How to know if you’re wrong

Nathan Ballantyne is the 2026-2027 Beatrice Shepherd Blane Fellow at the Radcliffe Institute. He is also an associate professor of philosophy, cognition, and culture at Arizona State University’s School of Historical, Philosophical, and Religious Studies. 

In a high school English class, I first encountered a disconcerting question about knowing oneself. The teacher was talking about a Shakespeare character who fails catastrophically because of their own flaws — vices the character couldn’t see. Hamartia, or a tragic flaw, is the term used for this. How can we know our own errors? Well, it turns out sometimes we can’t, and I became fascinated by the possibility that there were errors I might be making that I couldn’t recognize.

We are often willing to accept that we might be wrong, though in a very general sort of way. But as soon as someone zooms in and thinks about one of their particular convictions, something they believe strongly, they often don’t feel the same pull of the idea that this belief might be wrong. Of course, it can’t be that all our beliefs are accurate; we all have some imperfect beliefs. The trouble is figuring out which ones are mistaken. We need a way to step back somehow and gain perspectives on our beliefs.

The method I lay out in my book, “Knowing Our Limits,” starts with a simple question: Are we competent to form good beliefs on the basis of the evidence we have? Basically, if we find out that we have reasonable doubts about whether we’re competent to arrive at good beliefs, that’s going to give us the space to admit to ourselves that we might be wrong, and we might lower our confidence in our views.

For example, it’s easy to become aware of vast bodies of evidence concerning controversial topics, evidence we haven’t looked at. You might have an opinion about something like the morality of capital punishment, but then you realize that the library has a whole shelf of books about this issue, and some of those books contain arguments against your views — but you haven’t read those books. That’s an insight that can lead you to admit your way of forming your view on capital punishment wasn’t competent. You formed an opinion on the basis of an unrepresentative sample of the available evidence, and so you shouldn’t be so sure of yourself. When we encounter what appear to be reasonable doubts like that, it’s helpful to build our uncertainty into our way of thinking; that’s how we get nuance into our ideas.

A second example begins by noting that our intellectual world is filled with complicated, dense domains of expertise where people answer questions using all sorts of different methods and data. When we make judgments about topics that fall well outside our own circle of expertise, I call that “epistemic trespassing.” We can start to recognize that we’re missing out on methods and data from those other fields. That insight gives us some means of doubting that we’re competent to form good beliefs about that issue.

So how do we cultivate the capacity to acknowledge we’re wrong? A big part of the story is engaging with the rival ideas other people have put forward. Some obvious skills here are listening carefully, reading widely and sympathetically, coming to inquiry with patience and humility. But I think in the background there’s an even more important issue — context. We can ask, “Where do people go to spend time having this sort of intellectually open conversation? What are the spaces where humility is more natural for us than arrogance?” Well, it probably won’t be in the group chat with like-minded friends or on a social media hellsite. Sometimes lab groups and classrooms can be places that help us be more open and exercise those skills — places where we can brainstorm together, ease ourselves into new ways of looking at the world.

Learning how others think and reason doesn’t always — and shouldn’t always — change our minds, but it’s important to exercise patience to see someone’s argument all the way through to its conclusions, and to try to understand why they find that perspective compelling. In my experience, friendships that are built across political, moral, and religious differences can be helpful, though these are admittedly hard to maintain in a fractured age.

A friend of mine shared me a quotation from Hannah Arendt recently: “A human being is far more valuable than his opinions.” That struck me as an idea worth reflecting on, even if you happen to think it’s wrong.

—As told to Sy Boles/Harvard Staff Writer