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Question It possible to look at the world optimistically or pessimistically without sacrificing accuracy?

Accepted:
November 26, 2008

Comments

Certainly. We can have a particular view of the world, just get up in a good mood, say, and there is no reason why we should not have that view, even in the most unlikely circumstances. Accuracy does not come into it here, since the atttitude has more to do with us than with the world. It is like falling into or out of love. We do not have to fall in love with someone, and we do not have to fall out of love with someone, it is not as though the object of our love commanded our devotion, or at some later stage the lack of devotion. I suppose continuing to be optimistic when everything is terrible might make one wonder at the intelligence of the agent, but on the other hand it is the stuff of cheap fiction that people constantly fall in love with the wrong person, and were that no longer to be the case life would be far poorer emotionally, albeit probably a lot tidier intellectually.

I'd certainly agree that qualities like goodness and badness aren't really features of the world as it is in itself, so much as attitudes that we project onto it. And it does indeed follow from this that such attitudes are neither accurate nor inaccurate, since there is no objective quality out there to which they might either conform or fail to conform. So, if optimism and pessimism simply meant regarding the world as mostly good or mostly bad, then they would not generate any inaccuracy. But there's more to optimism and pessimism than that: they also tend to give rise to specific expectations about the future. Optimism might lead you to believe that you're going to win the lottery, land your dream job, find your soulmate, and live happily ever after. Pessimism might lead you to believe the opposite. And those beliefs about future events certainly will be objectively accurate or inaccurate, depending on how things actually turn out. My suspicion is that excessive optimism and pessimism are both likely to generate false beliefs in this way.

Question It possible to look at the world optimistically or pessimistically without sacrificing accuracy? Accepted:November 26, 2008

Question It possible to look at the world optimistically or pessimistically without sacrificing accuracy?

Accepted:
November 26, 2008