make logical sense) and testing for soundness (does the argument have true premises as well as being logically valid?). The second connects the justification condition to the verification condition.

Triangulation (coherence)

This is where the conditions we’ve drawn up so far are appealed to together to support one another, in order to make as strong a set of conditions as possible to achieve being right. If for instance I were making a case for enacting a policy, or sending someone to prison for a very long time, or for declaring war on another country, I might need to appeal to many of the previous conditions. That I feel I’m right, or even feel and strongly believe it, is simply not enough. And though I may be able to persuade people to believe me, I must do so in good faith, making sure they believe me for the right reasons, and that I’ve brought to their attention any facts or points they need to know before making a decision about whether they continue to believe me or not. I need to make a strong case that not only corresponds to how things are, but does so for good reasons, including a cogent argument and good evidence, where it can be found.

Fallibility (error)

Perhaps ironically, at the bottom of the funnel, and therefore the element that makes our sense of being right most highly warranted, is our defeasibility, meaning, a readiness to accept that what we are claiming may turn out to be wrong; in other words, an openness to re-evaluation and revision. So, the best way to be right is to know you could be wrong.

Fallibility can be manifest in two ways: either in an openness to rejecting what has been claimed in light of persuasive evidence or arguments to the contrary, or by adopting a tentative position when expressing a belief or making a claim, such as statements of the following form: ‘What I am NOT saying is…’; ‘All I AM saying is…’; ‘It is at least possible that…’, and so on.

This dimension can also be called a falsifiability condition, which helps to keep the verification condition in check. But verification and falsifiability are not in competition with one another as principles of knowledge. Rather, they complement each other.

Context

So, how can you be right? The right answer is that The best way to be right is to know in which sense it’s presently right to be right. This is the final dimension: the contextual dimension. It’s because not all contexts are equally demanding, as you can see from the examples I have provided.

2 + 2 Revisited

We can now say that Belinda was right that 2+2=4 in a weak sense, since her answer could be verified, but she lacked any good justification for it. Yet if, for instance, the security of the human race depended on her answer being correct (this we might call the ‘quiz show’ sense of being right – see ‘rules of the game’), we might be safe with the answer she’d given. But she wouldn’t have been right if her reasoning mattered. Rather, Belinda was right according to her own internal logic. However, if one were adding digits rather than values, then the answer to “What is 2+2?” would indeed be “22”. And Alison might be right according to criteria, if the teacher were teaching the difference between digits and values and asked questions to apply these two concepts, such as: “If we were just adding digits, what would 2+2 be?… And if we were adding values, what would 2+2 be?” Here, 22 would have been a right answer to the first question, but not the second.

I’ll leave you with this question: am I right?

Peter Worley has degrees in Philosophy from UCL and Birkbeck, and is the Founder and Philosopher-in-Chief of The Philosophy Foundation, which teaches philosophy to children in London schools. His latest book Corrupting Youth (Rowman and Littlefield, 2021), is an explanation of his method of facilitating philosophical conversations.