humanities.lit.authors.shakespeare

On Mar 23, 6:58 pm, "John W. Kennedy" wrote:
> Tom Reedy wrote:
> > All the evidence in the world would not convince an Oxfordian that
> > Shakespeare wrote Shakespeare, because their belief does not rest on
> > historical or logical premises. In fact, it is based on no evidence
> > whatsoever. The belief in Oxford fulfills some type of psychological
> > need or wish fantasy, so it's not subject to logical or historical or
> > any type of evidence in the conventional sense of the word.
>
> There is a more profound problem, and that is that admitting you were
> wrong is /hard/; cognitive dissonance is one of the most powerful of
> motivators.

Yes, it's the same trait that keeps people investing in losing
propositions: once we have actually committed a large sum, we are
inclined to add to it more than we would have ever accepted to invest
at the beginning.

> (There's a new book, "True Enough: Learning to Live in a
> Post-Fact Society", by Farhad Manjoo, that goes into the matter.)

Thanks for the book title.

Another good one mentioned by Mac Jackson is "Inevitable Illusions:
How Mistakes of Reason Rule Our Minds," by Massimo Piatelli-Palmarini.
He goes into the subject of the framing of choices and probability
illusions that shed a lot of light on Diana Price's method, plus a lot
of other interesting mental tunnles we unconsciously live in.

TR


>
> --
> John W. Kennedy
> A proud member of the reality-based community.