Did you ever believe in the tooth fairy? In the Easter bunny? In a flat earth? When young, many people believe things that aren’t true. How did they find out they were wrong? How did they find out that what they believed to be true was not actually true?  How did they come to know they had made an error?

Of course, the first requirement is to know what true and false mean.  Suppose a child is told that the cookie jar is full of cookies. The child can pick up the lid and find out if that is true or false. If the child finds the jar full, what the person told the child is true. If the child finds the jar empty, what the person told the child is false.  If the child hasn’t looked, the child doesn’t know if the jar is full of cookies or not.

A child does not begin by learning the meaning of true or false as applied to a statement; the child first learns the meaning of yes or no as an answer to a question.  Suppose the child is asked if the cookie jar is full of cookies.  Assuming the child doesn’t know, the child will answer “I don’t know.” After looking, the child will answer “yes” or “no,” depending on what she sees. If the child answered the question with yes, it is a small, but crucially important, step for the child to understand that it is true that the jar is full of cookies. The child is learning that evidence is needed to answer yes or no to a question.

To know if the cookie jar is full requires some simple evidence. To believe the jar is full without evidence is a misuse of the mind. The proper use of the mind is to conclude “I don’t know” if evidence is lacking.  A major function of the mind is to determine what is true, to judge what is false, and to know when the mind does not have enough evidence.

To know if a “tooth fairy” exists is a somewhat different case.  Most people eventually are able to say that they believe there is no “tooth fairy.” Why is that? If it is wrong to believe without evidence, how can it be right to believe there is no tooth fairy?  It, at first glance, appears there is no evidence about tooth fairies.  But, just as it is right to believe that a circle can’t have three corners, it is right to believe there are no tooth fairies. The basic reason, in both cases, is that the proposed object has impossible properties.

A proper use of the mind is to accept something as a belief if you know it to be true. It may also be proper to believe something true if you have a great deal of evidence. You may recognize that more evidence is needed in order to know, but you may judge that the evidence is likely to be found.  The important point is to fully understand how much evidence is available to you and the relationship of that evidence to the evidence required to know.  And, it is most important to be ready to jettison a belief if contrary evidence is found, including evidence that something is impossible.

Just as it is important to use carpentry tools properly to build a house, it is important to use the mind properly to build knowledge.  To believe something is true without evidence denies the meaning of truth.  To believe something is true that you know to be true is a recognition of the meaning of truth. To properly use the mind is to know that knowledge is the proper source of belief.
 

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